A former Republican political strategist has mocked President Donald Trump, saying he is having his “Marie Antoinette moment” on tariffs.
MSNBC‘s The Weeknight hosts spoke Monday night with political strategist Lucy Caldwell, who was campaign manager for former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh in the 2020 presidential primary.
She said pushback from companies such as Walmart on Trump’s tariffs plan show that he is out of touch with everyday Americans.
“Let them eat tariffs,” joked co-host Alicia Menendez, referencing Trump’s Truth Social tantrum Saturday, in which he told Walmart to “eat the tariffs.”
“It’s like his own Marie Antoinette moment, isn’t it,” quipped Caldwell.
Marie Antoinette, the former queen of France, famously said in response to news that people had no bread to eat prior to the French Revolution, “let them eat cake.” It became a well-used phrase to illustrate the disconnect between the wealthy and the working class.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said Thursday that Trump’s tariffs have begun to impact the American retailer, which provides for around 255 million customers and members each week.
“We’ll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins,” Walmart spokesperson Joe Pennington told the Daily Beast.
Although the panel found humor in Trump’s words, Caldwell made a point to note that the way Americans are getting “socialized” into accepting Trump’s fickle economic decisions is “not funny.”
“We’re socialized to the idea [of] ‘oh, actually, it’s okay because he paused the China tariffs so now the economy is recovering from the burst,’ or ‘oh, actually, we do have supplies coming into the LA port,’” she said.
“This is how authoritarians normalize people to their insanity,” Caldwell added.
“And incompetence,” said Menendez.
Menendez went on to mention how Trump has been claiming his economic moves “as a win,” saying how the president calls it “his economy” on the good days, and “Joe Biden’s economy” on the bad days.
In response, Caldwell called out the media, politicians, and anyone else who has allowed Trump to continue spreading his illusion of the “art of the deal.”
She said that people need to “collectively participate” in ending the narrative that there is “an art” to his actions, and that he deserves praise when he “rolls it back.”
“We have to stop ever praising him for this,” Caldwell said. “We have to stop letting Scott Bessent, a person who knows better, go on and claim this is some masterful art of the deal.”
“It is all chaos and it is an authoritarian playbook, quite frankly,” she added.
But she predicted that Trump’s “let them eat tariffs” strategy won’t go down well among Americans, and will affect him electorally sooner than later.
Caldwell stated that there has been a “shift in our economy,” and that today’s biggest American companies no longer sell everyday items, instead focus on tech and social media.
“But we don’t eat cans of Instagram soup, right?” she said. “We don’t lay our head down on Facebook pillows, or we don’t drive OpenAI cars.”
“And ultimately, we all still have to feed our families, we have to supply the things that make our home run, make our businesses run… Demand for food, for affordable groceries at Walmart, is not going down,” she added.
Co-host Michael Steele also noted that families will suffer from Trump’s economic moves in very tangible ways.
“Families are going to be hurt, they’re going to feel the impact of this in a real way,” he said. “And there’s no amount of slimy, slithering Trump BS that’s going to offset that because at the end of the day this is his economy, it’s not Joe Biden’s.”
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