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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Tuesday, April 8th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that was formulating a conspiracy theory that the Trump tariffs are tethered to a misogynistic fantasy in which women need to be pushed out of the workforce because of a crisis of masculinity. And then Fox News host Jesse Waters just said it. 

[clip of Jesse Waters] When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this. And if you’re out working, like building robots like Harold, you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers that–

[clip of unnamed Fox News Host] What do you do? 

[clip of Jesse Waters] –give you estrogen. 

[clip of unnamed Fox News Host] What do you do? 

[clip of Jesse Waters] Let me finish, judge. I’m finished. 

[clip of unnamed Fox News Host] You sit behind a screen. 

Jane Coaston: If the field of gender studies survives this administration, boy will there be lots of material to study. On today’s show, the Supreme Court weighs in on two immigration actions at the request of the Trump administration and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House for a second time during President Donald Trump’s second term. But let’s start with your wallet and 401k and your kids’ college funds. You know, your money. As you may be aware, the stock market is having a not very good time right now as a result of Trump’s tariffs on everyone and also some penguins. And while the stock market isn’t the economy, it sure doesn’t help the economy. Especially as policy appears to be determined by one guy who may have never been grocery shopping once in his life. Here’s CBS News. 

[clip of CBS News Host] Markets took a quick nosedive for a third day today as President Trump doubles down on his sweeping tariff agenda. The Dow slipped 3.1 percent when markets opened this morning. The S&P 500 also took a tumble, dropping 3.5 percent. 

Jane Coaston: And counter to the desperate hopes of the markets, economists, and a whole bunch of people, Donald Trump is not in fact looking to pause the tariffs. Here he is in the Oval Office during his meeting with Netanyahu Monday. 

[clip of unnamed journalist] Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for negotiations? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, we’re not looking at that. We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and they’re going to be fair deals. And in certain cases, they’re gonna be paying substantial tariffs. They’ll be fair deals. 

Jane Coaston: Now there are a few reliable signs that things are not going super awesome for Donald Trump. Yes, one of them is the stock market, which Donald Trump used to care about a whole lot. Another is when elected Republicans who love Donald Trump suddenly sound weirdly removed when asked about the president, like Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy on CNN Monday. 

[clip of CNN reporter] Do you think it’s Donald Trump’s economy now? 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] Oh, I think it is. There’s no question. Um. I think once he decided to to to add the tariffs, clearly, I mean, he will be held responsible as he should, whether it turns out good or it turns badly. 

Jane Coaston: But don’t worry. Texas Republican Representative Roger Williams has found the bright side of massive tariffs that will increase prices for everyday Americans. 

[clip of Representative Roger Williams] And people with used cars, their used cars are going to be worth a little bit more, and when it’s worth more, they have more down payment, they can have more equity, and they can make their payment less than it was. 

Jane Coaston: But you’re not, Texas Republican Representative Roger Williams. Your job is not to make excuses for the president of the United States. Your job is to provide for yourself and your family and maybe, on occasion, buy something. And Donald Trump and the Republican Party have decided to make that harder for reasons that seem to differ depending on which Trump advisor you hear from. So what about you? What should you be doing to keep your money safe and stay sane right now? I am not a personal finance expert. So I had to talk to Jessica Roy, who is. She’s the personal finance and utility columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Jessica, welcome to What a Day. 

Jessica Roy: Hi, thank you for having me. 

Jane Coaston: Now, obviously everyone’s financial situation is different, but people are also pretty freaked out at the moment because there’s reason to be. So to start, what’s your top line advice to people worried about their finances right now? 

Jessica Roy: Don’t panic and don’t touch anything. Don’t mess with your 401k. Don’t move stuff to cash. Just leave it alone. 

Jane Coaston: I love that. I love telling people not to panic, especially as a noted panicker. One of the big groups of people who are really stressed right now are those who are at or nearing retirement age or maybe just retired and whose savings are tied up in the stock market. I know you just said, don’t pull your money out. But why? Because I know that for me, the apparently Great Depression grandma who lives deep inside me is like, take the money, put it under your couch. That’s where it’s safe. 

Jessica Roy: That’s definitely true. And yeah, it’s a super scary time for people who are like, I don’t have decades for the market to recover from this. I think the best indicator of what’s gonna happen in the future is historic performance. And that’s true in two ways here. One, the market has always recovered. Sometimes it takes a little longer. If we look at the last big dip like this with COVID, it recovered really fast. Two, I would say, is Donald Trump’s historic attitude toward the market, which is that he has, even way before he got into politics, always judged a president’s performance by how well the market was doing. And the fact that it is not doing well under him right now, entirely because of decisions he is making, suggests, and nobody can say for sure what Donald Trump is going to do ever but strongly suggest he is going to find like a victory channel out of this to pivot he’s going to say look we showed the world how strong we are, unfurl the mission accomplished banner, tariffs undone he is gonna find some way to get the market back to where he was because really his priority has always been, how can we get the stock market to be doing great? 

