During a break from discussing the Donald Trump administration's growing battle with the judiciary, Axios founder Jim VandeHei reminded the panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the president has a lot on his plate right now with problems of his own making.
According to the Washington insider, Trump's tariff war has done what appears to be irreparable damage to the reputation of the U.S. and he has put himself into a box he can't escape from to get the economy back on track.
Noting Trump has been facing an extraordinary amount of push back from Wall Street, VandeHei explained, "I think the president blinked in a pretty substantial way last week because of this pressure," he began. "It's pressure from CEOs. It's pressure from investors."
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"Listen, if you're running a business and someone who does run a business the last thing you want is unpredictability, right?" he continued. "And there's a tremendous amount of unpredictability. So when companies start to say we're going to freeze hiring or they have to wait to figure out what's happening at the port with shipments of goods, that has a tremendous effect on that company and ultimately on the consumer."
"I think that the president is in a hell of a pickle right now, and I don't actually know how he's going to solve it," he asserted. "The Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessett's theory now would be the best possible outcome is that you use a very messy situation to leverage European countries and South Korea and Japan and others to create almost a free trade zone with no tariffs between all of us in exchange for not doing business with China."
"Okay, in theory, that sounds like a great idea," he added skeptically. "Except for if you're a European company or you're a European country, or you're South Korea or you're Vietnam, do you trust that the United States now is a more trustworthy partner?"
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