Myanmar Quake, Who Pays Tariffs, E.O. Impacts On Arts

Buildings topple and Myanmar's military government makes a rare plea for international aid.

That's after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake shook Southeast Asia.

I'm Scott Simon.

I'm Ader Peralta and this is Up First from NPR News.

Recovery efforts are underway in Myanmar and neighboring Thailand.

We have the latest.

Sweeping tariffs come into effect in days.

What you need to know about who will be footing the bill.

And how the administration's anti-diversity efforts may affect your local theater or children's museum.

So please stay with us.

We have the news you need to start your weekend.

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In Myanmar, state-run media now say more than 1,000 people are dead after an earthquake in the center of the country. It was so powerful, it was felt 600 miles to the south in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
A skyscraper that was under construction there collapsed, leaving dozens buried. The epicenter of the quake was roughly 10 miles from Myanmar's second biggest city, Mandalay, home to some 1.5 million people.
Michael Sullivan is in Chiang Rai, Thailand, and joins us now. Michael, thanks for being with us.
Hi, Scott. It's early in the evening where you are.
What do we know about rescue efforts? Well, it's hard getting information from Myanmar because of the military government's severe restrictions on internet access and other means of communication since the 2021 coup, but reports that are leaking out, Scott, are pretty grim. Here's a teacher from Piemana on the outskirts of the capital, Nipida.
He's helping with the relief effort, but doesn't want to be named because he's afraid of the military. Right now, firefighters, police, the Red Cross, and volunteers are taking bodies from the rubble, he says, but we don't have enough equipment, not enough machinery, and that's why the rescue work is very hard.
He says he reckons about 80 percent of the town has been totally destroyed and says the death toll just in his town is at 200 and counting. Now, that's in a town about 150 miles south of Mandalay, the city you mentioned, only 10 miles from the epicenter, a city of over a million people.
And images coming from there show pancake buildings everywhere. And rescue efforts hampered workers say by the same lack of equipment and enough people to help.
The hospitals are completely overflowing, and many people are preparing to spend their second consecutive night outside in the street, some because their homes are gone, others because they're afraid theirs might come down at any time. Historically, Myanmar's military has been suspicious of outside intervention, but have they asked for help now? Surprisingly, they have.
Here's Junta leader Senior General Min Aung Lung in a televised address last night. So here he's saying Myanmar will welcome foreign aid from anywhere, and some has already begun to arrive from neighboring India and China.
President Trump says the U.S. has offered to help as well, though it's not clear how, especially with the gutting of USAID, disaster relief was part of what it did.
Now, in past disasters, the military ignored offers of help or severely restricted it, most egregiously, Scott, in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis struck and Western nations offered to use their navies and helicopters to ferry in relief supplies, the military ignored them and slow-walked visas for foreign aid workers, and more than 140,000 people ended up dying. I think the military asking for help this time is probably a sign they realize just how bad the situation is.
The death toll continues to climb. We're still just two days in.
Any idea of how bad it might get? Well, I mean, it's impossible to say really, but modeling by the USGS estimates the death toll from a quake as powerful as this in an area like this is likely to surpass 10,000 with a strong possibility it could go much, much higher. And I have to stress how ill-prepared the country is for dealing with something this awful.
Four years of civil war since the coup has left the public health system in tatters, and aid distribution is severely restricted by the conflict as well. In a country where nearly 20 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN, which says more than 15 million, or roughly a third of the population, are facing acute food insecurity.
And Scott, that was even before this quake. So we said, of course, here in Thailand.
Thailand got pretty shaken up too, didn't it? Yeah, we felt it here in Chiang Rai, and it was felt in several other provinces as well, but the damage was pretty minimal. In Bangkok, farther south, it was far more dramatic, with shaking skyscrapers sending people scurrying into the streets.
You might have seen this video, Scott, of the infinity pool on top of one of these high-rise buildings raining water down several stories onto the street. And many buildings in Bangkok are being examined over the weekend before the work week starts again on Monday.
And the 30-story building under construction that you mentioned in the intro, that completely collapsed. Several people were killed there, and rescue efforts are continuing to reach dozens of construction workers trapped under the debris,

and many of them are migrant workers from Myanmar.

