NYT’s Peter Goodman on Tariffs, Trade Wars and the New Crony Capitalism

This week, we take a close look at Trump's tariff-happy trade war and its impact on blue cities with New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman, the author of Davos Man and How the World Ran Out of Everything.

We explore the political tightrope blue city and Democratic Party leaders are walking on trade policy. Are they anti-tariffs or just anti-Trump’s tariffs? And we ask Peter: Is Trump dismantling the global neoliberal free trade regime as left-progressive activists have been demanding dating back at least to the Clinton Administration? And, if everyone agrees the status quo is failing American workers, how much of the blame for that falls on blue city Democrats?  

Goodman argues Trump’s erratic, on-again-off-again tariffs chest thumping is not rescuing the American working class. But it is killing confidence in the U.S. as a safe harbor for investment and ushering in an extreme form of crony capitalism. We also get into the possible real-world consequences of Trump’s tariffs for the non-investor class in blue cities, including the potential for a recession and shortages of essential goods. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  

 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.

But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 

The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? 

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