Firing Line

- A conservative critique of President Trump's first 100 days.

This week on "Firing Line."

- I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear... - You have to give President Trump very high marks, a straight A, I think, for promising and then delivering.

You'd really have to go back to 1933 and FDR to see anything quite like this.

- [Margaret] But historian Neil Ferguson also sees echoes of another American president.

- I, Richard Nixon... - In many ways, Donald Trump is Richard Nixon's revenge.

He has the same enemies, Harvard, "The New York Times," the bureaucracy.

- [Margaret] Sir Niall Ferguson is an economic historian who has taught at Harvard, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and is now a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

He warns that Trump may be at risk of overreaching.

- The President has to be more careful than he's being.

He has to remember that the constitution still exists and that he is not king and he is not emperor.

And if he makes as many mistakes as I believe he's made in the last 100 days, he runs the risk of suffering the fate of Richard Nixon.

- [Margaret] What does historian Sir Niall Ferguson say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Meadowlark Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation.

And by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Sir Niall Ferguson, welcome to "Firing Line."

- It's very good to be with you, Margaret.

- It's wonderful to see you again.

We've known each other for some time.

You're affiliated with the Hoover Institution, where I sit on the board of overseers.

You have written that no one should be shocked by what Trump has accomplished in his first 100 days, because he told us exactly what he was going to do.

And yet it strikes me, and I read your columns closely, that you are somewhat surprised, and perhaps disappointed, by Trump's alignment with Russia, and the shock of his trade wars internationally.

But isn't that what he told us he would do?

- Well, let's take a step back and remind ourselves of what happened in 2024.

I counted 37 videos on the Trump campaign website in which he spelt out in considerable detail to camera everything he was gonna do, from reciprocal tariffs down to picking a fight with university accreditation.

I mean, it was detailed stuff.

And so you have to give President Trump very high marks, a straight A, I think, for promising and then delivering.

Very, very rarely do candidates say in so much detail, "Here are all the things I'm gonna do," and then do them, and do most of them inside 100 days.

You'd really have to go back to 1933, and FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to see anything quite like this.

I don't think one would give him an A for execution in every single domain, but you have to acknowledge that this is one of those rare occasions when the candidate says what he's gonna do, and he, as H.L.

Mencken said of democracy, you know, "The people get what they want, hard and strong."

- How much of what he has accomplished in the first 100 days is really comparable to the New Deal?

I mean, what impact will the first 100 days have 10 months from now or 10 years from now?

- Well, a couple of differences immediately suggest themselves.

Unlike Roosevelt, Trump has wafer-thin majorities in the House and the Senate.

And so it's all being done by executive orders or other similar executive actions, whereas Roosevelt was passing laws.

The second big difference, Margaret, is that Roosevelt came in at the tail end of the worst depression in the nation's history.

And he comes in with a mandate to expand the federal government.

Trump has come in at the end of a boom that has surprised most economists by its duration, and his mandate is exactly the opposite, to shrink the federal government.

So it is different.

It's almost like the New Deal, but with the sign reversed.

Now I think what's interesting is that there was an option open to President Trump to do a little bit less and take less risk.

Let's imagine that he'd taken his mandate to be deal with illegal immigration, and make sure inflation doesn't go back up, and deal with the deficit, and deal with DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion.

Make that your project.

I mean, that's a lot for a new administration, what I've just told you there.

But he could have done that, and I think he would've been pretty much executing what the voters voted for, 'cause the voters really voted for anti-illegal immigration.

They really voted for let's not have inflation.

They were mad at Biden and Harris for inflation.

People were pretty disillusioned with DEI, and some people at least were worried about the deficit.

So he could have had that program.

But he's Donald Trump, and he's also Donald Trump 2.0, vindicated by events.

He survives assassination in Pennsylvania.

- Criminal trials.

- He then wins bigger than everybody had, than the pollsters predict.

And there's a kind of hubris that was not there eight years ago.

So Trump says, "No, no, no, I'm not content with closing the border."

Which by the way, they do super quickly.

I mean, there's been a drastic decline in the number of people.

- Which is a real achievement in the first 100 days.

- Yeah.

And so you ask, "What's gonna endure?"

What's striking to me is how quickly that mass influx of population across the southern border has stopped.

So he could have focused on that.

He could have focused on trying to deal with the deficit, which he's inherited at more than 6% of GDP, but instead with a sense that, "There's no stopping me now," Trump decided that he would go straight to tariffs, not wait, but use, quite unexpectedly, an argument about an emergency, a national emergency, to impose the biggest tariff hike of our lifetime.

And this he did not need to do.

And I think it's the biggest risk he's taken, because it jeopardizes some of the other things, in particular it runs the risk of igniting inflation.

- You have written that, "Trump is crushing his to-do list.

