Late-night hosts sift through the US economic crisis posed by Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers bemoaned a new economic reality on Thursday after Trump implemented sweeping tariffs on nearly all countries, “raising prices for American consumers, escalating a pointless trade war and plunging the economy into a self-inflected meltdown. Let me check my 401k – oh no.”
And the “early response is worse than the worst-case scenario”, said the Late Night host, as the Dow plunged more than 1,600 points on the day after Trump implemented the tariffs.
Meyers recapped how we got here: Trump promised to lower grocery prices during the campaign, but also to tax imports from other countries, setting up an impossible scenario. “Tariffs raise prices,” Meyers explained. “You can’t impose tariffs and lower prices at the same time. You can argue that targeted tariffs are worth it for some other policy goal, but you can’t argue that they magically bring prices down.”
“There was an irreconcilable contradiction between Trump’s two big campaign promises, imposing tariffs and bringing down costs,” he continued. “And now we know which one of those promises was real and which one was bullshit. Spoiler alert: the bad one was real and the good one was bullshit.”
“What are we getting in return for all this economic pain?” Meyers wondered. “In some special cases like steel or aluminum, you could argue that it makes sense to tariff imports from other countries in order to protect domestic American production. But in many cases, we import stuff from other countries because we don’t grow much of it here,” such as coffee or chocolate.
“It’s madness, it’s irrational, it’s mafia-style governance designed to bully the world into submission,” he said. “It’s a self-inflected economic crisis and it’s worse than the worst-case scenario most experts feared.”
“Trump is just picking a fight with the rest of the world. That’s all he’s doing,” he concluded. “So in that sense, we really are producing more beef.”
Stephen Colbert
“Everybody feeling liberated?” asked Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “Because … yeah. Today was the first day of trading on Wall Street since Trump slathered our economy in honey and staked it down next to a fire ant hill.” And the Dow Jones nosedived 1,679.39 points, joining the S&P 500 and Nasdaq in having their biggest drop since 2020.
“So, worst day for our economy since Covid,” Colbert summarized. “Just a little reminder: this time, he’s the disease.
“One bit of good news coming out of all this: it’s all pretty solid proof that there is no deep state,” he added. “Because if there was, they would’ve stopped this shit. But if they do exist, I just want to say to the cabal of financial and governmental elites who pull all the strings behind the scenes: maybe put a pause on your 5G chip JFK Jr adrenochrome chemtrail orgy and jump in here, ‘cause we’re fucking dying.”
Americans will immediately feel sticker shock on imported products, such as coffee and parmesan cheese. “So that’s it – over a century of economic policy dumped in a ditch for no coherent reason,” Colbert lamented. “And what’s the president doing? He’s jetting off to Florida to watch golf.”
And also attempting to vaguely reassure the American people. “I think it’s going very well,” Trump said on Thursday. “The markets are gonna boom. The stock is gonna boom. The country is gonna boom.”
“Yes, boom, the traditional sound for when everything stays intact,” Colbert deadpanned. “And he’s right. Today the market fall down go boom.”
The Daily Show
Trump's tariff "operation" has left the stock market bleeding out on the table pic.twitter.com/jKHezblk1s
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 4, 2025
And on The Daily Show, Michael Kosta examined how the US market lost $2.5tn in value in a day. “$2.5tn vaporized,” he joked. “Your kids’ college? Disintegrated. Your 401k given the death penalty. Your pension waterboarded at Guantánamo. Those stocks your nana gave you 20 years ago accidentally stepped on a landmine while vacationing in Vietnam.
“Economists say we could be on the verge of a recession, so things are looking scary right now,” he said. “But don’t worry – the only thing the president is better at than negotiating is speaking soothing words of comfort in times of need.”
Specifically, Trump posted on Truth Social: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE.”
“Boy, I feel so much better now,” Kosta deadpanned. “Always reassuring when the surgeon comes out screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘the patient is FINE!’
“Also, the patient is going to be … bigger? Was the surgery a penis enhancement?” Kosta joked.
Nevertheless, Trump called the tariffs “reciprocal” meaning: “They do it to us so we do it to them. Very simple.”
“Yeah, it’s very simple, in that it is simply not true,” said Kosta. “The reality is that the numbers on his board are not the tariffs other countries are charging us. They actually represent the trade deficit between the US and those countries, meaning we buy more stuff from them than they buy from us.”
It means, he added, that “we’re basically punishing other countries from selling us stuff that we want.”
