The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 19 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Something interesting has been happening on Fox News. Its personalities are openly panicking about Donald Trump’s economy. They keep warning Trump that his tariffs are blowing up in his face. On Tuesday, for instance, Fox host Maria Bartiromo lost patience with a Trump administration official and walked through all the reasons why business leaders are unhappy with Trump’s threats.
All this comes as a new NBC poll finds majority disapproval of Trump on the economy for the first time ever in NBC polling. Yet by all indications, Trump isn’t listening to any of this. He’s forging ahead with his plan for tariffs, and he rarely even bothers talking about the economy anymore. So what’s going to happen to Trump’s alliance with Fox News if a recession really looks likely to hit? We think it’s a sign that Trump’s project is more fragile than you might think. Today, we’re talking about all this with Matt Gertz of Media Matters, who’s been closely tracking Fox coverage of Trump’s economy. Good to have you on, Matt.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Sargent: Let’s start by listening to what Fox host Maria Bartiromo said about the tariffs. She was interviewing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who talked about how we need tariffs because imported goods like foods aren’t adequately tested. Then this happened.
Maria Bartiromo (audio voiceover): These are the things that people are really worried about. Because they first thought it was just about trade. Then they thought it was just about fentanyl. Then after that we talked about, Well maybe it’s currency manipulation. Now you’re talking about food testing. And when I bring up the issue of clarify, that’s what I’m talking about and that’s what I’m hearing from corporate America.
Sargent: Matt, the frustration there is palpable. The key point is that Trump has no real rationale for the tariffs—and it’s so nakedly obvious that even Fox News won’t play along. What do you make of it?
Gertz: You can almost hear the desperation starting to creep into her voice there. Maria Bartiromo is a pretty hardcore Trumper. She used to have a much stronger reputation as a business reporter, but alongside Trump’s rise, she really got on board with the movement and with him. She’s really his favorite host to interview him about the economy; he did an interview with her earlier this month. You can almost sense that she’s tried to reach through the television and warn Trump that what he’s doing could backfire in a very big way, and that he should perhaps reconsider what he’s trying to do to the economy before that happens.
Sargent: Matt, when she interviewed him earlier this month as you mentioned, she literally said it straight to his face. She practically begged Trump to show some clarity on the tariffs. And Trump basically said, Nope, the tariffs are going to go up. Bartiromo served this opportunity to make it clear that at some point the craziness is going to stop, and he was like, Nah, I’m not going to do that.
Gertz: And then she asked him, Are you expecting a recession this year? and he said, Well, there’s a period of transition happening. I think there was a sense from the business community during the campaign that Trump was talking big about these tariffs, but they weren’t really going to happen. [They thought that] it was all part of some negotiation, and they’d be able to talk him out of it, so a lot of people from that community got on board with Trump’s campaign. They decided they preferred an insurrectionist to someone who might raise their taxes. Now it seems to be blowing up in their faces. And for someone like Bartiromo, who, as I recall, was telling her audience that this probably wouldn’t be a big deal, that is a big problem. And I think we’re seeing that manifest in little explosions like that.
Sargent: We’ve seen a lot of it from Fox figures lately. Bartiromo, for instance, on Monday quoted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development saying “higher tariffs will slow economic growth and push inflation higher worldwide.” Fox anchor Charles Payne was pretty blunt recently saying “the boon times are over”—I guess that’s an admission that things were much better under Biden. And Payne actually also pronounced consumer sentiment “scary.” Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich said on Fox News, “We are sliding toward a recession.” Matt, does Fox News question Trump that way on any other issue? I can’t think of one.
Gertz: I can’t think of one either. This is really an unusual phenomenon that we’re seeing—and it doesn’t stop there. We saw Bill McGurn up from The Wall Street Journal editorial board say on Fox business, “I can’t really say anything nice about tariffs. I think they’re anti-growth and a bad thing to play around with, because they can get out of hand.” Fox anchor John Roberts called Trump’s tariffs “perhaps the ticking time bomb,” and Brit Hume said that the tariffs are effectively making taxes higher. This is a long running schism in the right that Trump has stepped in and you’re seeing some aspects of the right really revolting to it.
Sargent: Yeah. I want to talk about that schism a little more. If you take The Wall Street Journal, for instance, the editorial page is absolutely trashing Trump on the tariffs day in and day out practically. I think it’s fair to say, don’t you, that Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page are really allied with the GOP’s plutocratic wing?
Gertz: I don’t know if I’d go that far. I think certainly aspects of Fox News are allied with that wing. I think that Fox, though, really represents the full range of the Trump coalition. That includes traditional business conservatives like The Wall Street Journal editorial board, but it also includes the more MAGA nationalist wing, the slash-and-burn libertarians. You can get every flavor of that Trump coalition from watching Fox News—but, and this is the crucial aspect, they disagree on a lot of policy. The thing that unites the Trump coalition is that they hate the left and they hate people who are members of the left. As long as Trump is trashing and destroying liberal institutions and trying to tear down individual progressives, everyone is happy. Once he moves into the realm of policy, all of those different coalition partners have different priorities and different things that they want to get done, and will often clash in a very big way. That is part of what we’re seeing on Fox News right now.
