Capital expense: the political cost of Donald Trump's tariffs

单集文稿 ...

• 00:06

  There really wasn't any way to spin it.

• 00:08

  The Republicans captured more than five dozen seats in the House.

• 00:12

  They whittled away the Democratic majority in the Senate, too.

• 00:16

  And they did it by campaigning against President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.

• 00:22

  Pursuing health care reform was a big risk.

• 00:24

  And while he was able to sign his signature legislation into law,

• 00:29

  He took what he called a shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections.

• 00:34

  Shellack, like the finish used on wood furniture.

• 00:37

  It left a lot of people scratching their heads.

• 00:40

  Shellacking had fallen out of favour.

• 00:42

  Google's Ngram viewer, which trawls Google Books for frequency of words,

• 00:46

  showed that the use of shellacking peaked in World War II.

• 00:51

  President Trump would take his own shellacking in the 2018 midterms.

• 00:56

  Today... his approval rating has fallen even farther and faster than in his first term.

• 01:02

  And his risky trade policy is a big reason for that.

• 01:08

  I'm John Priddow, and this is Checks and Balance from The Economist.

• 01:14

  Each week, we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

• 01:25

  Today.

• 01:27

  What's Donald Trump's appetite for political risk?

• 01:41

  When it comes to tariffs, he's threatened, imposed, suspended, retaliated, you name it.

• 全部文稿