The question for the rest of us is whether or not he will crush the economy, too."

And you called the implementation of the tariffs, "One of the great fiascos in the history of modern economic policy," and wrote that, "On fiscal policy, to put it bluntly, the first hundred days have been a fail."

- [Niall] Yeah.

- Proponents of the president's tariff strategy argue that there will be a little bit of pain, at least in the beginning.

But the ultimate goal of having an industrial policy that will return manufacturing and rebuild a working class that is robust in this country, is worth it.

Why is this tariff policy not going to return the manufacturing base to the country in a way that brings you confidence?

- Well, there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that if you create enormous uncertainty about what it will cost to import things from just about anywhere.

Businesses are in a sense frozen in the headlights.

And so there's a kind of immediate shock that is going to take some time to filter all the way through to the average household, but it's on its way.

Part two, I'm very, very skeptical that the tariffs, as they've been implemented, will bring about large-scale investment in manufacturing capacity in this country.

Every major economy, as per capita GDP rises, moves out of manufacturing and into services.

There is no exception to this rule.

And trying to get us back to where we were in, I don't know, 1970 or 1950, the arrow of history does not go backwards.

It's very hard to turn the clock back in the way that I think the president imagines.

And even if you did have a huge expansion of manufacturing in the United States, I don't think you would create a great many jobs, 'cause modern manufacturing is done more by robots than by humans.

We're not about to go back to sewing our own running shoes.

That's just not the future.

So I think there's a certain confusion here.

What are tariffs for?

Are they a source of revenue?

Are they something that you use to bargain with other trading partners?

Are they something designed to make sure that your industries are protected from competition?

It's somehow all of these things and none of them.

And that confusion is going to cause a real slowdown in the US economy, if not a recession.

- The United States is in violation of what you call Ferguson's Law.

Ferguson is not you, it is Adam Ferguson, a figure in the Scottish Enlightenment.

No relation you say.

- No relation.

- But this is a calculation when a country's payments on their debt service exceeds their payments on defense spending.

And the U.S. just last year crossed this line.

You've acknowledged that, you know, this is a precursor for the decline of great powers.

You've explained how that has happened in the past with the European powers.

And the only way to truly tackle this problem is to tackle mandatory spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security programs.

- Ferguson's Law is a very binding law.

It's a very good predictor of the decline of great powers.

When you're spending more on interest payments than on defense, as we are, it's a problem.

Now the problem gets worse if you say, but we're gonna ring-fence the entitlement programs, which President Trump has done consistently.

He has always said Social Security, sacrosanct, Medicare, sacrosanct.

Republicans are talking about doing stuff to Medicaid, so that is on the table.

But the big ones, the big entitlement programs, are not, and I've been writing about this for more than 20 years, Margaret, and it's got steadily worse every year.

And now we're pretty close to the crunch point.

So this is a very, very grave situation.

And I worry that the tariffs have become a distraction from this core fiscal problem.

And worse than that, they're gonna make the deficit larger.

So this is a big risk for the president to take with his entire program.

If we don't have the growth, then these debt numbers can get ugly fast.

It's the nasty fiscal arithmetic that gets you.

- Moving internationally abroad, President Trump had famously promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one.

There is no peace deal in sight.

And you have pointed out that it is much harder to end a war than it is to start one.

Trump has proposed plans that would make major concessions to Putin, including recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea and denying Ukraine's future in NATO.

In a recent panel I heard you say, "We seem to be caving to Putin."

Are we getting played by Putin?

- I certainly think it was predictable that President Putin would run rings around Steve Witkoff.

I'm sure Steve Witkoff is a nice guy and a good businessman.

- [Margaret] A competent real estate investor in New York City.

- But he ain't no Henry Kissinger.

And the analogy I would draw would be with the negotiations between the first little pig and the big bad wolf.

Putin has simply continued to wage the war while engaging in talks of the form, "Here are our demands, let us know when you meet them," putting all the onus in the first 100 days on the United States to force Ukraine to accept the permanent loss of Crimea, potentially to accept the loss of territory in the Donbass, to accept that membership of NATO was off the table.

The good news, Margaret, is that President Trump has realized he's being played.

He's understood what Putin is doing, which is the old communist tactic of fighting while talking.

You go into the negotiations, but you carry on fighting.

If anything, the violence has escalated in the Russian aggression against Ukraine since peace talks began.

- Is peace in sight?

- No.

No, I don't think it is, because the Russians can certainly keep this war going.

- The Chinese will keep funding them.

- They will keep supplying them with such hardware, dual-use equipment as they need.

The Russians have the men.

They can continue to find forces from the other side of the Urals.

- North Korea.

- The North Koreans have already made men available.

But the Ukrainians are not about to collapse, because they have become extremely adept at defending their lines, not least with drones, which the Ukrainians really have become the world leaders at using.

