Louise Matsakis: Yes, that is an absolutely beautiful quote that I really want to put on a hat or a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. Just an absolutely incredible picture that Secretary Lutnick is painting there. There’s two basic camps within the Trump administration here, and I think that that’s part of why you’re seeing this confusion because these two camps are sort of warring with one another. They’re both going on TV. So in one camp is the Art of the Deal crowd. Let’s call them that. The Art of the Deal people say Trump is the ultimate negotiator. This is an incredibly provocative measure. These tariffs are a starting point, and the goal is not to keep the tariffs this high, but to create a new world economy where the US is not ripped off by these unfair trade deficits, and we’re ushering in sort of a new world where the US is treated more fairly, we throw our power around, and you’re going to see things change quickly. I would say that this is the camp that the false Walter Bloomberg tweet was speaking to. The other camp, maybe let’s call them Armies of iPhone Workers, believes that the actual goal here is not to remove the tariffs or just to use them as a negotiating tactic. Sure, we can definitely get some concessions from other countries along the way. Maybe the tariffs will be adjusted over time. But broadly, the tariffs are going to stay in place because the point of them is to have a manufacturing renaissance in the US, and to genuinely have maybe not people assembling iPhones, but to have all sorts of industries come back to the United States. They’ve been pretty vague about like exactly which industries they want to prioritize here. But the idea here is honestly, I think it’s kind of outgrowth in some ways of masculine Twitter, the backlash among like certain populations of the US that feel like in particular men with only a high school diploma have been sort of gotten the short change of globalization. So the idea is to harken back to this era where the man went to work and had a manly job, putting tiny screws into iPhones and provided for his family doing something like that, instead of having a, quote unquote, feminine email job. So that’s the other camp.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. OK. Well, I definitely want to get into the manufacturing of it all, and I think we’re going to touch on that in the next segment. But we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with Louise Matsakis. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So let’s talk about some of the impacts, both of the tariffs and the market madness that followed. From your reporting, how is this hitting small businesses and manufacturing?
Louise Matsakis: So these tariffs are a disaster for basically every kind of small business that you can imagine. So your local coffee shop is importing beans from Indonesia and Colombia. A clothing manufacturer, the boutique down the street, they’re importing clothes from China, from Vietnam, from Cambodia, potentially also Bangladesh and places like that. And I think really, it’s not necessarily the tariff rate. Obviously, trying to figure out how your small business that’s probably already running on pretty thin margins is going to absorb 30 percent more in costs, obviously it’s a big deal, but what the real problem is, is the uncertainty. So these tariffs were announced really suddenly. While Trump was talking about them, no one knew how high they might be. I saw some reporting from the Washington Post that actually indicated that they were still deliberating how high the tariffs were going to be and how they were going to be calculated hours before Trump’s announcement. They moved around the time of the announcement. They ended up doing it after the markets closed, I think, because they knew there was going to be this big crash. So what that means is, for example, let’s say you make shoes. You’re a US-based shoe designer, but you produce your shoes in China. These kinds of businesses, they work months, sometimes a year, a full year, 12 months in advance. And so they’ve already set their prices, they’ve already talked to buyers, the retailers that are going to carry their shoes, they’ve already agreed on a price for the next season. Like right now, a shoe manufacturer is producing maybe like fall shoes at the earliest, but probably their winter shoes have already gone into production, or they’re at least negotiating with manufacturers right now. And their summer shoes, those were priced five, six months ago. And in some cases, those summer shoes, they’re already on a ship. So you’ve already paid your manufacturers for them, and that ship is coming, and suddenly like if that ship’s coming from China, you’re going to have to pay a 34 percent tariff that you were not expecting. So I think that it makes it really difficult for any business to plan right now.
