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Dow Tumbles After Weak Jobs Data, New Tariffs Announcement; New Data: 258K Fewer May & June Job Gains Than First Reported; Trump Unveils New Global Tariff Policy Takes Effect Next Week; Harris Breaks Down Decision To Forgo CA Governor Run. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired August 01, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[12:00:00]

MANU RAJU, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Today in "Inside Politics," economic goosebumps, a dismal jobs report giving a gut punch to the White House as it tries to sell the president's new sweeping tariffs. We'll bring you the latest from Wall Street as a double whammy shakes investor confidence.

Plus, will the real Democratic leader please stand up? Kamala Harris says she is not going back in the system, but doesn't name a single person leading her party. Is it a political strategy or a sign of growing Democratic chaos?

And it's one of the marquee matchups of the year, but President Trump still has not endorsed the Republican nominee for Virginia's next governor. Why not? Well, the candidate herself is my guest this hour.

I'm Manu Raju in for Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines in "Inside Politics."

We start with the breaking news. Markets are plunging. Right now, the Dow is down nearly 500 points on the heels of the President Trump's new sweeping tariffs and a disappointing jobs report. Just 73,000 jobs were added to the economy in July, and that is far fewer than expected, even though the economy did grow in the last quarter surpassing predictions.

Now it all comes as the White House is pushing to sell the President's latest tariff plan that he signed last night. And for the latest, CNN's Jeff Zeleny is live for us in the White House. So, Jeff, how much concern is there inside the White House right now about that very bad jobs report?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Manu, there is a significant concern. For a President who often gauges a success by the market, we can see what the market is doing today. The, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, telling CNN there, you know, this is less than ideal. Of course, that is obvious.

But, what the bigger concerns are as we talk to officials are the revisions from previous months. Last month, for example, revised down to only 14,000 jobs added to the economy. That is barely any. So that is the concern, the underlying, sort of sense of worry inside the economy, inside the hiring market. But a variety of officials were explaining it in a variety of ways this morning. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHEN MIRAN, CHAIR OF THE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS: We've been hearing a lot about uncertainty of the last few months, but that's all resolved now. We're creating trade deals left and right that have unlocked enormous new potential for the American economy.

LORI CHAVEZ-DEREMER, LABOR SECRETARY: While we could have seen better jobs numbers, right now we're seeing American workers are being put first.

JAMIESON GREER, U.S. TRADE REPRESENTATIVE: These are the highest level of tariffs that that we've seen, and this is a great deal for the country. And the President has also agreed that if a country has another plan where we could have some level of tariff, but also some investment and purchases and the market opening, that we can have some deals.

There are others available if the President wants them. You know? At some point, you know, his view is maybe a tariff is better than a deal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZELENY: So the timing of this latest economics report, certainly is less than ideal as well coming the day after, really hours after many of these new tariffs were announced. The question is, will this lead to changes in a policy, or will the President try and ride it out?

But one overriding issue is uncertainty. The uncertainty in the market, the uncertainty with companies as they decide to whether they can hire more employees and whether they should raise prices or not. So there's no question that this is a -- certainly one of the weakest job markets that this President has seen. But so far, we have not heard from the President directly on this aside from criticizing Jerome Powell for leaving interest rates where they are. Manu?

RAJU: All right. Jeff Zeleny, a very muddy economic picture right now. Jeff Zeleny live from the White House. Thank you.

And I'm joined here in the room by a terrific group of reporters. CNN's Phil Mattingly, Michelle Price of the Associated Press, CNN's Aaron Blake, and Jasmine Wright of NOTUS. Nice to see you all.

So you've been doing a ton of reporting about this latest -- the economy. You know, there's a really complex picture here. Right? You have -- it's showing real signs of resilience, the economy is, with the tariffs. But at the same time, cracks are clearly emerging, prompting some real concern about where things are headed.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: This is going to be probably unfortunate for this platform, but not having a direct line or a linear explanation for what's actually happening is OK.

Because if you think about where The U.S. economy is right now, particularly, given what the President has launched on the tariff front, we don't know. There's no historical precedent, certainly not in the better part of the last 100 years or so for what's actually happening in the economy.

[12:05:00]

Now I would say this jobs report, if you're somebody who wants a fed rate cut, like a person who resides in the Oval Office, may be helpful on that front. I think the concern right now is the market is starting to kind of wake up that, oh, wait, he was actually serious about the April 2 Liberation Day tariffs. And what they put in place last night officially that will be implemented on August 7 is basically that with a couple of revisions and tweaks here and there.

That's reality. The President wanted to overhaul the global system of commerce. He has done exactly that. And now people are going to have to figure out what it means in the wake of some softness in investments, some softness in consumer spending, and some real concerns about the labor market.

RAJU: And what are you hearing from inside the White House, you cover the White House, about what concerns there -- that exist and whether the President may change any of his policies on tariffs going forward.

MICHELLE PRICE, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, AP: I mean, the White House, so far, they're confident about this, but, you know, these trade deals they take sometimes up to two years to negotiate. So while they might have a framework for some of these, there's always room for, you know, if there's a foreign policy dispute or something else that the President is upset about, for some of these to be tweaked and or maybe significantly change. Like, we saw the Canadian deal, last night jumped up by 10 to 35 percent.

So I think there's still just chaos and uncertainty here for consumers, for businesses, and for these other countries that are just trying to negotiate.