So the war drags on.

I don't think it's hopeless, but I don't think we should expect peace to be declared.

We might get a ceasefire, but I don't think that ceasefire would necessarily hold.

This will take time.

- One of Trump's inner circle in the West Wing was the former national security advisor, Mike Waltz, who has recently been removed from his post in the White House and nominated to be the UN ambassador in New York.

I mean, you wrote about personnel and you cited 1,300 political positions that had not yet been filled.

You write that the executive office building, Eisenhower executive office building, is a ghost town, and that the National Security Council is a shell.

And yet the individuals who are in the National Security Council are sort of at war with themselves between these sort of Reaganite, sort of Mike Waltz folks, and those who are more aligned with a, maybe not isolationist, but a restraint as a foreign policy approach.

- I think it's a little bit more complex than that.

Let me suggest, there are three different foreign policies competing for the president's backing right now.

One, which I think is the one that's losing most obviously, is that we have to take the access of authoritarians on everywhere approach, which, I think, was roughly Mike Watt's approach, and the people that he had on the NSC.

The idea is Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, it's all part of the one struggle against an axis of authoritarians led by China.

And we need to stand up in all of these places.

I think that view is in retreat.

There's a middle position which says, we gotta focus on China.

China's the big game, and everything else, we just need to wind that down, because we can't do all of these things.

But then the third position, which I think is the vice president's position, is, well, who even cares about Taiwan?

Let's focus on the Americas, our hemisphere.

Let's go full 19th century, Monroe Doctrine, and just, that'll be enough.

And this is what gives rise to the somewhat serious, somewhat frivolous, Canada's-going-to-be the-51st-state idea.

Or let's have Greenland.

Or what about the Panama Canal?

So there are three different foreign policies competing at the moment.

Because the administration's understaffed and in a permanent state of turmoil, it's not quite clear which one comes out on top.

But I think the first of those, which was quite closely identified with Mike Waltz, has to be on the way out.

So it now becomes China hawks versus America First.

- You have referred to the engagement with China right now as Cold War II.

When Trump returned to office, you expressed confidence that he could win a Cold War with China.

And more recently, you have been critical of his approach with Beijing.

What does the Trump administration need to do differently vis-a-vis China right now?

- Well, I started talking about Cold War II back in 2018.

I think it's- - It was very controversial at the time.

- It was certainly not consensus.

I think now it is, and there's a general recognition.

There are two superpowers.

They're ideologically at odds, they're in technological competition with one another, there's contested territory.

It looks increasingly familiar.

It looks like a Cold War.

And the People's Republic of China is playing the part that the Soviet Union played From the 1940s through to the 1980s.

How do you deal with that?

Particularly, how do you deal with the fact that, compared with the Soviets, the Chinese are good.

They have a bigger economy, they're better at the technology, because they have a dynamic private sector.

They're keeping up even at the cutting edge of AI.

That's a serious challenge.

And nowhere is it written in the laws of history America always wins Cold Wars.

So we can lose this Cold War.

And there are a number of ways that we could lose it.

And this needs to be much more the focus of President Trump's foreign policy.

We don't really have the option of saying, "You know what?

You can have Taiwan.

We're just gonna focus on the Panama Canal."

Because what's in Taiwan?

That's right, the source of the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world is TSMC.

All Nvidia's chips are made there.

They are the key to the AI race that is going on right now.

So the idea that one can just somehow retreat into the Western Hemisphere and not worry, that's not realistic.

China is pursuing a Cold War strategy, whether we like it or not, and really has been since Xi Jinping came to power.

So the United States has to recognize its vulnerability.

We have lost deterrence.

This is the legacy of the Biden-Harris administration, failures of deterrence pretty much year after year.

- There is failures of deterrence in the Obama administration as well when the Russians annexed Crimea.

- It goes back to Obama.

It goes back to 2014, 2013, that period when I think a course was set that encouraged not only Xi Jinping but also Vladimir Putin to think that they could be assertive and we would not stand up.

The big risk here, Margaret, is that coming soon, I think on this President's watch, is a showdown over Taiwan.

- You have suggested as soon as 2027, that that's what the Chinese Communist Party suggests will be the date in which they advance on Taiwan.

- Don't take it from me.

Bill Burns, when he was running the CIA, said on more than one occasion that Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready for war by 2027.

And everything that one hears coming out of Beijing suggests that that is the focal point of Xi Jinping's ambition.

So I do think a showdown is coming.

And what worries me is that I do not think that we have a particularly credible strategy to deter China from making the Taiwan move.

And this is, for me, the nightmare scenario for the Trump administration, that one day President Trump is confronted with a choice.

The Chinese, let's say they don't invade, they don't blockade, but they just send Coast Guard vessels.