Reporter Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Michael, thanks so much.

You're welcome, Scott.

Next week, President Trump's new tariffs, 25%, go into effect for all imported cars and auto parts.

And in a few days, he is expected to announce more tariffs,

what he's calling reciprocal tariffs on goods from all over the world.

So who's paying for this? If you ask the White House, it's foreign countries.

Here's how Trump put it on Inauguration Day. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.
But it's not really foreign countries picking up the tab. NPR's White House correspondent, Danielle Kurtzleben, is here to walk us through how it works.
Hey there, Danielle. Hey, Eider.
So Trump says this all the time, that tariffs are paid by foreign countries. Explain what actually happens when an import comes into the U.S.
Sure. So let's use a concrete example.
Let's say an American airplane manufacturer is importing aluminum from Canada. So that aluminum arrives at a U.S.
port, and there the manufacturer or a broker

representing them pays that 25% tariff to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
So in other words,

a company in America is handing that money over. It's not the Canadian company selling the goods,

and it's certainly not Canada. Okay, so the money isn't being paid directly by foreign countries.

So then there's a question of who actually ultimately pays the cost. Right.
And White House officials argue that foreign companies end up eating the cost of tariffs by lowering their prices. I recently asked Kevin Hassett, he's one of the president's top economic advisors, why that would be true.
He told me that he expects foreign companies will lower their prices to compensate for the tariffs. That would mean that the foreign companies' profits would go down, but prices wouldn't change for American importers or consumers.
Okay, so what does the evidence show? I mean, do foreign countries lower their prices in response to tariffs? No, at least not based on evidence from Trump's first term. I called an economist at Columbia University, David Weinstein, who studied Trump's first term tariffs on China.
For the most part, the pass through, as far as we could measure it, was close to 100%. What that means is that American importers paid for the cost of the tariffs on virtually all Chinese products coming to the United States.
And other studies have also shown that American businesses and consumers largely paid Trump's first-term tariffs. Now, the White House has stood by its claims that foreign companies will eat the cost of these tariffs.
But I've asked the White House for data backing that up, and I haven't received any. Has Trump addressed this question of who's actually on the hook for tariffs? Well, he's been asked about it.
At a press conference last month, a reporter asked him directly why he believes foreign governments are paying tariffs. Trump did not answer directly, but he argued the economy was fine in his first term when he imposed the tariffs.
It's a myth that's put out there by foreign countries that really don't like paying tariffs, and especially to even up. And again, I've asked the White House for a more direct answer on this, and I haven't received a response.
So speaking of other countries, I mean, tariffs don't hurt other countries at all? Well, they certainly can. There's evidence showing that Chinese manufacturing declined after Trump's first-term tariffs on them.
And you can see Canada right now loudly protesting the tariffs Trump is putting in place on autos, on steel and aluminum, and other goods. In fact, ads have popped up in multiple U.S.
states recently. Ads funded by the Canadian government telling Americans that tariffs are a tax.
So Canada clearly doesn't like this policy. The White House, meanwhile, is arguing that Trump's tariffs are going to boost U.S.
manufacturing, bringing factories back to the U.S. Now, it is not clear that that's going to work.
But even if it did, the point here is that tariffs involve tradeoffs. Higher prices are just one of the economic problems that tariffs can cause.

And there are also non-economic tradeoffs, like worse relationships with foreign countries.

And here's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thank you.
Thank you, Eder. wherever you live it is likely that there is a theater or children's museum near you that is being supported in part by the federal government.
And if you've ever visited Scott there in Washington, D.C., you may have been inside one of the free Smithsonian museums or attended a show at the Kennedy Center. All those places are, to differing degrees, undergoing changes.
That's because since President Trump took office a couple of months ago, his executive orders relating to gender and DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion have had a profound impact on arts and culture. NPR correspondent Elizabeth Blair joins us.
Elizabeth, thanks for being with us. Thank you, Scott.
Give us an overview, please, of all the changes. The changes are many, and they're ongoing.
Let's start with something President Trump said this week at a Women's History Month event at the White House. It has to do with the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum, which doesn't yet have a physical building.
New York Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis recently introduced legislation to locate the museum on the National Mall. Here's President Trump.
And she is really working hard on this one. This is a passion for you, and you're working.
It's a big, beautiful, she said it's going to be a big, beautiful museum. Well, it has to be.
If it's for women, it better be big and beautiful or we're in trouble, right?

