Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might be because the logic here isn’t entirely economic at all. So we wanted to spend an episode looking at Trump’s economic policies through a wider lens. Gillian Tett is a columnist at The Financial Times and a member of its editorial board. She’s also a trained anthropologist with a Ph.D. And she brings both perspectives into this conversation — exploring Trump’s policies as economics, as well as power politics, patronage and cultural messaging — which I think makes the whole thing make a bit more sense. Mentioned: “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System” by Stephen Miran Book Recommendations: National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade by Albert Hirschman The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes Debt by David Graeber How to Think Like an Anthropologist by Matthew Engelke Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. In his first term, Donald Trump was often criticized for taking the stock market too seriously, for conflating Wall Street and Main Street.
0:40.2	Say what you will, about a second term, but I don't think you can make the same criticism.
0:44.7	In the last week or two, we've begun hearing something pretty new out of the Trump administration,
0:50.2	which is that they are prepared to push the economy into a period of pain, maybe even a period of recession, in order to achieve their economic goals.
1:00.2	But what are those goals?
1:03.1	In our episode earlier in the week, we looked at the tariff policy very specifically and tried to understand what are they trying to do?
1:10.6	And I think the problem with trying to see it that way is that the tariffs don't make that much economic sense because what they are pursuing is not, I think, best understood as a narrowly economic policy. It is some mixture of economics, of power politics, of maybe more traditional patronage. And it's not clear
1:32.3	there is one framework here. Not clear there is one way of understanding it. But some people are
1:37.3	trying to figure out a framework. And so what does that look like? And how do you try to put all
1:42.1	this together? My guest today is Jillian Ted.
1:45.2	She's a economics columnist at the Financial Times and a member of their editorial board.
1:49.9	And she's always had to me a very interesting approach to this because she doesn't come at it
1:53.3	just from the perspective of economics. She's a trained PhD anthropologist, which I think is
1:58.7	training useful for understanding the Trump administration
2:01.1	and geopolitics right now.
2:03.6	As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com.
2:15.9	Jillian Tett, welcome to the show.
2:17.8	Delighted to be with you.
2:19.5	So I think it's good to start here.
2:21.9	Give me the best account you can give of what Donald Trump's economics team thinks they are doing.
2:28.9	What is the grand theory of the promised land on the other side of all this turbulence, disturbance,
2:38.1	possibly even recession, as Donald Trump just said, that they are risking?
	...

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