But I'll let you set it up.

Yeah, sure thing.

I mean, I just was kind of looking at how the data center boom has been positioned for communities and kind of thinking about it just in historical context, right? And before I keep going, I want to say like everything I'm going to say is a value neutral statement, right? I'm just trying to make observations as a reporter.

I'm not saying Green New Deal is good.

Data centers are bad.

Green New Deal is bad.

Data centers are good.

Do you think it would be a lot easier to build these data centers now in a way that wouldn't upset people because that extra infrastructure capacity would already be there?

What is your sense? Uh, are- Is the administration digging, really digging in for that long haul?

Yeah, it does appear so, because in addition to the tariffs and trade prohibitions that we saw announced yesterday, there's also kind of a, a longer term threat here as well.

Your listeners will remember Trump has already threatened to increase tariffs on Canadian vehicles and metals, steel, and aluminum, uh, to fifty percent, but that wouldn't kick in until January first of next year.

Now, obviously that would be...

It's not only on Canadian vehicles, but also auto parts, and that would be ruinous for the Canadian auto industry, but also very, very difficult for automakers and parts suppliers in states like Michigan, um, in, in the United States.

And so I think that that is still looming off in the distance, and you will probably see the sides come back to the table at some point to try to negotiate something.

Maybe that happens a little faster now because you do have those trade prohibitions going into effect in three weeks on September twenty-ninth.

I mean, what, what's the way back to the table?

But the Canadian government had demonstrated something important, that it wouldn't just go along with Trump's demands like other allies had.

Most countries did not respond with tariffs of their own.

There have only been two countries to actually respond with retaliatory tariffs, Canada and China.

Think about other major US trading partners, like the European Union, Japan, or South Korea, United Kingdom as well.

Instead, they said, "Let's come to the table.

Let's talk and try to work out a negotiated agreement where we can at least bring down the tariff level on a few industries," right? They accepted the fact that there are going to be new US tariffs of some level in the second Trump term.

They said, "Can we just negotiate these down?" And by not retaliating, by kind of playing nice with the US even after they hit them with these tariffs, that enabled them to kind of sit down and talk with the Trump administration, ultimately come to some interim, you know, kind of tentative deals.

What is it that the Trump administration wants from Canada?

This contentious oil pipeline would connect Alberta to the US, but it was blocked by the Biden and Obama administrations.

Very unclear why this was thrown into the mix here.

I didn't have any sources, nor my colleagues, who heard from anyone involved in these talks that anything like the Keystone Pipeline was going to be a subject of conversation here.

However, here it rears its head again.

You know, this was a very controversial project with Indigenous activists, environmental activists in the United States.

It was canceled under President Joe Biden.

Trump has talked about wanting to bring it back.

But Bade says he's ultimately one of the few leaders to have stood up to Trump on tariffs.

Their goal was to find more permanent ways to reinstate the president's tariff regime.

If you think back to the first round of tariffs, they, they were based on this law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The IEEPA statute, it had never been used for tariffs before, and it really was kind of a long shot that the courts would uphold that tariff authority in any case, right? And so what they did was they dusted off a different part of trade law that is much more tried and tested.

This is called Section 301 of the, of the Trade Act of 1974.

What it allows the president to do is impose tariffs on another country if the president finds that they are discriminating against US commerce or US firms.

And what you have to do under this section is before you impose a tariff, you have to do a really lengthy investigation process.

You prepare these reports.

[upbeat music] So if you take a step back, what is the difference between the old tariff regime and this new one? What has the administration learned?

Is forced labor really the thing that the Trump administration is pushing to address here, or are they really just looking for a way to have the tariffs that they want?

Well, it can be both things.

Certainly, on paper, they are very serious about this forced labor stuff.

The US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, he's worked on this issue before.

But at the same time, they've been very clear that they were going to rebuild the tariff wall that the Supreme Court, uh, tore down, and it just so happens that the tariff levels in this investigation really correspond very closely to the tariff that was going to expire.

'Cause remember, after the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs, uh, he put in place a temporary ten percent tariff on just basically all imports across the board.

Um, and then that was going to expire, and so they had to get their act together and get this thing out before the other tariffs expired.

Why is that?

Just go fucking do it and we'll figure it out later.

We're moving fast and breaking things.

We're going to figure out everything and it doesn't matter if we take it off the next day, whatever.

You just blast through and yell at anyone who points out that you've made a mistake.

If you caught a lot of these people in a moment of honesty, they would say, yeah, of course, this is what we're doing.

And it's good.

And you know what? Of course, we're coercing people.

What is happening?

How have tariffs changed businesses' plans across the country?

Yeah, I think you really encapsulated in your reporting there the idea that tariffs are a double-edged sword, right? It's a very nuanced and convoluted subject to see how, how these tariffs kind of affect different companies.

We don't see the huge swings in tariff policy that we saw in spring of 2025 where, you know, we had a hundred and fifty almost percent tariffs on China, and then they were paused, they were taken down.

