# The Pain in Spain is Mainly in Trump's Brain

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trump-s-brain
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trump-s-brain.md
Podcast: [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924)
Published: 2026-07-08T19:49:31+00:00
Episode link: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trumps
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/206170167/ddebe6d59c0269164887c96e31f79ee2.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trump-s-brain
Duration seconds: 177

## Resource

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . Transcript Yesterday, Donald Trump ordered Scott Bessent, the Secretary of theTreasury, to cut off all trade with Spain. Bessent said “Yes, sir.” Trump also said that this is because the Spaniards had stolen his strawberries. Okay, I made up that second part, but he did in fact order Bessent to cut off all trade. This is not going to happen. Presidents have a lot of discretionary authority on tariffs and trade, more than they should, but you do not have the right as president to impose tariffs on a country just because you don’t like their defense spending or you think that they haven’t been nice enough to you. So this would not fly even in the Trump administration. Even with a supine congress and a permissive Supreme Court this is not going to happen. Also Spain is part of the European Union. So this is like Europe declaring “we’re cutting off all trade with Florida”: they can’t do that. And also, there’s a lot of U.S. business with Spain. In fact, Spain is one of those countries with which we run a trade surplus. So U.S. business would be howling. So this is all a non-event, this is is not something that is real. Except that the President of the United States did say this. It was completely crazy, and that’s the story that we should be taking from this. It’s not really at this point about economics. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about Trump Administration policies, let alone ideology. What we have is President Sundowner. I mean, this this is completely insane stuff. In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are them…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trump-s-brain/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/the-pain-in-spain-is-mainly-in-trump-s-brain.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.