And they say, "From now on, everything going in and out of Taiwan has to clear PRC customs," 'cause there's one China policy.

This is part of China.

Then what do we do?

Do we, A, start sinking those Chinese vessels, in which case we're on track for a very big battle?

Or do we fold?

Either way, it's a nasty outcome.

- What should we do to avoid that decision point?

- We have to rebuild our deterrence there as fast as we possibly can.

And that should be much more of a priority for the administration than the trade war.

Taiwan is hard for us to defend.

And President Trump is on the record as saying that he's not convinced it's worth it.

This is one of the most revealing parts of John Bolton's memoir.

When Trump compares Taiwan to a Sharpie, and China to the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.

The Chinese have read that book, I can guarantee it.

And their calculation must be, if ever there was a president who would do a deal that would give us Taiwan, it is Donald Trump.

So that's the moment of truth, I think, for the administration.

When we move from the realm of tariffs into the realm of pure geopolitics, is this going to be the administration that lets Taiwan go?

And if it is, I think that's the end of American primacy in the Indo-Pacific.

- You are working on a biography, the second volume of the biography on Henry Kissinger, who appeared on the original "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley, Jr. more than 20 times.

Here he is in 1999, defending his approach to dealing with the Soviet Union in Cold War I.

Take a look.

- Americans, including American conservatives, tend to think in foreign policy more in absolute terms, as an confrontation with between good and evil.

And therefore, the appearance of accommodation with the Soviet Union have made them restless.

- In Cold War II, is a similar mindset required?

- I think one of the lessons of Kissinger's time in office was that when things are going badly, as they certainly were in the early 1970s, detente is not a bad strategy.

And I think this may be the time for detente with China, when we are not really in a good position for a confrontation, when we're spread quite thin.

We've got concerns in Eastern Europe, we've got concerns in the Middle East.

We've got a kind of non-credible commitment to Taiwan.

My advice would be to President Trump, at all costs, avoid a showdown over Taiwan.

and you don't want a Cuban Missile Crisis to happen with Taiwan as the island, and you in the role of Nikita Khrushchev.

So I think this is a moment for detente when some of the arguments that Kissinger made are relevant again.

And I think it's one of the things that's right about the Trump administration, that despite all the bluff about Canada and Greenland, in truth, this administration knows the limits of American power.

It understands that we can't fight everybody all at once.

But there is a strategic option open to Xi Jinping, to throw down a gauntlet over Taiwan, to change this from a debate about trade into one about geopolitics.

And I worry that we're not ready for that.

I worry that we could find ourselves faced with an impossible choice, either a major war with China, which I don't think President Trump wants, or ceding Taiwan to Beijing with all that that implies.

Everything must be focused in US foreign policy today to avoiding being faced with that dilemma.

- Let me ask you about cryptocurrency.

President Trump debuted his own crypto meme coin at the launch of this administration, and the Trump family and its partners have now collected more than $320 million, it's reported, from the Trump meme coin.

This has ignited a firestorm on Capitol Hill.

Critics say potentially the president is using his office in a way that could become a conduit for bribery, an opportunity for foreign actors to influence American foreign policy, corporate interests.

Should the United States be a country where the President has the opportunity to enrich himself by the position that he has been entrusted with by the public?

- No.

And I think everybody who's in favor of financial and monetary innovation, who wants to see a payment system that is native to the internet, is deeply disappointed by what has happened this year.

Because it felt as if this administration understood decentralized finance, was sympathetic to innovation, in a way that the Biden administration was not.

It really discredits the enterprise to have what amount of scams emanating from the White House.

And by the way, if the Republicans lose the House, there will be another impeachment, and things like this provide the material for that next impeachment.

So it doesn't even make sense from the vantage point of the President's own interests.

- But I don't know that impeachment is a deterrent for this president.

- Well, you know, the thing about the third time is often it's lucky.

- Are you saying that if President Trump is impeached a third time, he might actually be convicted by a Senate?

- I have said Margaret, and I'll say it again, that in many ways Donald Trump is Richard Nixon's revenge.

He has the same enemies, Harvard, "The New York Times," the bureaucracy.

And what I've learned from studying the Nixon presidency is that if you make too many enemies and then the economy rolls over, and your polling numbers plunge, it's surprising how quickly you lose your friends in the Senate.

The President has to be more careful than he's being.

He has to remember that the Constitution still exists, and that he is not king, and he is not emperor.

And if he makes as many mistakes as I believe he's made with the economy in the last 100 days, he runs the risk of defeat in the midterms, he runs the risk of a major economic problem, and he runs the risk of suffering, ironically, the fate of Richard Nixon.

- Sir Niall Ferguson, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you, Margaret.

(lively music) - [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Meadowlark Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation.

And by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. (lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music) (gentle music) - [Narrator] You're watching PBS.