Trump administration gets blistering schooling after its revealed they don't know how tariffs work

Appearing on MSNBC's "AM Joy," one of Donald Trump's biographers, David Cay Johnston, explained in exquisite detail how tariffs work -- and who pays for them -- to the president and his economic advisers who still insist consumers won't feel the brunt.

Calling the President a "grifter "who only cares about his own wealth, Johnston said Trump has no understanding of economics and has no interest in learning.

"The thing about Trump is that he has an obsession with China and Mexico being foreign bad actors, bad people that his base wants him to fight, so you have this policy emerging not just from economics. so to appease voters that care about immigration, that's what they care about," host Joy Reid asked. "Is it fair to undermine the farm economy just to appease those people and himself, I guess?"

"The only things that matter to Trump is Donald Trump," Johnston replied. "He wants to hoodwink all of the people that want to live in a mythical 1950's America where black people didn't have hardly any civil rights and Asian people were hardly seen."

"That is clearly racism mixed with 18th-century mercantilist economics," he continued. "He thinks there is only x amount of dollars in the world and every dollar he doesn't have is a dollar that someone else has."

"We know how to create wealth, we're good at it," he added. "But if you're Donald Trump you don't understand that. All of these policies are indeed a bet he could lose the popular vote by 12 million votes and get a second term."

Watch below: