President Donald Trump isn't backing down from his trade war plans and even his allies at Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Fox Business networks have been sounding the alarm.
In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz said that the recent coverage of Trump's tariffs at the network shows that many conservatives are worried that trade wars with America's two largest trading partners will come back to bite the GOP.
At the start of the interview, Sargent played a clip of Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo cutting through administration spin about the rationale behind the tariffs, which led Sargent to suggest that even Fox suspects that "Trump has no real rationale for the tariffs."
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"You can almost hear the desperation starting to creep into her voice there," Gertz responded. "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."
Gertz then reflected on the way many in the business community believed that Trump wasn't really serious when he pitched trade wars with Mexico and Canada while on the campaign trail last year.
"They decided they preferred an insurrectionist to someone who might raise their taxes," he said. "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."