Fox News host Jesse Watters admitted he would be covering President Donald Trump’s reaction to the stock market collapse far differently if he was Joe Biden.
The anchor mocked himself on The Five on Monday after showing clips of Democrats criticizing Trump for playing golf while global markets lost trillions over the weekend.
Watters said Trump playing golf during the crisis ‘is not a middle finger to middle America – that’s a middle finger to all these foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down.’
He added: ‘But if Biden was golfing during a stock market like this, I’m sure I wouldn’t say a word.’
The Fox News panel agreed that Trump had given Democrats ammunition by spending time on the golf course amid the crisis, with the president also skipping the dignified transfer of four fallen soldiers to play golf on Friday.
As the tariff plan continues wreaking havoc on global markets, Watters said he was ‘not panicking’ about the fallout from the tariffs because he has decided not to look at his bank account.
‘I’m afraid,’ he added.
Watters took aim at the struggling US economy days after Trump introduced his ‘liberation day’ tariffs on Wednesday, which included a 10 percent ‘baseline’ levy hitting all US imports except goods from Mexico and Canada.
Fox News host Jesse Watters admitted he would be covering President Trump’s reaction to the stock market collapse far differently if he was Joe Biden
Trump was criticized for playing golf over the weekend as global markets were sent into a tailspin, which Watters said was a ‘middle finger to all these foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down’
Further tariffs on goods from 57 trading partners, including the European Union and China, are set to go into effect on Wednesday, sending global markets into a tailspin as industries react to the heavy tariffs.
It comes as world-renowned economist Brent Neiman revealed that he was left stunned when he realized that President Donald Trump used his research to leverage his lofty worldwide tariffs – and claimed the administration grossly overcalculated how much each country owes.
Neiman, a University of Chicago Economics Professor and Biden-era Treasury official, said he was confused when the president held up his sign showing the amount of tariffs he would impose on 60 countries last Wednesday.
‘My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime was: How on Earth did they calculate such huge rates?’ he wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times.
Neiman – who has prestigious degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and UPenn – had his question answered the next day, when he realized that the ordeal was ‘personal.’
‘The Office of the US Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of their numbers,’ he said.
‘But they got it wrong. Very wrong.’
Neiman explained that the Trump administration erroneously added a 25 percent rate to the formula Neiman and his colleagues had created – meaning that the tariff rates Trump imposed should all be four times less.
University of Chicago Economics Professor Brent Neiman was left stunned when he learned the Trump administration invoked his research to leverage his lofty worldwide tariffs
Nieman wrote that he was confused when the president held up his sign showing the amount of tariffs he would impose on 60 countries last Wednesday in what Trump dubbed Liberation Day
‘Where does 25 percent come from?’ Neiman asked, rhetorically. ‘Is it related to our work? I don’t know.’
‘Our findings suggest the calculated tariffs should be dramatically smaller – perhaps one-fourth as large.’
Neiman also hit out at the president for leveraging the ‘reciprocal tariffs’ in an effort to end trade deficits with the country’s major trading partners.
‘Is this a reasonable goal? It is not,’ he declared in his op-ed, arguing that trade balances are unavoidable and natural.
‘Americans spend more on clothing made in Sri Lanka than Sri Lankans spend on American pharmaceuticals and gas turbines. So what?’ he explained.
‘Not every country has similar natural resources or development levels,’ Neiman continued. ‘The deficit numbers don’t suggest, let alone prove, unfair competition.’
The economist also quoted Nobel laureate Robert Solow to explain his reasoning. Solow had once said, ‘I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me.’
‘Mr. Solow also surely ran a chronic surplus with his students and these imbalances reveal nothing about trade barriers in haircare or higher education, nor would they speak to his financial health.’
Neiman concluded by saying Trump’s tariffs ‘have enormous implications for workers, firms, consumers and stock markets around the globe’ and warned that they will ‘bring average tariff rates to their highest level in 100 years.
‘And despite being billed as a “do unto others” trade policy, they are not calculated in line with the Bible’s golden rule,’ the economist noted, saying foreign tariffs on American goods are nowhere near the levels Trump is pushing.
On Monday, European stocks suffered their worst one-day fall since the start of the Covid pandemic and Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index closed nearly 8 per cent lower than on Friday, while the broader Topix finished down 7.7 per cent.
Economists across the world now worry about a global economic downturn, with betting markets now showing a 62 per cent chance that the U.S. will plunge into a recession this year.