Sargent: Unquestionably. This week, an NBC News poll found that 54 percent of voters disapprove of Trump on the economy and 55 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living. Just 18 percent of voters say the economy is excellent or good. That’s just brutal. Now, we should note that NBC found Trump’s overall approval at 47 percent a bit better, but even here a majority disapproves. And the thing is, Trump’s economic numbers have long been his Teflon, the thing that gets him through everything else. For those to be cracking now so visibly means his overall approval is on very shaky ground as well.
Gertz: That’s right. What I always go back to is that the period in which Trump had the lowest approval ratings throughout his whole political career was when he was trying to repeal Obamacare after cutting a huge tax cut to the wealthiest Americans. That was the period in which you saw parts of his coalition questioning whether he really had their best interests at heart. What we’re seeing right now is that that has accelerated—the sense that Trump is more interested in hurting his enemies and rewarding his friends than in improving the economic situation for the average American, which is what he said his priority was going to be and what he said that he was going to do. That is poison for his approval ratings in general.
Sargent: Underscoring your point there about Trump really taking his eye off the ball of the economy and focusing on his enemies and culture-war craziness, the NBC poll finds that among independents, 30 percent approve and 67 percent disapprove of Trump’s performance in office. Those are terrible numbers among independents, Matt, and independents famously do not like the type of stuff we’re seeing from Trump right now. It really clearly shows that you’re correct that he has really taken his eye off the ball of the economy and is now focused on things that the middle of the country just sees as a total distraction.
Gertz: And even when he is making economic policy, it’s doing exactly the opposite of what he said he was going to do. He was supposed to bring down prices. He was going to end inflation. Instead, with these tariffs, what he is threatening to do is put a huge tax increase on everything that everyone buys at the grocery store and everywhere else. That is going to show up in people’s wallets, and they can tell that he has some other priority in store rather than making their lives easier and better.
Sargent: I feel like it’s really important to underscore this point: Tariffs are a tax on consumption. Those fall most heavily on the poor and the working class and some middle-class voters as well who spend a larger proportion of their income on consumption. And Trump is openly out there saying that he needs these revenues because he’s going to continue his tax cuts which will overwhelmingly benefit wealthy corporate investors and the very rich. So he’s quite literally trying to transfer the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It seems to me that these numbers are looking really terrible even before we’ve seen him actually do this. What happens when he does it?
Gertz: Yeah, that’s a great point. We are at the stage of this process where he is threatening and pulling back and threatening and pulling back; some tariffs are going to affect and some aren’t, and now he’s threatening a new set of tariffs that’ll go in at even higher levels. It’s the sort of thing that (a) makes planning for any business totally impossible and (b) just underscores that he doesn’t really have a plan, that there isn’t really a sense of why any of this has happened. And that’s what comes through in the Bartiromo clip that we started with. She’s making the point that the rationale for what these tariffs are supposed to be accomplishing keeps changing. At the same time, the revenue from these tariffs, whichever ones eventually get implemented, are simultaneously being promised to reduce the deficit and to pay for the tax cuts—and maybe some revenue going back to the voters in some other way. The only thing clear about this is that we have no idea what is happening.
Sargent: I want to get to your point about the schisms inside Fox. You had a piece recently where you pointed out that some Fox personalities, at least, are still trying to hold to the propaganda line, insisting that nothing is at all amiss on the economy or with Trump’s tariffs even as their own colleagues are sounding the alarm. Can you talk about that?
Gertz: Yeah. What I wrote was right after the huge collapse in the stock market last week. I noticed that different MAGA media figures were having different ways that they were grappling with this. Some of them were ignoring it altogether. My favorite one of these is Jesse Watters, who basically ignored the stock market collapse the entire show. Sean Hannity didn’t mention it at all either. You have some people like Laura Ingraham who are gently warning that the tariffs might have a bad political impact. She is someone who has generally been supportive of his tariffs in the past, but finds the way that Trump’s implementing them to be so haphazard as to just be spooking the markets in ways that could damage his standing with voters. And that, I think, she’s presenting to Donald Trump as a friend, that perhaps you should consider this.
Then you have other people. You have the folks at Newsmax who are trying to compete with Fox News by being ever more pro-Trump than anyone else could possibly be. They’re trying to fill the old Lou Dobbs niche, so you have people there explaining that pain comes with change, that maybe stocks need to take a nosedive so the working man can get a little relief from all this inflation. And Greg Kelly [argued] that Trump has always known what’s best for the U.S. and viewers are better off listening to Trump because he’s always proven right. That’s the caliber of the commentary that we’re getting.
But yeah, we’re seeing a pretty big schism overall on Fox News. Even the people who are saying that Trump is doing the right thing can’t agree on why. You have some people like Sean Hannity saying that this is all the art of the deal, that it is a negotiation that Trump is engaged in to make things better, to get us better trade terms with other countries. Then you have a different set that is actually pro the economy getting worse. They’re basically saying, Look, there has to be a little bit of pain so that Donald Trump can build the great new economy of the future. Those obviously can’t both be true. Either the tariffs are actually going into effect so that he can build the new economy of the future, or it’s all a negotiation tool. And then you have people who, as we’ve discussed earlier, are just saying, Tariffs are bad. Tariffs are bad policy. They’re a tax on consumers. I think that’s more of the free trader wing of the Republican Party and now the MAGA movement speaking out.