And Trump signed an executive order this week that said, in part, that the Women's History Museum will, quote, not recognize men as women in any respect. Let's talk about that executive order because, of course, the Smithsonian is a complex of museums.
There's air and space, American art, American Indian museums, also the Cooper Hewitt in New York, and for that matter, the National Zoo. So what else does this executive order say?

The order says a lot. Are you ready? It says that the Smithsonian has, quote, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology, and that it promoted anything that degrades shared American values.
It goes on to say that the Department of the Interior should take a look at federal monuments to make sure they don't, quote, perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history

or include any other improper partisan ideology. And it calls for reinstating monuments.
We don't know exactly what that means, but we presume he's talking about monuments that were torn down because some people found them offensive. After the murder of George Floyd, more than 150 Confederate symbols were removed across the United States, and neither the Smithsonian nor the Department of the Interior have responded to a request for comment.
President Trump also made big changes to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, which is known as the Kennedy Center, made himself the chair of the board.
Do we know what his vision is? The Kennedy Center, as you know, has multiple theaters and puts on thousands of performances and events a year. Trump has said the building needs a lot of work, but that it has tremendous potential.
He has hinted at a few things he'd like to see there, a production of Cats, for example. He also suggested Elvis Presley should receive a posthumous Kennedy Center honors.
He has also said what he doesn't want. We're going to make sure that it's good and it's not going to be woke.
There's no more woke in this country. The new leadership recently eliminated the Kennedy Center's Social Impact Office, which organized projects and free events for underserved communities.
Let's talk about the way President Trump uses that term woke, because it's now become a kind of code for disparaging efforts to make organizations more inclusive. Of course, it's often through art that people learn about different perspectives.
How is the President's campaign against wokeness affecting the arts? It's affecting the thousands of arts groups in every corner of the country that receive money from the National Endowment for the Arts or the NEA. The ACLU is suing the NEA because the agency had told arts groups that they wouldn't be eligible for funding if they promoted what the Trump administration calls gender ideology, which they say is denying, quote, the biological reality of sex.
ACLU attorney Vera Edelman says that language violates the First Amendment and also the 1965 law that created the NEA, which says in part the agency should encourage freedom of thought. The law that created the NEA made clear that the only standards by which any application was to be judged was artistic excellence and artistic merit.
And Congress also made very clear in discussing the creation of the NEA that it specifically was worried about and wanted to make sure that the NEA did not become basically a government propaganda arm. Just a note here that NPR receives NEA grant money.
Once the lawsuit was filed, the NEA removed that language from its guidelines temporarily, but they're making a final determination in mid-April. Elizabeth, there must be so many different answers to this, but what are artists making of these changes? I talked to Holly Bass, who is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often explores her life as an African-American woman.
She says lots of artists who have applied for NEA grants or who would like to are confused about language that says you can't do anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I would really love if the language was made more plain.
Do you mean that you can only tell the stories of white

people? And if that's what you mean, that's what you should say. But as far as I'm concerned,

as an artist, I am doing the most American thing possible by telling my American story,

the story of my family, the story of my community, and I will continue to do that.

Elizabeth Blair, correspondent on the Culture Desk, thanks so much. Thank you, Scott.
And that's Up First for Saturday, March 29th, 2025. I'm Eder Peralta.
And I'm Scott Simon. Martin Patience, Fernando Narro, and Gabriel Donatov produced today's episode.
Ed McNulty edited along with Miguel Macias, Roberta Ramton, and Jennifer Vanasco. Andrew Craig is our director with support from our technical director, Andy Huther, and engineers, David Greenberg, Zach Coleman, and Arthur Halliday-Lorent.
Our senior supervising editor is Evie Stone. Sarah Lucy Oliver is our executive producer, and Jim Cain is our deputy managing editor.
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