After lots of back-and-forth in which it has threatened and pulled back on tariffs, the Trump Administration plans to put its significant tariffs in place on April 2, which it is already calling “liberation day.” It’s not clear precisely what the new tariffs will be, but it will affect “trillions” of dollars worth of imports, the Washington Post says.
One former Trump official thinks the business community is strongly opposing Donald Trump’s decision to take that course of action and that leading cabinet officials are supporting the tariffs even though they should know better.
Anthony Scaramucci, who served very briefly as Trump’s communications director during his first term, appeared on MSNBC this week to discuss tariffs. “The Mooch” noted that both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were opposed to tariffs when they worked in the financial world, with Bessant warning against tariffs in a recent investment letter.
“He’s taking calls over the weekend from various CEOs that I know that are trying to talk him off the edge” on the tariff brinksmanship, Scaramucci said. He predicted that even if that pressure doesn’t convince Trump to back off, a further deteriorating stock market and possibly a later midterm election loss will do it.
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“He’s doing this thinking it’s going to restore manufacturing, but it’s actually going to have the opposite effect, and market participants know this,” Scaramucci, who also came from the financial world, said on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show.
Also in the interview, Scaramucci said that he thinks cabinet members in the Trump orbit are enjoying the trappings of power because, after all, Scaramucci himself experienced the same thing when he was involved in Trump’s first term.
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“They want those seats. They’re prestigious seats,” “The Mooch” said in the interview. “They want to walk in and out of the White House. … I was there, and I got thankfully fired after 11 days, but I made the decision to do something that was against the grain. It was against my instincts [to join the Trump Administration] because my ego was talking to me, and my pride. And so these guys have Potomac Fever. … And one of the bad things about Potomac Fever is that you don’t know that you have Potomac Fever when you have it.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
