On today’s show: Daniel Flatley of Bloomberg News explains Trump’s tariff policies and some of the economic pressures around them. The Guardian examines why the Department of Education is investigating allegations of antisemitism on college campuses. CNN’s Deidre McPhillips looks at what happened the last time the U.S. faced a significant measles outbreak — and the valuable lessons learned from the public-health response. Plus, the House passed a stopgap funding measure to avert a government shutdown, Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire proposal, and the NTSB released its preliminary report on the D.C. plane crash. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What are the main topics discussed in this episode?
Good morning. It's Wednesday, March 12th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, the Trump administration threatens big funding cuts for higher education, lessons learned from the last major measles outbreak, and a possible beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine.
But first, widespread tariffs from the Trump administration on foreign steel and aluminum are expected to take effect today, which would impact all countries the U.S. imports these resources from. Both steel and aluminum will be tariffed at 25 percent.
And for one of those countries, Canada, Trump initially planned to double the tariff rate in response to a recent surcharge on electricity announced by Ontario. But he withdrew that threat after Ontario rolled back their tax. Trump's tariff strategy has been a roller coaster so far, with threats and reversals. The stock market has been on a similar volatile ride.
And it's left many wondering what exactly the president is trying to achieve with these tariffs. So we called up Dan Flatley, who covers national security and economics for Bloomberg News, for more insight into Trump's goals.
Essentially, what Trump is trying to do here is reorder international trade and try to revitalize American manufacturing. At the same time, he's also trying to raise revenue to extend his tax cuts from 2017 that were enacted in his first term.
But Flatley told us it's difficult to know if the threats, delays, and reversals are part of Trump's strategy and an indicator that it's working as intended because he's getting some concessions from foreign leaders, or if these walkbacks signal that his plans are flawed.
Of course, that is all sort of this grand experiment that's happening in real time. And so there is a school of thought that all of these moves on tariffs may be ultimately, you know, him trying to get some sort of grand bargain with Canada and Mexico and with China to basically bring in more revenue to the United States, achieve what he calls a more even playing field for U.S.
workers, and to resource U.S. manufacturing.
In Trump's first term, he did not issue tariffs as widely as he has in this term. But those tariffs didn't result in the promised increase in American factory jobs or heightened inflation that those for and against the tariffs had forecasted. This time, the president has said he believes being more aggressive with tariffs could lead to bigger economic impact.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of Trump's new tariffs?
Some of the most impactful campaigning involved gaining trust in the Orthodox community and understanding what kinds of conversations were happening around vaccines.
One thing that was happening in the communities was that there was a lot of misinformation about measles and also the vaccination. A lot of the work that was happening on the ground was to help parents understand that the measles vaccine is safe and also that measles isn't as benign as they were led to believe.
McPhillips says health officials came up with a highly individual approach and went door-to-door to answer questions.
There was a lot of involvement from trusted messengers in the community. A nurse association of Orthodox Jewish nurses were involved in creating a pamphlet that they hung on every person's door in the neighborhood that helped explain that the vaccine was safe and what it did to help protect kids.
The city ended up administering 200,000 doses of the measles vaccine in New York City and another 30,000 in Rockland County. A retrospective study said those efforts averted a crisis that could have been 10 times worse, with as many as 80,000 infected. McPhillips says even though New York was somewhat of a success story, how to prevent measles has been known for a long time.
This is not a lesson that we learned in 2019. We've known for a while, but the vaccine really works. When measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000, the average number of cases since then has only been about 180 cases per year. Before that, it was about 5,000. And we have all of this look back analysis at how much getting kids vaccinated really did help prevent the spread in New York.
Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. In Congress, House Republicans passed a bill to avert a government shutdown scheduled to start on Friday. The bill now goes to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. The stopgap measure passed along a party-line vote with the exception of one Democrat voting yes and one Republican voting no.
The measure funds the government through the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30th, and largely keeps spending flat with a slight increase in defense spending. Senate Democrats, the New York Times notes, are in a bit of a bind. Either pass the bill and give President Trump and Elon Musk wider leeway to continue slashing the federal workforce and programs, or be blamed for a shutdown.
In international news, the United States lifted its pause on military and intelligence aid to Ukraine on Tuesday as Kyiv agreed to a proposed ceasefire that could signal the beginning of the end of its three-year war with Russia. Here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio after negotiating the deal in an eight-hour session with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia.
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