Corporate Media Takes Screw America Approach To Trump Tariffs

Fueled by fear, nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed believed President Donald Trump’s tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. 

The sentiment check dropped as the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs, with the exception of serial free-trade abuser China. Instantaneously, the battered markets surged. Trump said he paused his sweeping reciprocal tariffs on the many nations who have long screwed the U.S. consumer because they were willing to come to the negotiating table in an attempt to level the playing field. 

The president also felt the fear of the American people. 

Why wouldn’t they be afraid? The Trump-hating corporate media has inundated their pages and airwaves with apocalyptic coverage of the tariffs and how Trump is single-handedly driving the world into recession. Not that there isn’t cause for worry. If you’re a baby boomer staring down the barrel of retirement right now and counting on your 401(k), the markets’ bruising over the past several days is more than unsettling.  

Predictable ‘Doomcasting’

While there have been moments of measured coverage on the tariff battles, the reporting by the usual suspects in the hyperbolic accomplice media has been the kind of hair-on-fire journalism the American people have come to expect in the Trump era. 

Curtis Houck, managing editor of media tracker NewsBusters, says the coverage has been telling. It’s reminiscent, he said, of when the leftist press was panting over the late, great Rush Limbaugh’s comments that he hoped then-President Barack Obama would fail. Corporate media got on its high horse over Limbaugh’s opinion that America would eventually be a better place if Obama’s leftist policies were unsuccessful. Now, Houck says, it feels like the same hypocritical “news” outlets are rooting for America to fail under the leadership of the left’s arch-enemy. 

“The doomcasting from the corporate media has been pretty predictable,” Houck told The Federalist. “They are looking at the economy as something that, if it doesn’t go well, they can hang around the president in next year’s midterms.” 

It’s funny. The same accomplice media that dismissed the bad economic months and years of the Biden presidency, including an actual recession by any traditional measure, is quick to pounce on Trump’s economic policies a few months in. 

“Now they can’t get enough of the ‘R word’,” Houck said, noting that we have yet to fully come to terms with the economic damage of the big government-led lockdown years. 

That’s not journalism. That’s the Pravda Press. 

Americans Are With Trump

But while they’re understandably worried, Americans generally support what Trump is trying to accomplish.

“Even as President Donald Trump’s tariff policy sparks controversy, the underlying goal – protecting American manufacturing – is a big winner with voters,” a Rasmussen Reports poll finds. 

According to the national telephone and online survey, 45 percent of likely U.S. voters say the government doesn’t do enough to protect U.S. manufacturers and businesses from foreign competition.  Just 17 percent believe the government protects U.S. businesses too much, and 25 percent say the current level of protection is about right. 

The findings haven’t changed much from a similar survey from Rasmussen Reports conducted in 2018, during Trump’s first term. At the time, as the president imposed hefty tariffs on some foreign manufacturers, Americans by a two-to-one margins supported tariffs. 

Monthly trade deficits north of $110 billion are an intrinsic problem for the U.S. economy, despite so-called free-trade advocates insistence that such deficits are somehow a blessing. The crippling trade imbalance and the exodus of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been at the core of Trump’s tariffs crusade. He campaigned on tackling it. In February, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau reported an $8 billion decrease in the trade deficit, down from $130.7 billion in January. 

Democrats Loved Tariffs Before and After Trump

It is curious that the same leftists who swoon over fair trade coffee can’t seem to get the idea of fair trade agreements.  Democrats like Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin campaign on “Buy America,” but they recoil at the heavy lifting it takes to make it easier to fulfil that promise. Their principles melt in the hot lure of cheaply produced crap from countries that have long stuck it to American manufacturers with punitively high tariffs. Those countries include the U.S.A.’s “dear friends” and tenuous allies. 

Look at Michigan’s far-left governor and political climber, Wretched Gretchen Whitmer. With an eye on the 2028 presidential election cycle, Whitmer just gave a speech on her vision to bring “supply chains home from China, create more good-paying jobs, and invest in our defense industry.” What incentive does industry have to build in the United States when it is so much cheaper and less regulated to do so elsewhere? 

Asked by interviewer Gretchen Carlson what she would have done differently than Trump has done to achieve her stated goals, Whitmer said she really hasn’t thought about it. 

“I don’t know how I would have enacted them [tariffs] differently,” the Democrat said. What she has thought about, Whitmer claimed, is tariffs “need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.” 

You see, Democrats used to be for tariffs before they were against them. Before the rise of Trump. 

“Democrats have been more scattered. Most are wary of criticizing a tariff power that they believe in, and that presidents of their own party have used to benefit US companies and unions,” Semafor reporter David Weigel wrote this week. “All of them disagreed with how Trump executed his tariffs. Few — but not none — are interested in being part of an anti-tariff party.”

As Weigel pointed out, the Dem Party 2024 platform praised President Joe Biden for “strategically increasing tariffs” while attacking Trump for his tariff plans. It’s an incredible talent to be able to speak so fluently out of both sides of one’s mouth. 

‘A Place of Great Certainty’

What Democrats are really for is power. But even more than that, they are for destroying Trump. The party’s useful idiots in the accomplice media are, per usual, carrying water for that mission. 

On Thursday, the doomcasters were back as the markets dropped on Trump’s escalating tariffs on Chinese goods. The decline followed huge gains the day before on the tariff pause elsewhere. The corporate media players were again talking turmoil and the “R word” without bothering with context. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to offer a little perspective during Thursday’s cabinet meeting, telling the propaganda press that time will tell. 

“Up two, down one is not a bad ratio, or up 10 down five,” he said. “And I think, as we have talked about, as we go through the queue and settle with these countries who are going to bring us their best offers, we will end up in a place of great certainty over the next 90 days on tariffs.”

TV personality and mega entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary recently said the same in schooling Madison Mills, the petulant host of Yahoo Finance’s morning show, Catalysts. O’Leary said the more complex aspects of the negotiations are around massive trade imbalances that previous presidents have failed to take on. 

“You can assume that behind the scenes are two spheres of negotiations. One is, ‘Let’s try and reduce the imbalance of trade by buying more stuff from the United States.’ That’s one signal. And the other, which is very easy to fix, is to simply remove all tariffs. If you’re going to have reciprocal tariffs of 30 percent, 40 percent, just get rid of them. Bring them down to zero,” the Shark Tank shark said.  

That, as O’Leary noted, is Trump’s shorter-term goal. 

‘Let Him Do His Work’

But “Mr. Wonderful” knows there’s a multi-front economic battle going on here. And China, O’Leary said, is a whole different story. 

“This isn’t about a trade war with China. This is about leveling the playing field on a wide range of issues, including IP [intellectual property], access to business, access to courts, being compliant on U.S. regulations on securities,” he said. “There is a laundry list of grievances with China that have been around since they joined the World Trade Organization, and none of the administrations previously have ever dealt with China.” 

“They do not play by the rules. They’re going to have to start doing it pretty soon,” he added. 

Mills interjected that the tariff tools Trump is using to target those core issues aren’t working. 

“What tool do you suggest they use when nothing else has worked?” O’Leary asked. 

Mills smugly answered, “I’m not the president. That’s not my job.” 

“Exactly. So let him do his work,” O’Leary shot back. 

But the corporate media’s real work is to help the left crush Trump and America First principles. 

Have the opening rounds of the tariff matches been painful? You bet. For some more than others. Will Trump’s tariff “hammer” ultimately work? Time will tell. One thing is clear right now: the same globalists who are leading the indignant “free trade!” rallying cry are the same pigs who have long dined at the trough of corruptly unfair trade deals stacked against America and Americans. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.