Jane Coaston: That is a very optimistic view of what’s going to happen here. So even people who are about to retire, who have just retired, they should just sit tight?

Jessica Roy: I think especially right now while it’s all so new and so fresh and we don’t know what’s going to happen, if you sell off your stocks right now, that’s what’s called locking in your losses. You’re saying, I’m betting that the market’s never gonna recover you know within my lifetime, within while I need this money. I think, especially right with everything so crazy, my advice would be, yeah, just hang in there. Don’t do anything really rash with your money and especially if you’re living off that money right now. 

Jane Coaston: Now, let’s talk about buying things, a thing people enjoy doing and also have to do. Some of the goods facing the stiffest tariffs are cars and car parts. Cars are already very expensive. As someone who recently went looking for maybe buying a car and said, oh no, I can’t do this right now. And practically every expert out there says those prices are looking to go up now. If you’ve been looking, like me, or are thinking about buying a new car, should we just bite the bullet and get one now?

Jessica Roy: That’s a tough one because I think a lot of the tariff stuff is already built into car prices. You know, it’s not like automakers were waiting to see if Trump was going to keep doing tariffs and holding their prices low. You know a lot, of the time, companies know what’s going on. Companies are paying attention to the economic news and they are building in that uncertainty and that possibility into prices. And so even cars that have already landed, automakers are likely to up those prices and say, well, tariffs, what are you going to do? I think if you have to buy a new car, you have to buy new car. It is what it is. Buy one that’s sensible, you know, secondhand within your budget. I don’t think it’s a great time to be like, I’m going to buy my dream car that I’ve always been wanting to buy before that gets too much more expensive. Like I would really focus on, like you said, like great depression, grandma, sensible financial decisions right now, if you need to buy a car, you need to buy a car. If you don’t really super need to buy a car right now. I wouldn’t buy a car right now. 

Jane Coaston: There’s something about this moment, which is really giving March 2020, which is funny because we’re doing this to ourselves. There is no giant pandemic, but March 2020 people rushed out to panic buy a bunch of things as the reality of the pandemic really started to set in. We had so much hand sanitizer. I think we still have hand sanitizer actually. 

Jessica Roy: So many people gave it out, like I went to events in like 2022 and I was still getting little hand sanitizers and I still had those kicking around. 

Jane Coaston: I have hand sanitizer in my purse, I just realized that. But obviously, it’s not quite that bad, but I’ve heard at least one story of someone buying and freezing a year’s worth of coffee beans because they’re worried about tariffs, which iconic behavior on their part. Is it the worst idea to stock up on stuff like that right now? 

Jessica Roy: There is no such thing as having too much coffee on hand. I’ll say economic factors aside. You know, Mark Cuban was saying on Friday, he tweeted, he was like, this is a good time for people to be stocking up on essentials. I think so much of the economy is based on vibes and based on people’s feelings. And I think it’s a mistake to pretend that that’s not the case and that everybody is like only making statistics based decisions. I totally understand. I think if it makes you feel better to be like, I’m going to put in a big Costco order and get a big bag of rice and a big thing of tuna and have that in my closet and that’s going to help you sleep better at night. Yeah, do it. You know, if it’s especially non perishables, if it’s stuff you’re going to use, I think you would have to buy a lot of groceries and toilet paper before you are like realizing major cost savings in your budget, even if prices do go up another five or 10%. But I don’t think it’s like the worst idea in the world, just if it makes you sleep better at night. 

Jane Coaston: I think one of the hardest things about this moment, for everybody, is how unpredictable it all feels. I realize the stock market isn’t the economy, but even on Monday, an erroneous tweet suggesting the Trump administration might pause the tariff sent the market careening. Like, things seem really out of control. And at moments where things seem out of really control, how should people be thinking about their pocketbooks amid all of this uncertainty. 

