Episode
Full Episode - Trump Goes Hat In Hand To China + Trump’s Policies Have Been Disastrous For The American Economy
- Podcast
- The Chuck ToddCast
- Published
- May 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 6198
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Chuck Todd opens by previewing Mark Zandi's sobering economic forecast from this episode and arrives at a simple, devastating conclusion: every single policy decision Trump has made has made the economy worse, tax refunds have already been gobbled up by inflation, and the math guarantees voters will feel even worse by the midterms — meaning Republicans on the ballot should be furious with the president, and those in swing districts have no choice but to start distancing themselves from his policies now. But the real heat in this episode comes from his analysis of Trump's trip to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, which he frames as the diplomatic equivalent of going hat in hand. He argues there's simply no winning a trade war with China, that scrapping the TPP and the JCPOA will go down as two of the most colossal strategic mistakes of the modern era, and that Trump's combined Iran and China policies have somehow managed to strengthen both adversaries simultaneously — to the point that his foreign policy decisions are starting to make him look, in Chuck’s words, like a Manchurian candidate. The world is now beginning to view the United States itself as the global boogeyman, and Trump's presidency is doing damage to America's long-term standing that will take a generation to repair. The brutal irony, he notes, is that Trump now needs more from China than China needs from America: China is the only country with real leverage over Iran, defenders of Taiwanese independence are quietly terrified that Trump could trade them away for an economic off-ramp, and Xi gets to sit across the table from a desperate American president whose negotiating position keeps eroding by the day. Then, Mark Zandi — chief economist at Moody's Analytics and one of th…