Batya Ungar-Sargon: Trump ‘Picked up a Baseball Bat,’ Said to the Global Elites that ‘It Would Be a Shame If Anything Happened to It’

PHILLIP: “We‘re not so sure that the United States of America is a safe haven for our money anymore.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “Here‘s the way I think they‘re thinking about it. It feels like the direction they‘re heading in is that what Trump basically wants is for our allies to consume a lot more of our products, and for China to produce a lot less of what we consume. And so I think what he‘s going for is a kind of soft global embargo on China. And the way that he went about doing that is he basically picked up a baseball bat and said to the entire global elites, ‘That‘s a really nice stock market you‘ve got. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.’ And the reason that I think that that was effective is, I mean, Lutnick is saying that they could never have gotten such good deals if that pressure that you‘re actually describing wasn‘t there. But I think that that was more designed for domestic audience. And the reason that I think that is this. I‘ve been thinking a lot about the 10 million Americans who lost their homes in the 2008 financial crisis and how President Obama‘s first act in office was to give $700 billion to the banks that caused it, including $30 billion in bonuses to the crooks who organized it. And I‘m thinking about how those very Americans saw a president pick Wall Street over main street and what they saw this whole week was a president willing to go out there and fight for the forgotten men and women of this heartland and take on the entire international global order.”