What you do see, though, is the administration preparing to put tariffs on other specific industries, whether this is, like, industrial robots, or we're waiting for their semiconductor tariffs.

And so even though it is more settled than it was this time last year, it's still very unsettled for businesses compared to, you know, any other administration.

So a lot of kind of compliance issues and, and things for companies to sill-- sift through here.

Going back to Sherrod Brown, Gavin, how is Brown balancing his longtime criticism of free trade and now challenging Republicans on their tariffs?

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting kind of test case for Democrats nationwide.

How have tariffs changed businesses' plans across the country?

Yeah, I think you really encapsulated in your reporting there the idea that tariffs are a double-edged sword, right? It's a very nuanced and convoluted subject to see how, how these tariffs kind of affect different companies.

We don't see the huge swings in tariff policy that we saw in spring of 2025 where, you know, we had 150 almost percent tariffs on China, and then they were paused, they were taken down.

What you do see, though, is the administration preparing to put tariffs on other specific industries, whether this is, like, industrial robots or we're waiting for their semiconductor tariffs.

And so even though it is more settled than it was this time last year, it's still very unsettled for businesses compared to, you know, any other administration.

So a lot of kind of compliance issues and, and things for companies to sill- sift through here.

Going back to Sherrod Brown, Gavin, how is Brown balancing his longtime criticism of free trade and now challenging Republicans on their tariffs?

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting kind of test case for Democrats nationwide.

I- if there's skepticism in Congress, if tariffs are not having much impact on the trade deficit, if there are studies saying that it's raising prices for businesses and consumers, and now the Supreme Court says the way it's been implemented is illegal, why not just back away from this tariff policy entirely?

I, I think in a way, they've been doing that in fits and starts already, right? We've seen in the last few months, Trump has really carved a lot of holes, a lot of exemptions in these IEPA tariffs.

You know, when he enters into a new trade agreement with another nation, he often will exempt many of their products from tariffs, right? Just yesterday, we signed a trade deal with Indonesia.

A lot of their farm goods, like, you know, coconut oil, palm oil, those will be able to come in under duty-free, no tariffs under this new deal.

So they've already been pushing those back a little bit, but I don't think that you'll see them just throw up their hands and say, "We're not doing tariffs anymore," right? They're going to reinstitute most of these tariffs.

They want the revenue from it.

They want to have the political symbolism of sticking up for US manufacturers and US workers.

Even if Trump is able to reimpose all of his tariffs, it's unlikely that his new justification will give him as much power as IEEPA did.

Did the ruling say what happens to the tariffs that companies have already paid?

No, it did not, and that is a big point of contention here.

You have over 1,000 companies that have already filed in court saying, "We want refunds if these tariffs are struck down." The Supreme Court did not weigh in to say what happens.

This means that it will probably be litigated in lower courts, and the president said at a press conference that you'll probably be in court for five years sorting this out.

So whether or not that means that they're going to fight this tooth and nail for that long, I am not sure, but there's no easy resolution to the refunds issue, at least in the short term.

Do we at this point expect those to stand?

At this point, I think those tariffs, the new ones he announced, are more legally defensible than the ones that were struck down.

So he announced there's two sets of tariffs that he's talking about.

How is Fuyao applying competitive pressure?

The Fuyao people would say, "Well, it's just efficiencies and economies of scale." Their factory houses more than ten times the workers that the Vitro plant does.

They got three thousand people down there in Moraine.

They took over a big closed General Motors factory and just installed all of the state-of-the-art glass manufacturing and cutting equipment, right? And so they would say, "Look, we're just better at making glass than these other older plants, and that's why we're competitive." Now, that's maybe not the whole story from the standpoint of the government and from their competitors like Vitro, right? There are also accusations of unfair trade and labor practices, so there's this big federal investigation into alleged human trafficking and illegal immigration to feed workers into this plant.

The Fuyao plant was actually raided in July twenty twenty-four, um, by DHS, by the FBI and other agencies.

This is under the Biden administration, and they allege that the owners of this factory and others created a, an intricate web of affiliates that were all aimed at creating a pipeline for illegal immigration and illegal labor to come to this plant.

And then on top of that, you have concerns that, well, maybe this plant is perhaps getting subsidies from the Chinese government.

How generalizable is this really? I mean, is this a typical kind of dynamic where you have a local manufacturing setup and then a Chinese rival comes in? Like, can we see more of this coming?

Gavin, what do we know about this deal as it exists right now?

Broad strokes mostly, and not many details.

We're looking at a reduction of 10% in the tariffs that the US has applied to China.

So as a reminder, Trump put 20% tariffs on China in response to its role in the fentanyl trade.

We would see him reduce those tariffs by half, and what that would do is bring average US tariffs on China from around 55% down to 45%.

So we're not talking about a huge difference in the overall tariff rate, but there is some movement here, and importantly, it makes a difference with how competitive Chinese goods are compared to others in the region and other trading partners.

So a significant move there if it does pan out from the US side.

What does this mean for other topics on the table between the US and China, like rare earths and soybeans?