Jessica Roy: Absolutely. You know, you brought up, it’s all feeling very like March of 2020. And I saw the New York Times had a great chart that was like, this was the biggest one day stock sell-off since like 9/11, since COVID. And there is a lot that’s uncertain right now. A lot of people are like, this time is different because these unpredictable people are in charge. This time the market’s not going to recover. If you think about 9/11 and COVID in particular, those were things we had so little control over, you know, we couldn’t know after 9/11 is global travel going to collapse permanently? Is no one ever going to fly a plane again? With COVID is the global economy going to fall apart? You know, are our hospitals going to collapse? Is every senator going to be hospitalized and nobody’s going to be in charge anymore? We couldn’t just like snap our fingers and undo those things. We really didn’t know what was going to happen. And with this one, one person could snap their fingers and undo all of it. and I think is likely to try to undo at least some of it in the pretty near future. And so it’s not financial advice so much as it’s life advice. Like as much as you can close the tab with your 401k balance, as much you can like take a step back and take a deep breath and try to focus on what’s in your control right now, I would really try to do that because I think things are so unpredictable and I think any big move you’re gonna be making right now based on stress or panic might not be the right move in the long term. 

Jane Coaston: Now, the word recession is getting thrown around a lot right now. I graduated from college in the Great Recession of like 2008. I would prefer we not do that again. I would also prefer lots of things to not happen, and yet here we are. Again, lots of uncertainty, but are there steps people should be taking now to prepare for a possible recession? 

Jessica Roy: Absolutely, I’m a recession grad too. I was class of 2009. I worked like a lot of crazy part-time recession jobs. I ghost blogged for one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, all kinds of wacky stuff back then. So yeah, I remember what it was like, and I don’t want to return to that in any way, shape or form. And so I think this is a really great time to get back to those fundamentals. If you don’t have like a full budget in place, I get that that’s a big task for a lot of people, but like tracking your expenses and knowing where your money is going. Building up your emergency fund. How long could you stay afloat if you got laid off? How long could you stay afloat if yeah, the government canceled the contract, and now the university you work for has had a hiring freeze and is letting everybody go. I think it’s really a time to look at that and try to stay calm, even though it’s very, very hard. I think this is a good time to take a hard look at what you spend money on and does what you’re spending money on align with your priorities. Classic budgeting advice. Do you need 17 streaming services? Do you need to have a gym membership to a super expensive place and a Peloton membership at home right now that you don’t ever use? Just really keep track take stock and make sure your spending is in line with your priorities and that your savings are in place. 

Jane Coaston: Jessica, thank you so much for being here. 

Jessica Roy: Thank you so for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Jessica Roy, personal finance and utility columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of President Donald Trump] You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip? I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate, and I think that it’s something that we would be involved in, but, you know, having a peace force like the United States there controlling and owning the Gaza strip would be a good thing. 

Jane Coaston: During Trump’s Oval Office visit with Netanyahu, they talked about Israel’s war in Gaza, Iran, and tariffs. The two spoke with reporters in the Oval office, which was, you guessed it, an absolutely batshit event. Trump referred to the Gaza Strip as, quote, “beachfront property” and again suggested the U.S. should control it. He also laid out a plan for what to do with Palestinians who already live there and it sounded a lot like ethnic cleansing. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] And if you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that, and you really have a freedom a freedom zone. You call it the freedom zone, a free zone, a zone where people aren’t going to be killed every day. That’s a hell of a place. 

