Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Economy
Why couldn’t we all just get along?
President Trump boldly announced last week that he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to talk disarmament, working to fulfill his recent State of the Union promise to prevent Pyongyang from obtaining nuclear missiles that could hit the U.S. homeland. In making that pledge, Trump declared, “I will not repeat the mistakes of past administrations.”
The tweet came before 6 a.m., as President Trump’s tweets often do. It was early March, and the Trump administration had just announced steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. That did not make China or America’s European allies happy. Last week, after the U.S. imposed tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese goods, it was reported that China would respond with their own tariffs on $3 billion of U.S. goods.
Republicans are in revolt. Economists on the left and right are deeply skeptical. President Trump’s top economic adviser resigned rather than be party to it. The culprit: tariffs, and specifically the president’s decision to slap duties on imported steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent).
Happy Equal Pay Day! (Or, as I like to call it, Women’s New Year.) Today is the day that marks roughly how far into 2018 women had to work to earn a salary equal to what men got the year before.1 We’d throw a parade and street fair, but we were too busy working to organize one.
President Trump seems ready to declare victory in his effort to make America great again; last month, he said the slogan for his 2020 re-election campaign will be “Keep America Great.” But how much has really changed, particularly for the “everyday, working Americans” whom Trump said were the “backbone and heartbeat of our country” — and whose votes helped him secure the presidency?
Late last year, graduate students watched as legislators in the House debated giving them a hefty new tax bill: A version of the GOP tax plan proposed to treat tuition waivers as taxable income. Although that plan was later dropped, Congress is once again considering legislation that could affect graduate students’ bottom lines. And the federal government is considering ending some of its student loan forgiveness programs, which could raise the economic barrier to entering certain public service professions and leave social workers, teachers and other people in public-service fields that require graduate degrees paying thousands of dollars more for their education.
We think of today’s Washington as being rigidly divided along party lines on nearly every issue. But a bloc of Democrats in the Senate just joined with Republicans and the Trump administration on a bill that would lighten some restrictions on banks imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, one of President Obama’s signature policy achievements. Meanwhile, some congressional Republicans are considering legislation that would stop President Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which several Democrats and labor leaders have publicly supported.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter made an improbable journey from Georgia peanut grower to Democratic president in part by playing on his humble roots and receiving support from America’s farmers. Yet this bedrock voting constituency abandoned a fellow farmer to back Ronald Reagan four years later, after Carter punished Moscow for invading Afghanistan by cutting off grain sales to the Soviet Union. U.S. farmers were already struggling with collapsing crop prices, and the embargo may have been the final straw. Farmers threw their support behind Reagan, who had promised to lift the hated restrictions.
