Political scientist detests Trump’s tariff strategy: ‘This is insider trading masquerading as policy’

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick revealed how President Donald Trump’s tariff strategy opened up many new opportunities to renegotiate with foreign countries over trade deals and that the U.S. is now “getting the respect we deserve now.”

Many pundits and experts disagreed with Lutnick’s claims, including political scientist Dr. Jason Johnson, an associate professor of politics and journalism at Morgan State.

“This is terrible. This is insider trading masquerading as global economic policy from this regime because I barely want to call them an administration,” Johnson said on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “If you want to go to war, you pick a target, and then you go after that target, and you engage, and you battle, and you find the best deal, and you sue for peace. What you don’t do is start a war with everybody in the building, then backtrack on half the tariffs.

“This is not a good strategy. It will not accomplish the things that Trump said it would accomplish,” Johnson continued. “It doesn’t get us better deals long term, it doesn’t bring jobs back to the U.S., and in the short term, it could be very, very expensive, especially when it comes to the services, products and things like that that Americans want to buy in the summer.”

Finding positives among Trump’s plans

Johnson did identify some silver linings in the Trump administration’s aggressive strategy.

“I can say, in the long-term economic view, what Trump is doing right now is terrible, but many of these trade agreements did need to be readjusted. They just don’t need to be readjusted this way,” Johnson said. “What Trump is doing now could potentially get some of these deals to be renegotiated. Will they offset the bad deals? No. But the only positive I can see is that some of these trade relations were based on policies from 15, 20, sometimes 30 years ago. They needed to be updated and they haven’t been updated.

“The problem is, Trump isn’t doing it because he really wanted to update these deals long term,” Johnson added. “He’s doing it because he wanted to crash the stock market so his billionaire buddies could buy back stock and make money at our expense.”

Listen to the full conversation here:

Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.