Sargent: It seems like it’s worth pointing out as well that building this great new Trumpian economy is really just not going to happen, right? The way tariffs work is they also impact inputs on intermediate products that are needed to manufacture things in the United States, actually [raising] the cost of making things here as well.
Gertz: I think there are some instances in which tariffs are worth considering, particularly on high-end manufactured goods. But what Trump is doing is proposing tariffs that are across the board.
Sargent: We should also bring up Paul Krugman’s point from the other day, which is, Are we even sure we want to manufacture shoes in the U.S. again? Shouldn’t we be looking at the higher level manufacturing goods? By the way, one thing that’s entirely missing from all these discussions is that Trump is taking all kinds of steps to destroy the new jobs that are being created in high-end manufacturing in the green energy economy. So this is yet another way none of it makes any sense. He and Vance constantly rhapsodize about manufacturing work, but they’re in the process of wrecking some of the best possible manufacturing jobs of the future.
Gertz: And making it more difficult to build more factories going forward. The inputs that you need for construction are among the things that they’re trying to put tariffs on. Part of this is just a total inability of Trump and his media supporters to acknowledge that the Biden economy had some good aspects to it. In fact, what we’re seeing on Fox now is a lot of people claiming that any economic downturn that happens now is really a Biden recession rather than something caused by the person who is in the White House right now. It’s totally ludicrous, but completely consistent with what we get out of the White House.
Sargent: I want to ask you about Fox’s ideology, the reigning ideology on the right that you were talking about earlier. Another thing that we haven’t seen hit yet but is going to hit are the huge cuts to the safety net that Trump and Republicans want to make. We’re talking about huge amounts of money being cut out of Medicaid potentially. We’re talking about rollbacks of these subsidies for the green economy, which even some House Republicans are opposing. What happens when those start to hit? How does Fox straddle that? Fox News ideologically is predisposed toward wanting the safety net to be destroyed; yet, at the same time, they want the MAGA project to succeed. They know as well as anyone else that a lot of people on Medicaid are Trump voters. So how do they straddle that part of it?
Gertz: Well, that’ll be an interesting question. Right now, what they’re saying on Fox News is that Trump is not going to cut Medicaid, that none of these social safety net cuts are actually going to happen. You had Jesse Watters saying last month that Democrats are squealing Trump is going to cut Medicaid, but then pointing to what he thinks of as inappropriate Medicaid spending and saying Trump is saving us all money and Democrats are trying to stop it. You have people like Greg Gutfeld saying Republicans are only going after Medicaid and Medicare for fraud and everybody knows that. This is the sort of thing that is not going to hold up once people actually experience the crushing destructive assault on Medicaid that Republicans have been planning for years. If that actually comes to fruition, if they actually put together huge Medicaid cuts to pay for their tax cuts, Fox’s audience is going to feel that. How Fox actually responds to something like that is anybody’s guess, but probably they’d try to make it someone else’s fault. We’ll see how that plays out.
Sargent: Matt, you follow how Republicans interact with Fox News; that’s something you followed for a long time. House Republicans, especially the ones in moderate districts, the really vulnerable ones in next year’s elections, are going to really start balking at these Medicaid cuts and at the rollbacks of green energy subsidies. Fox News wants the Republican Party to succeed also in addition to Trump and MAGA succeeding. Fox News does not want the Republican Party to lose the House in the 2026 midterms. How do they get around that? They’re going to have to start sounding some alarms about how at least the politics are pretty bad for Republicans when these cuts start, no?
Gertz: Yeah. This is the problem that Trump’s platform really established. Donald Trump likes to take a lot of different positions on a lot of different issues, and they don’t really match up at all. He’s simultaneously talking about balancing the budget and not cutting Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid and providing huge tax cuts, both renewing the ones that he passed in his first term and a whole slew of new ones. The math doesn’t actually work on any of this, so something’s got to give. Either they do the slashing cuts to Medicaid and other federal spending, and they are able to pay for their tax cuts; or they don’t do the tax cuts, which I really cannot conceive of actually happening in any way as that’s their top Republican priority every time; or they end up doing another debt-financed tax cut, and we end up with rising interest rates.
Someone’s going to end up getting hurt, probably a lot of people along the way. And Fox is going to need to come up with something. Part of the issue is going to be during that whole negotiation that happens over what happens with this reconciliation bill or bills, there’s going to be so many different conflicting signals from Donald Trump, from his top advisors, from congressional Republicans. It’s going to be hard for them to figure out what position they’re even supposed to take if they want Donald Trump to succeed—and that could lead to, I think, some pretty scattershot commentary.
Sargent: Well, Matt Gertz, you are the person who follows this better than just about anybody else alive, and that’s why we love having you on. Thanks for coming on, man.
Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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