Transcript - America This Week, Apr 4, 2025: "Tariffs, the Battle in Seattle, and the Triumphant Return of Thomas Friedman, Villain"

Left and right populism almost came together many times to oppose globalization. Now that Trump's "reciprocal tariffs" are here, minds have changed. Why? Also "The Pedestrian," by Ray Bradbury

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, we’re very matchy-matchy today.

Walter Kirn: Well, we are. We’re wearing matching County Highway hats. It’s County Highway Magazine, you can subscribe online, because the logos are not particularly prominent on our hats. If you’re wondering what it is, it’s the newspaper I help edit, and Matt has kindly agreed to be twins today.

Matt Taibbi: Well, I mean, I’m always supportive of County Highway, so I think everybody should have a copy. Also, you and I, Walter... It’s a dissident publication, and you and I have both had personal difficulties this last week, and we can’t share fully today what they are, but we will be able to next week. At least partially.

Walter Kirn: Yours was on TV.

Matt Taibbi: Mine was on TV, so that one’s not so much of a mystery, but the other shoe dropping to it is a little bit.

Walter Kirn: Oh, no. Okay, I can’t wait.

Matt Taibbi: Well, no, no, no. It’s not necessarily bad news.

Walter Kirn: Well, mine was on TV too. We actually had video of a criminal doing something to me, and you’ll have to tune in next week. This is going to be a serial drama, and it’s a new way for us to keep and hold subscribers.

Matt Taibbi: In fact, we may need the audience’s help to get some movement on Walter’s situation at least, because it’s so weird, but we’ll get into it probably next week. Look, obviously a lot going on in the world. There’s a lot of things we could get into, but Walter noticed a tweet that we both thought was fascinating, and that leads us down what Adam Entous would call a Warren. In other words, a rabbit hole, and it’s our old friend, Lee Fang. The first thing he says is, “There’s absolutely no way a time traveler could explain to a 1999 Seattle WTO lefty protester how the era of globalization and American support for free trade would come to an end.” Now, we’re going to have to cut away from this for a second to talk about what he means, and what he means is a series of tariffs that were announced this week. Trump is calling them reciprocal tariffs. If we could just play the beginning of this.

Donald Trump: If you look at that China, first row. China, 67%. That’s tariffs charged to The USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers. 67%, I think you can, for the most part, see it. Those with good eyes. With bad eyes, we didn’t want to bring... It’s very windy out here, we didn’t want to bring out the big charts, because it had no chance of standing. Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller chart, so it’s 67%. We’re going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. In other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less, so how can anybody be upset?

Matt Taibbi: Essentially, Trump is slapping tariffs on the whole world. The whole world is currently freaking out about this, but if we go back in our Wayne’s World time machine, Walter, what did it look like in 1999 when the political establishment then led by Bill Clinton was pushing for China to be put into the WTO, given most favored nation trade status, and brought into this community of free trade that was going to cause this worldwide explosion of global wealth-

Walter Kirn: And peace, love, and understanding.

Matt Taibbi: peace, love, and understanding as well. That’s a key part of that. We’re going to get into what some of the rhetoric was at the time. People have naturally forgotten what that was, but that 1999 decision to not only beef up the World Trade Organization, but bring China into it. A plainly undemocratic, highly repressive country was being welcomed into the fraternity of Western democratic nations for reasons that didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to a lot of people, but particularly the American left at the time.

Walter Kirn: Then the American left then pledged to the robust protection and wellbeing of the American worker.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right, yeah. The American left that supposedly had a sacred bond with the American worker, suddenly didn’t have a problem with all of America’s jobs being moved over to China, and we’ll get into what some of those excuses were at the time, but it led to-

Walter Kirn: Well, they did have a problem on the streets of Seattle, but...

Matt Taibbi: Exactly, exactly.

Walter Kirn: The cops and others got a hold of that one.

Matt Taibbi: Yep. In fact, let’s give a brief... Let’s do our Wayne’s World time machine and go back to 1999, and if we could just see the battle in Seattle footage.

Protester 1: Our world, our state. Our world, our state.

Protester 2: For the most part, it was the police, it was tear gas, it was rubber bullets that were provoking all the chaos in the streets.

Proterster 3: The criticism of the protesters right now, it’s being portrayed that there is a whole bunch of anarchists that came here just to have fun and smash stores, and there’s very few people that do that. That a lot of people are seriously working to prevent protesters to prevent violence.

Matt Taibbi: All right, all right. We can stop there. The battle in Seattle was massively propagandized at the time as a ruckus drummed-up by leftist/communist agitators who were breaking glass and doing all these horrible things, and they hugely represented what those protests were about. Most of what the WTO battle in Seattle protesters were upset about was this idea that we were entering into trade agreements that would effectively undermine a century of pro-labor agitation in places like the United States by helping move our labor environment to unfree places where workers without rights would suddenly be competing with workers in the United States. Is that an accurate summation, Walter?

Walter Kirn: I think it is. There were other deleterious effects to this move. We were going to not only be moving to these jobs to low-wage unfree countries, but to countries which didn’t observe the same niceties of environmental protection-

Matt Taibbi: Exactly, pollution.

Walter Kirn: ... and so on. But Bill Clinton, in his wisdom, made sure that goon squads, unseen even during any Trump administration, moved into the streets to get rid of these rats, these anarchists, these communists, these so on.

