Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump’s tariff negotiations

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, it has been a busy day, with the announcement this morning of a pause in the trade war with China and President Trump leaving for a nearly weeklong trip to the Middle East.

  Let's delve a little deeper into those topics and more with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  It's good to see you both.

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  Hello.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So we awoke this morning to news of a 90-day truce in President Trump's trade war with China.

  Tam, based on your reporting, was this the plan all along, be tough on tariffs, hope that China flinches and negotiate a deal, or was just the turmoil in the markets and the economy just too much for this administration to bear?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  The plan all along is tariffs. President Trump is someone who has talked about wanting there to be tariffs against pretty much every country in the world on imports from everywhere. He has always wanted to be tougher on China.

  What happened here is essentially the tariff level that President Trump imposed on China, and then China retaliated, and then the U.S. retaliated. And then it got to a level where it was essentially a trade embargo. Whether it's 80 percent or 100 percent or 135 percent, those goods are not being transferred between the countries.

  And so where they are now is 30 percent for imports to the U.S. and 10 percent for imports to China. That is in the neighborhood of what President Trump had discussed on the campaign trail, which at the time was roundly rejected by economists and others, who said that would disadvantage American consumers, would make things more expensive, would hurt small businesses.

  But now it's like, wow, those tariffs really came down. This is such a dramatic reduction from where it was. So, in a way, President Trump has, by imposing these so-called reciprocal tariffs that are extremely high, conditioned people to be OK with the tariffs that he truly has been talking about all along.

  If you will note, the deal, which is a preliminary deal with the U.K., those tariffs are also at 10 percent. President Trump has made clear that he thinks a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports to the U.S. is something that he'd like to have because he wants the revenue from it, though that is widely seen as revenue that would be paid by the American people.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Yes.

  And, Amy, the president had said that these tariffs are hard medicine. That was the phrase that he used. It apparently works both ways, hard medicine for the American people, but also for the administration.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, what's been interesting to watch today, Wall Street obviously very happy with what it's seeing, you talked about Dow shooting up.

  It's not really clear that consumers or voters are feeling similarly. And when you look at the president's overall approval rating, especially on the issues of the — excuse me — especially on the issue of the economy, you can see from February until now it's dropped a net of 20 points.

  Some of that was due to concerns about this, right, what's happening with China, all this talk about 145 tariffs and Christmas presents not coming in and you're only going to get two dolls, and all the anxiety around that.

  But there's also something more, I think, underneath it. And this is why I think you also had the president today coming out and talking about drug prices. There's still an overwhelming anxiousness among the public about the current cost of living. Take away tariffs, but they feel as if they voted, many of them voted for Donald Trump because he was the one that they thought was going to best — was best able to tackle the day-to-day cost of living.

  I have been listening into a lot of focus groups recently and that's what you hear more and more of is, my rent's still unsustainable. The grocery bill is too high. So I will be watching these job approval ratings to see if talk of putting the tariff on pause only maybe helps Wall Street, but it's not really helping consumers feel that much better.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, Tam, with the president on his, — or embarking now on his first foreign trip of his second term, might there be egos of his first foreign trip of his first term, in the sense that he's looking for quick economic wins on trade, on technology potentially, economic investments from these three countries that he's visiting?

• Tamara Keith:

  And arms sales. That is a big part of this. And President Trump, I was on his first trip to Saudi Arabia the last time. I'm obviously not on this trip. He's in the air right now.

  But on that trip, he celebrated $110 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia that could grow to $350 billion, including also some commercial deals. The numbers were always a little squishy, but going back and looking to see what ended up with those deals, it's clear that those numbers weren't hit.

  They're not even close to those numbers because it turns out these sorts of foreign military sales transactions are really complicated. A memorandum of understanding between a Saudi business and American business is not actually a new factory being built. And so what we know is that President Trump said, I will go back to Saudi Arabia again if they up it to a trillion dollars.

  He literally said that multiple times, sort of conditioning the trip on this. And what we know is that all of these countries want to lavish the president with these sorts of deals that offer that quick fix, that big headline, something to celebrate, even as the rest of the foreign policy is complicated, bogged down and not going to deliver quick wins.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, Amy, let's talk about that airplane, because it's not just Democrats who are raising alarm about Qatar reportedly offering this $400 million version of Air Force One.

  It's also dividing MAGA world, apparently.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, it is.

  From the left, you're hearing a lot about the cronyism and the corruption. But from the right, what you're hearing from some of the more outspoken folks either in the Twitterverse or who have their own sort of podcast space is that Qatar is not our friend. They are friends of Hamas. They are friends of Hezbollah. They are not America's friends. We should not be accepting this from Qatar.

  So they're not taking it as something that this is an Emoluments Clause problem. And Ari Fleischer, who is definitely very supportive of this president, worked for a previous president, George W. Bush, said, I just don't think we should be getting Air Force One from a foreign country, certainly not from a king.

• Geoff Bennett:

  More to come. Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, thank you. Thank you both.

• Tamara Keith:

  You're welcome.

• Amy Walter:

  You're welcome.