AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Tomorrow at the White House, President Trump meets with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. El Salvador is home to the supermax prison for migrants deported from the U.S. It's to that prison that the government wrongly sent a Maryland man in a case that's now pitting the Justice Department against the courts. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So that man is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the judge in his case is not happy with the DOJ. What's the issue there?
LIASSON: The issue is that the judge ruled that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, and the administration has admitted he was deported because of a, quote, "administrative error." The judge says the government has to get him back or, quote, "facilitate his return," and the Supreme Court has backed up the judge.
So now it would seem to be a pretty simple matter of President Trump asking to bring this man back to the United States. But the Department of Justice has been resisting the judge's order, even though President Trump said on Friday, quote, "if the Supreme Court says, bring somebody back, I would do that," so we will see.
RASCOE: Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again tariffs on goods around the world are off again. Do you think the 90-day pause will last longer than 90 days?
LIASSON: Well, I don't know, but I would think it would take more than 90 days to negotiate individual or, as the administration says, bespoke trade deals with 75 different countries. But it seems that so far, the president has just been negotiating with himself, lots and lots of reversals. First, he put the tariffs on hold for 90 days after White House officials insisted there would be no pause. Then over the weekend, he exempted cell phones and other electronics from the reciprocal tariffs, after the U.S. trade representative said the president was clear that he would not give any exemptions.
So these concessions were all made without the U.S. getting anything specific in return from other countries. So the president's negotiating strategy is confusing a lot of people, and these flip-flops all happened after the president apparently got the yips, as he put it, after the stock market lost trillions of dollars of value and, more importantly, the bond market yields went up, which means that investors in the U.S. economy, people who finance U.S. debt by buying U.S. treasury bills, are demanding a higher interest rate or a higher yield because they've lost confidence in the safety of U.S. treasury bonds, in the safety of the U.S. economy. And I think the bond market might be the last guardrail in American politics because it's impervious to intimidation or spin, and the president seems to care about it a lot.
RASCOE: Well, so the bond market spooked the president. But what about public opinion?
LIASSON: Well, public opinion is pretty negative right now. The president's approval rating is in the low 40s. His base is still solid, though, but big majorities of people say that we are either already in a recession or will be in one within a year. Majorities of people are expecting higher inflation.
And most importantly, more people are beginning to say that Donald Trump is responsible for the current state of the economy, not Joe Biden. And when people are this pessimistic about the economy, it can be an economic factor in and of itself because pessimism can affect people's decisions to spend and to borrow. It makes a recession more likely.
RASCOE: Yeah. It can be a self-fulfilling problem.
LIASSON: Right. Right.
RASCOE: I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah. The House narrowly passed a budget framework that calls for extending tax cuts, while allowing for trillions of dollars in federal borrowing. Now lawmakers need to hash out the details. Do you think they'll be able to make all the numbers add up?
LIASSON: Well, that's a good question. Now, they could make the numbers add up if they used a budgetary sleight of hand and ruled that the tax cuts - 5 trillion-plus in tax cuts - don't actually add to the deficit. But if they don't do that, it's going to be very hard to make all these numbers add up without cutting Medicaid, which Republicans and the president have promised not to do.
But this is where the bond market comes back in because big deficits are one of the reasons that the bond market did what it did. In other words, when you pick fights with major trading partners who also finance your debt, it can be a big risk, especially when you have a big deficit, and it's getting bigger and bigger and you don't have a credible plan to rein it in. And the bond markets look at that. And that's why these budget negotiations on Capitol Hill are so important because they're going to send another signal to the bond markets about whether or not the United States can get its fiscal house in order. And right now, the debt is about 120% of GDP, and the bond market doesn't like that.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
LIASSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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