New York University Stern School of Business Professor Scott Galloway blasted President Donald Trump's ongoing tariff changes and attacked him as "stupid."
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg bashed Trump, saying he has "wreaked havoc on the global economy since his so-called liberation day last week with massive tariffs." She noted that Trump has now mostly walked them back, leaving a 10% tariff on all goods and 125% tariff on China.
She asked Galloway what Trump could possibly be doing.
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"It would be hard to think of a more elegant way to reduce prosperity this fast," slammed Galloway.
He specifically brought up Apple, explaining that people in China making iPhones earn $500 a month while designers at Apple make $200,000 a year. The kind of manufacturing that Trump wants to return to the U.S. isn't sustainable because people don't want to pay unaffordable prices for goods they were once able to obtain cheaply.
"We want to wear Nikes. We don't want to make them," he summed up. "We have outsourced low-wage jobs overseas such that we can create more profit, more investments and create higher wage jobs."
Galloway said that 80% of the "toys under the Christmas tree are from China. So 90% of U.S. households are budget-constrained. So we're talking about half the number of toys. We're talking about a destruction in shareholder value such that your parents can't retire as quickly and talking about the entire world rerouting their supply chain around 'brand America,' which, quite frankly, right now, is toxic uncertainty — so they can bypass a series of unpredictable, epileptic, sclerotic decisions. And we finally need to acknowledge we have someone at the wheel of the global economy that is blackout drunk right now."
He went on to knock Trump for seeking a "golden age" of U.S. prosperity, but Galloway said it was also a time when there was no indoor plumbing and the U.S. allowed child labor.
"I'll take Netflix and novocaine," said Galloway.
He closed by jeering Trump's "war" with Canada, and said that the big winner in that is China.
"The damage here — when he paused the tariffs yesterday, he took the knife halfway out of the economy's back, but the injury will take years, if not decades, to heal. The definition of stupid is doing something that hurts yourself while hurting others. This could not be more stupid," he said.
