Scott Jennings: The Rest of the Free World Isn’t Going to Say ‘Let’s Get Behind the Chinese Communist Party and Let Them Lead Us into the Future’

CARNEY: “Look at what the U.K. politicians are doing. They are saying we are not going to overreact to this. Europe is already leaving — “
QUEST: “Because they’ve got a 10 percent, slightly different from Ursula von der Leyen. By the way, I haven’t brought my props with me tonight, but you will be pleased to know — “
FOROOHAR: “Where’s your shoe?”
QUEST: “I have this one. You will be pleased to know that we are putting together the basket of goods. We’ve done a study of what are the most things that people buy, and we’ve put together 15 to 17 baskets of goods and we’re going to track it for the next three months.”
CARNEY: “I really am looking forward to this.”
QUEST: “And it’s things like bananas. It’s things like coffee. It’s — “
CARNEY: “I’m really looking forward to this basket, because I track the basket of things that we tariff when we tariff China. I tracked everything every month, every report that came out, whether it was PPI, CPI, CPE, everything that came out, I was right on top of it and nothing went up except for bicycles, weirdly. Bicycle prices went up, but nothing else did.”
PHILLIP: “So, let me just — this is from the camp of people who are actually making the business decisions. The Wall Street Journal had a piece that said, ‘One auto executive early last week darkly predicted Chernobyl if tariffs broadly hit imported parts, which they are scheduled to do next month. Industry executives and analysts said what the administration outlined Wednesday was worse than they expected.’ Car dealership owners are saying very similar things. I think that the people that this is supposed to help are raising an alarm right now. They are saying this is actually not good for our industry, except for, I mean, there may be a couple of industries, maybe steel this is great for, maybe a handful of agricultural industries this might be good for, if other tariffs go down, but that is such a small portion of the economy. Almost everybody else is going to be hit in one way or another by this.”
JENNINGS: “Yeah, and we’re going to have to see what the administration comes up with, with these 70-plus countries that have called. We don’t know how that’s going to turn out yet. And I think people are also just going to have to take the president here and his administration at their word when they talk about reorganizing and reordering the global economic order so that it doesn’t unfairly punish the working class of the United States. And on this issue with China, look, I just — I don’t believe that the rest of the free world is going to wake up and say, ‘You know what? Let’s get behind the Chinese Communist Party and let them lead us into the future.’ That will not happen. That will not happen. That will not happen.”
PHILLIP: “But isn’t that already happening?”
JENNINGS: “I’m sorry, it will not, it cannot.”
PHILLIP: “I’m not being facetious. Like, seriously, like isn’t it already the case that China is already using its economic influence to build a whole block on the global south?”
JENNINGS: “I know what they do. But that’s coercion. And what you’re talking about is people — “
QUEST: “Oh, what is the United States doing?”
JENNINGS: “Willingly — you’re talking about willingly following them off the cliff. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
QUEST: “Excuse me. And what is this tariff, if not coercion?”
CARNEY: “Well, the reason why China will never become what the United States is to the world right now is because they insist on running a trade surplus with the rest of the world. They will not do what the United States does, which is absorb the overproduction of the rest of the world. This is why Europe will be on our side. Europe needs to export to us. China needs to export to us. China will never become the buyer of last resort.”