Gavin, what are some of the tariffs that the Trump administration is shifting on?

Yeah, so this is a subtle but important shift in the Trump administration's reciprocal tariffs.

These are the ones that he unveiled on Liberation Day back in April, then paused, then there were a bunch of negotiations.

He put them back in place in early August, right? And so what he's done in the last few weeks here is he has increased the exemptions or the carve-outs from these tariffs for a few dozen products.

They've also given indications that they're gonna do more in the future.

There was an executive order in September where Trump said, "Not only am I exempting more products from these tariffs, but I'm gonna lay out an entire list of hundreds of products that I'm going to say are available for exemptions if we make a trade deal with another country." They're putting the offer out there to other nations to say, "If you do a deal with us, we can carve out more of these tariffs as well."

So for businesses that have been trying to navigate these tariffs that have been changing, what does this mean for them?

It's still gonna be a lot of uncertainty here, right? In the first term tariffs, in the tariffs on China, there was an official exemptions process, so any business could apply to the US Trade Representative's office and say, "Hey, I get this component from China.

here.So was the administration right in that court filing? Like, does this decision make it less likely that countries will want to make a deal?

I do think a number of countries will still be eager to do a deal with the US, because maybe they will feel that they have a little more leverage in these negotiations now, and I think that they see that they may have a little bit more time as well.

All of these, um, court proceedings kind of throw into question the—the deadline that Trump had set to complete all of these trade negotiations.

That was actually on July 9th.

So if you're gonna do a deal with the US, you just got a little bit more breathing room and you got a little bit of leverage in these negotiations.

Maybe Trump can't drive as hard of a bargain as he would have otherwise.

So Gavin, where does this all leave Trump's signature economic policy of these sweeping tariffs?

Very much in limbo now, right? I think uncertainty has reigned for—for months on this tariff front.

How big of a break is this for automakers, especially when the broader 25% tariffs on imported parts and cars remains in effect?

Yeah, I think the impact is still a little bit uncertain.

The automakers I talked to are still digesting it.

But it's significant that we're not going to see, for instance, the 25% steel and aluminum tariffs, that they were going to be stacked on top of these 25% auto tariffs before this action today.

That was going to be really painful for a lot of automakers, not just for finished cars, but for the parts they're bringing in from other countries.

Then we'll also see a small rebate for these automakers on the tariffs they'll pay on a small amount of these parts coming in, so giving them a little bit of the breathing room to hopefully reconfigure their supply chains to have more US supply in their cars.

China though, as we saw in that clip we played, they're not, they're not backing away, they're not easing up.

They're certainly driving a very hard bargain, um, and they, you know, the Chinese have been steadfast in saying there are no significant trade conversations going on right now with the Trump Administration.

But this round of tariffs isn't rooted in that kind of classical economic thinking you talked about earlier. Tell us about the rationale the Trump administration is using to impose these tariffs.

So there's a few general motivations here. Generally speaking, Trump has said that first and foremost, it's about the f- illegal fentanyl trade that they say has killed tens of millions of American citizens. That's maybe an inflated measure, but killed a lot of American citizens, right? They say that this fentanyl and the precursor chemicals are produced in China, shipped over to the United States, and then manufactured in factories in Canada and Mexico and smuggled over the border, right? And so he has said his tool for getting them to stop this is to put tariffs on them until they make it stop. But this is sort of a non-trade issue that he is using trade tools against. That's one motivation. The second motivation is what he would call illegal migration through Mexico, um, mostly from Central and South America, from other nations as well, through Mexico. He has said he wants Mexico to stop that completely, and until they do, he's gonna put tariffs on it. So again, a non-trade issue that a trade remedy is being used for. And then there's a number of lingering trade disputes from this US-Mexico-Canada agreement that he signed, right?

This afternoon, a deal for Canada came through as well. After a call between Trump and Trudeau, Canada agreed to reinforce the border with new helicopters and technology, and Trudeau said nearly 10,000 frontline personnel will be working on protecting the border. Canada also said it will appoint a fentanyl czar. Trump agreed to pause the tariffs for 30 days. One of the things you've said is that Trump is using tariffs to handle non-trade related issues. What, like, in your reporting, what do people say that that reveals about his strategy?

Well, I think there's a few different ways to look at it here. This is tariffs for punitive measures, right? These are punitive, penalizing tariffs, things that are connected not to a trade irritant but to one of Trump's other bugaboos, right? Migration, fentanyl. So that's one thing, where you see these really bellicose tariff threats. But I think we should conceptually separate that from other tariffs that Trump has talked about. For instance, last week, he said, "We're gonna put tariffs on semiconductors. We're gonna do it on pharmaceuticals." Those are tariffs that are to remedy what are specific trade irritants for Trump. And then third, there's still going to be, we've heard, you know, we believe, still going to be a broad-based tariff of some sort that is mostly aimed not at rebalancing trade, but raising money for the US Treasury, raising money so that Trump can do tax cuts and pay for them with tariffs. That's, that is a strategy that we haven't really seen in over 100 years in the United States.