Matt Taibbi: It’s really an amazing story, because the Clinton administration began... Remember, the Democratic Party before Clinton was almost entirely beholden to big labor. Big labor was how they organized, big labor was how they raised money. What happened after Walter Mondale got creamed is the party got together and said, “We can’t compete this way. We need some other source of funding,” so they went to Wall Street, and they basically cut a deal and said, “Hey, can we get some of that good nice Wall Street cheddar?” In return, they got some policy changes, the biggest one being Democratic support for a Republican-crafted law called NAFTA, right? Clinton entered the office with a huge betrayal of labor, like a historic one, passing NAFTA, and ended with a subjugation of labor protesters over the WTO in general, and the idea of China getting most favored trading nation status in particular. Now we can zoom back out.

Walter Kirn: China, not all that many years after Tiananmen Square.

Matt Taibbi: Right, yeah. I mean, I feel like we had just watched that when this happened. Another thing that Lee tweeted, in addition to saying it would be difficult to explain to a lefty back then, that the end of this arrangement would’ve been fomented by a person that they probably hated more than anybody else in Donald Trump, or they at least would’ve been led to believe they hated. He then linked to a conversation between two political polar opposites. Pat Buchanan, who was one of the first ever... I don’t know. Not one of the first ever, but he was one of the first insurgent nationalist candidates who made hay on the big stage. Is that accurate, Walter?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, he was. What year again was this covered?

Matt Taibbi: This would’ve been 2011, so it was way after that,

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Pat Buchanan, you know him by the insults hurled at him, “Isolationist, nativist-”

Matt Taibbi: Racist.

Walter Kirn: “Racist, nationalist.” I won’t adjudicate the fairness of any of those. I did meet him once, I did interview him once as a journalist when he tried to take the Reform party. I think he did get the Reform Party nomination in 2000 when he ran against...

Matt Taibbi: Donald Trump.

Walter Kirn: Well, no, he ran against Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Matt Taibbi: Right, yes, but-

Walter Kirn: I mean, Al Gore and George Bush, excuse me.

Matt Taibbi: Yep, yep. Trump considered that nomination.

Walter Kirn: Trump considered that, and that’s when I first met Donald Trump, too. Donald Trump and Jesse Ventura in a motel ballroom in Minneapolis or St. Paul, Minnesota when they were considering running. It ended with Pat Buchanan as the nominee, and I went to his convention down in Arlington, Texas and had a very off-the-record, explosive interview with him in which he just railed against the degenerates and the globalists and the people who were selling the US and the US worker to the lowest bidder. He was quite a character, and one thing that can be said, I think, fairly of him was that he was an enemy of what they call the rules-based international order now.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly. He was, to his core, a nationalist. I think that is an accurate thing to say.

Walter Kirn: He’s a guy who doesn’t think we should have gotten into World War II, necessarily.

Matt Taibbi: Yes, and that’s another question, but there are ups and downs to nationalism.

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: He explored all of those vigorously, but he’s having a conversation with another figure, Ralph Nader, who is one of the most significant third party figures in this country. He’s famous for being a consumer advocate. We have seat belts in our cars because of Ralph Nader.

Walter Kirn: Who, ironically, in some minds, would decide the 2000 election in which Pat Buchanan ran and Al Gore and George Bush. Would decide it not intentionally, but perhaps on a practical basis for George Bush, in that he is thought to have sucked votes away from Gore.

Matt Taibbi: He sucked my vote away from Gore.

Walter Kirn: Interesting.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Nader went on to become one of the first symbols of what we now call Lawfare. In his subsequent runs for president, he was continually litigated against. Every signature that he ever collected was challenged, he was struck from the ballot or disallowed from ballots over and over and over again, the Democrats did everything in their power to make sure he could not run. He has some bitterness about it, but he and Buchanan, ideologically, would seem to be opposites. In 2011, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protests, they have a discussion. They start to talk about things, including the battle in Seattle, and there is a moment where they both entertain the possibility that, yes, the left version of populism and right version of populism might have found middle ground.

Patrick Buchanan: I don’t think we’ll be a country in the sense that John Jay and Federalist too described us as one unique separate people.

Ralph Nader: Yet, you know this Occupy Wall Street effort that’s proliferating in hundreds of communities, it’s marked by a great diversity of background, cultures, religions, race united against the power of Wall Street and Washington in a desperate search for a more democratic society. Not just political, but economic. How do you explain that? That seems to be against the…

Patrick Buchanan: That’s what I’m saying.

Ralph Nader: Yeah.

Patrick Buchanan: Well, I do think, I think that the measure of unity that they have, I think one of the reasons they have it is because they’re not defining their demands. I’ve seen some of their 13 demands, and I’m sure some of those folks who are Tea Party types would not be in favor of those demands. I think there’s no question about it. Well, I agree with the fundamental premise of the Occupy Wall Street folks, which is, “Look, these fellas up here played the highest stakes poker game in the world, they had a great time, they made billions of dollars, and then all of a sudden, they were wiped out, and they ran to Uncle and said, ‘Give us back our chips,’ and Uncle gave them back his chips. Now they’re playing again, and they got the bonuses, and everybody out in middle America is suffering. You got 9% unemployment and 16% probably active, unemployed, and those searching for work.” I share the exasperation and the anger and the rage at that inequity and injustice.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, Walter, that’s a pretty significant moment, don’t you think?

Walter Kirn: It’s a very significant moment, because there was the ability to agree on that simple premise, that the financial interests and the working interests of the country were opposed. Now, that’s pretty basic going back in American political economic history, but it has since become muddied and controversial, but there was that clear moment where they could both agree that the wellbeing of America and the American working class middle class and lower-middle class was to be esteemed at least as highly as the wellbeing of the financial class, which had one benefit the working class doesn’t, which is they can be bailed out.