Days after the president’s announcement of tariffs kicked off stock market chaos, Trump administration officials faced a barrage of adversarial interviews on Sunday morning talk shows.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins were grilled across networks, at times looking as uncomfortable as any American with eyes on their 401K.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker wondered if the Trump administration had put any forethought into their global raft of tariffs. Noting that the stock market had lost an astonishing $6 trillion in value over the course of the last week, Welker cornered Bessent.
“The markets lost more than $6 trillion in value. Was this disruption always part of the plan, Mr. Secretary?” she asked.
Bessent responded that “markets are organic animals” and accused Welker of pushing a “false narrative” in spite of the actual losses. He defended Trump’s decision, saying the United States unequal footing in trade deals needed to be corrected in spite of pain in the market.
“This has been years in the making,” he said. “This is a national security issue. President Trump has decided we cannot be at risk like that.”
Over on CNN, “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper accused the Trump administration of acting like a bunch of Pollyannas.
“There seems to be a lack of acknowledgment of the real pain and panic people are feeling right now,” he told Rollins. “There seems to be a disconnect between what you’re saying and the reaction of the world.”
The agriculture secretary, for her part, did not deny the reality of the stock market. Unlike Bessent, she said the administration knew that “uncertainty” would follow the tariff announcement.
“We knew there would be uncertainty,” she said. “The markets are adjusting.”
Tapper and CBS’ “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan both pinned their guests on the much-discussed tariffs on uninhabited islands. Rollins waved it off with a “whatever,” but Lutnick pushed back. Brennan asked the commerce secretary if the tariff list was “made with AI, ” prompting Lutnick to envision a scenario where corporations route their trade through the Southern Ocean to avoid duties.
“Because the idea — what happens is if you leave anything off the list, the countries that tried to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” Lutnick said. “And so the president knows that. He’s tired of it, and he’s going to fix that.”
