Ex-Biden Spox Mocks Trump on MSNBC for Continuously ‘Losing to Himself’ on Trade

Former senior Biden aide Andrew Bates mocked President Donald Trump over the trade deals he keeps promising, asking how Trump can succeed when he can’t stop “losing to himself” on the issue.

To paraphrase an adage, if you don’t like the news about tariffs in the Trump era, just wait a few minutes. Trump’s habit of whiplashing between issuing massive tariff threats and backing off of them even spawned the derisive Wall Street acronym TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — to describe a “TACO trade” strategy to outsmart Trump’s chaotic market-roiling tariff policies.

This past week alone, he’s already threatened to slap a 25 percent tariff on a pair of key trading partners — then extended a key deadline while threatening steep tariffs on other countries. All of this has taken place against the backdrop of hundreds of promised trade deals that have thus far largely failed to materialize.

Bates — currently a senior communications advisor for The Cost Coalition — was a guest on Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weeknight, during which co-host Alicia Memendez played a lengthy montage of Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promising a flood of trade deals over the past several months, and asked Bates to weigh in:

TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: (TRADE DEAL MONTAGE)

ALICIA MENENDEZ: Reminds me of when I was waiting for my husband to propose to me. Any day now.

SYMONE SANDERS TOWNSEND: Oh my goodness. You know on Sunday, unlike your husband, he said he never said any of these things. Scott Besson was like, I never, he was the one with Dana Bash and she asked about the 90 deals in 90 days. He’s like, we never said that.

Here’s my thing. I just, I’m trying to compose myself because this is just tier one gaslighting. Trade deals take more than a couple weeks to come together, an actual trade deal.

And what this administration has been promising in order to “bring back American manufacturing.”

I’m gonna use that quotes.

ALICIA MENENDEZ: Yes, because the language from Leavitt is good. Like they understand the framework. This is about workers. This is the middle class. This is bringing manufacturing. It sounds great. The problem is it is harder to do than they have led the American people.

SYMONE SANDERS TOWNSEND: And that’s not how you bring back American manufacturing.

ANDREW BATES: And it’s pulverizing American manufacturing. And in fact, polling keeps showing that majorities of manufacturing workers are against these. And it makes sense because there have been layoffs at auto plants already, including in Indiana and Pennsylvania.

But to your point, he keeps losing this negotiation with himself. I don’t know how the hell he’s gonna beat China when he keeps losing to himself!

And speaking of manufacturing, this “Big Beautiful Bill,” in order to provide tax giveaways to the rich, they’re not only using the revenue from these tax hikes in the form of tariffs on the middle class to pay off billionaires and rich special interests, but they are sending new manufacturing jobs that the Inflation Reduction Act created, especially in Republican districts, back to China.

And I don’t know how that squares with America First.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Weeknight.