who is left out wherever he is, somewhere out west. it s a good question. with cohn, it s a unique situation. this is a pattern. gary cohn was instrumental in designing the tax bill. after a past, there s nowhere to go but down. it s not that surprising that he left. shows the battle over tariffs at the white house right now. there s still a business cycle. we ll have a down soon. at some point there will be a down. they re called recoveries but they last seven years maybe. it will zy. there will be a time you need to reorganize the whole freshl economic program. it s going to happen probably before the election in 2020 for sure. who will be around to help him do it. it s already happy. the protectionists are an zendent. robert navarro pushing the tariffs. is that an economic policy. whether political or
it and i guess if you could p put if you could put the sort of bookends at, you know, basically a trade war that nobody is for, except him and the other protectionists in his inner circle, you got paul ryan, who never complained about devin nunes or the russia investigation or any of the president s ethical lapses, you know, all, you know, def con 4 over trade. sure. and you got everything that s the highest-level problem they have in policy. you ve got north korea which is exactly as you described. a skill the obama administration or the clinton administration or the bush administration would have a system for dealing with a north korea that the south says it s ready to engage in talks about their nukes. there are no systems. there s just a president on twitter. it s not a real white house. there s none. i think it was on your show, if not wuone of your colleagues la week, said there s never been anybody more unprepared to be president of the united states. that s what we re
president would like to see a reciprocal tax in place is that right? yes, yes, that s true but i think the important point that he was making is we are not in a level playing field and we are not protectionists. china and europe talk free-trade and they practice protectionism. they have far more protectionist s than we are. take cars. our tariff on automobiles is 2.5 %. europe s tariff 10%. china s tariff 25%. that s a funny kind of comparative advantage and free-trade, the theory is those countries that inherently make a better product and/or make it cheaper are the ones who will prevail in the export market. that gets very distorted when you have these lopsided tariffs. maria: you re rightist certainly not a level playing field. secretary before you go tell me where we are on nafta? i know you re just finishing
mr. trump announced. rob porter played a role as a gatekeeper of the oval office. one of the jobs there was to run point on trade policy. rob porter, along with gary cohn, using shorthand here called globalists when it comes to trade. they effectively had isolated some of the protectionists like peter navarro. with rob porter out of the building, peter navarro has worked his way back into the oval office. a promotion ag a week ago and yesterday signed off on one of his top priorities, which are the tariffs on aluminum and steel which caught a lot of white house officials, including gary cohn, by a lot of surprise. michael bender, thank you very much. i want to talk more about this with abby philip, also in that meeting with chief of staff john kelly and our chief political analyst gloria borger, who has an excellent piece about all of this chaos we ve seen inside the west wing this week. you were in this meeting, abby.
we trust your issue on this issue, and someone who has global views on free trade, we know what s unfair. we re not protectionists. we want a level playing field. it s for our employees to support our customers. when we get this right, it will be great for the united states of america. we have to get this done. and for your company and for your workers and for so much else, even the security of our own nation, you like the tariffs that we re talking about, you like the tariffs where they won t be dumping on our country. what they do is they dump massive amounts of product in our country, and it just kills, it destroys our companies and our jobs, and it s been happening for so many years. we are not the beneficiary. you feel tariffs are the answer? yes, sir. the trans shipments that go on, which you re well aware of. we call it the whack a mole game. it s time for whack-a-mole to go