Jane Coaston: I wonder why they’re being killed every day. Hmm, anyway. Trump said the US will begin direct engagement with Iran starting Saturday to negotiate a nuclear deal. The two countries have not had direct talks since 2015 when they negotiated another nuclear deal, which Trump almost immediately pulled out of. Trump threatened that if the negotiations don’t go well, quote, “Iran is going to be in great danger.” But Iranian officials disputed Trump’s characterization. They said the talks will be indirect using representatives from Oman as intermediaries. The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration two temporary wins Monday related to its hardball immigration policies. Late in the day, the justices lifted a lower court’s order that barred the White House from deporting alleged foreign gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. For now! The decision was unsigned, but the three liberal justices dissented. They were joined in part by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The court’s decision will let the administration resume using the wartime powers to swiftly deport some people while federal judges and lawyers have a high-minded debate of whether what the White House is doing is legal. But the justices also said the administration has to notify people of their pending deportation with, quote, “reasonable time to challenge it.” Also Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to pause the deadline for the Trump administration to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador. The temporary order comes after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block a lower court judge’s mandate to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia by Monday night. The administration admitted last month that Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador due to an administrative error. The social security website does not appear to be offering people much security these days. According to anonymous officials who spoke with the Washington Post, the site has crashed several times in recent weeks. Some outages have lasted almost a day. But just getting the site to load isn’t the only problem users say they’re having. Some say they can’t log into their accounts while others have reported some of their information is missing. Not something you want an agency that serves tens of millions of elderly and disabled Americans to be dealing with. Darcy Milburn, director of a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities, said SSA’s response has been, quote, “Oops.” The chaos comes just as the Social Security Administration is pushing beneficiaries to its website for things like identity verification. It also comes in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to slash tens of thousands of jobs across the federal government. The Post says around 7,000 jobs were cut from Social Security alone. Agency officials told the paper even more employees could be pushed out soon by DOGE, because 7,000 eliminated jobs is apparently not enough. The Post says the new cuts could include half of the technology division, you know, the ones responsible for the website, the one that’s been having technical problems. One worker told The Guardian the best way to describe the Social Security Administration right now is, quote, “complete utter chaos. The Trump administration fired one of the top U.S. military officials at NATO headquarters Monday adding to the already tumultuous relationship between the administration and many of its European allies. The ouster of Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the U. S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee, is the latest in some major military shake-ups since Trump took office. Firings have impacted folks across agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency last week, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of naval operations in February, and the commandant of the Coast Guard in January, among others. No explanation has been given for Chatfield’s firing. But she came under fire in conservative media a couple of years ago for comments she made in 2019 in which she used words like, quote, “diversity and dialog.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is eliminating diversity initiatives across the military, saying they’re divisive. Chatfield was a career helicopter pilot and the first female president of the Naval War College. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. As the stock market continues to crater, I am learning something very, very important about some of our biggest business leaders and economic minds. They are, without a doubt, some of the dumbest people alive. For reasons that, in my mind, range from wishful thinking to full-on delulu, many of the alleged smartest people in the world of finance thought that Donald Trump, who spent a ton of time during the presidential campaign and over 40 years waxing repsodic about tariffs. didn’t mean it. Maybe they had amazing memories of Trump’s first term and didn’t notice that most of the people involved in that administration were notably absent this time. Who knows? In any case, they bet their jobs, reputations, and online personas on the idea that a guy who says the same thing over and over and over again actually meant something else. I mean, let’s be real here. This is a person who tweeted in December 2018, quote, “I am a tariff man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in billions in tariffs. Make America rich again.” And this is what Trump said during his only debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last year. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] The tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. 

Jane Coaston: And here’s Trump talking in a very meandering way about cars made outside of the United States back in October. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I said, if I run this country, if I’m going to be president of this country I’m gonna put a 100, 200, 2,000% tariff. They’re not gonna sell one car into the United States. Because we’re not going to destroy our country by, so when, because I know you’re an anti-tariff guy, but I’m the exact opposite. 

Jane Coaston: And yet a bunch of his biggest supporters in the business world seem to have not heard any of this. Let’s take Bill Ackman to start. He’s the founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management and reportedly worth nearly $10 billion. You might remember that he spent a lot of 2024 writing very, very long tweets about anti-Semitism on college campuses. And over the last few days, he’s been tweeting nonstop about how the tariffs Trump is pushing could cause long lasting economic damage. On Sunday, he posted on Twitter that because of the tariffs, quote, “we are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down,” which is interesting to me. See, he endorsed Trump in July of last year, writing, quote. I assure you that I’ve made this decision carefully, rationally, and by relying on as much empirical data as possible. And here’s what he said in December on Fox news about Trump entering the White House. 

[clip of Bill Ackman] We’re stepping into, I would say, the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime, certainly. We just had a nice little ceremony and you know CEOs of a broad array of big American companies and I would everyone is incredibly enthusiastic. 

Jane Coaston: But now, Ackman is claiming on Twitter, quote, “I don’t think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.” Apparently, the quote, empirical data he studied to help him decide to vote for Trump just didn’t include any of the stuff Donald Trump said out loud with his mouth. Then there’s Jamie Dimon. He’s the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. On Monday, he said that because of tariffs, quote, “We are likely to see inflationary outcomes, not only on imported goods, but on domestic prices as input costs rise and demand increases on domestic products. Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth.” He sounds worried, which is interesting because here’s what Dimon said about tariffs back in January. 

[clip of Jamie Dimon] They’re an economic weapon, you know, depending on how you use it and why you use it, stuff like that. And, you, know, people argue, is it inflationary or non-inflationary? I would put in perspective, if it’s a little inflationary, but it’s good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it. 

Jane Coaston: And now he’s worried about the potential for a recession this year, as are Ackman and a host of other Wall Street-head honchos. Hmm. If only there had been a presidential candidate who had warned of the potential for a tariff-based policy to slow down growth, accelerate inflation, and cause a recession. 

[clip of Kamala Harris] Donald Trump’s plans for the economy would accelerate inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year. 

Jane Coaston: If only. 

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the wisdom of Donald Trump’s understanding of baseball, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about Trump’s description of the Los Angeles Dodgers World Series winning season, which I will now read, quote, Ahem. “When you ran out the healthy arms, you ran out of really healthy. They had great arms, but they ran out. It’s called sports, it’s called baseball in particular. And pitchers, I guess you could say, and really particular.” Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and what a time we’re living in. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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