RAJU: And it's the public messaging of all of this as well. This is what, the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, had said just a couple days ago when there was good news about the economy, when the GDP report from the last quarter showed about 3 percent growth, which surpassed expectations.

He said the Trump economy has officially arrived. Biden's quarter is behind us, and growth is already accelerating. OK. Fast forward to 08:51 a.m. this morning, about 20 minutes after that bad jobs report came out, here's Donald Trump on Truth Social. "Too little, too late, Jerome. Too late, Powell is a disaster. Drop the rate. The good news is that tariffs are bringing in billions of dollars of The United States." So it's a Trump economy, OK, but the scapegoat is Jay Powell.

AARON BLAKE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: It's a Trump economy when things are good, and it's not a Trump economy when things are bad. He's actually said that pretty transparently at one point. Look, I think that this was always a situation in which Trump was going to never back off his tariffs because Republicans in his party or Congress were going to do something about this.

This was always going to come down to economic factors and whether that ultimately scares the administration off or if the courts get involved, which we saw some action on this week. The Federal Appeals Court seemed pretty skeptic -- or seemed pretty skeptical that Trump was exercising his authorities in an appropriate way.

You know, it's obviously too early. We have a lot of muddy economic numbers right here. But this jobs report, you know, these -- the three months with the revisions that we saw from the last two months, this is the worst three month stretch that we've seen since 2010. So this is a significant slowdown. There's a question of whether this is because of the way the job market is kind of saturated right now.

But these are things that they're going to have to address. And so I think for the first time really, and it took a while, maybe longer than some economists thought, we're starting to see those cracks form. It'll be really interesting to see how the administration responds to that.

RAJU: And the question is how do Republicans respond? You know, remember, this is a party that has long opposed tariffs. This has been a free trade party until Donald Trump came in and just rewrote how the party views tariffs, how it views free trade, and the like. And, really, for the most part, Republicans are now very much falling in line.

There was a town hall that happened just yesterday in Wisconsin. Bryan Steil, the congressman there who is in a swing district, that's a district that Donald Trump carried by two points in 2026. He was asked about tariffs from the crowd, and he defended the President's approach.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My main concern is the tariffs that are coming up. I would like to know what dire economic circumstances put Trump in a position of throwing tariffs on over a 190 countries.

REP. BRYAN STEIL (R-WI): This really, at its core, needs to be an opportunity to make sure that other countries are treating the United States fairly. The United States --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: There's so much you hear from Republicans about you have to be patient, telling voters to be patient. The question is how much patience will voters give them.

JASMINE WRIGHT, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, NOTUS: Yeah. And I mean, I think it's interesting because I think Republicans in Congress have basically abdicated their role in the tariffs conversation right now. Basically, continuously saying when you've chased them down the hallways, when my colleagues have noticed have chased them down the hallways, that they want to give Trump space in a runway to effectuate these tariffs and see what happens.

I think now we are at least starting to see some of what may happen. I was talking to one outside adviser to Trump who he listens to on the economy, and I asked him about his reaction to the report. And he said three words, "bad report, yikes." This is not something, that the White House can necessarily talk down, at least this individual jobs report.

[12:10:00]

Yes. They're at muddy waters, but it's a far stretch from what we heard from them just on Wednesday when they were so excited. And I think it's really telling that we have not heard specifically from Donald Trump on this.

For the last five, six days that we have heard from the President, he has started every remarks that he has talking about how good the economy, talking about how America is the hottest country in the world, and yet we haven't heard from him about these job numbers, about these revisions.

And so, obviously, he's leaving the White House at 3:00 p.m. today. He's going to have to answer some questions about it, but it's a far departure. And Congress, I think, you're going to have -- you're going to have people asking them a lot of questions about, is it time for them to step in and do something? And I don't know if you're going to hear Republicans say yes.

RAJU: Yeah. I mean, no word from Trump. Yeah. When the GDP numbers came out this week, but for positive, I think within seconds he was out there posting about how great it was.

MATTINGLY: I mean, I think the word you hear from Trump has been his criticism of Jerome Powell, which by the way, he knows the job numbers. He gets the job numbers before they actually come out. And so when I saw, I think, at 06:30 a.m. when he was attacking Powell, I was like, oh, this may not be a great -- this may not be a great, employment report.

Look, I think one thing to keep in mind as everybody kind of watches this play out, humility is OK. We don't necessarily know how this is going to go. What we do know, and I can say this with some certainty based on conversations we've had, there's not going to be a dramatic pivot from the administration when it comes to the trade policy. Like, this is it.

And for all the tacos and turbulence and carve outs and threats and theater over the course of the last a 120-plus days during the Liberation Day tariffs pause, we're in it now. And this is reality going forward. And I think when you talk to officials, they believe that the freak out in the wake of April 2nd, which eventually led to markets being at all-time highs, the resiliency of the U.S. economy, Republicans continuing to stay in line, has only bolstered their view that this is the right path forward, and I think people need to kind of keep that in mind as they think through, what does this all mean going forward?

RAJU: I mean, that's the Trump believes that all the panic was -- it did -- has not borne out. He believes that he is -- you know? And he also seems -- you know, this whole Trump always chickens out taco thing.

PRICE: He did not like that.

RAJU: He did not like that so much. Yeah.

PRICE: And then this is the thing, his voters as well as Republicans, I mean, they have given him a lot of leeway understanding that there might be some disruption for a little bit, the people who support him. The other voters, voters in the middle, people who didn't support him, obviously, there's a lot of heartburn to say the least about this.

I think what we're going to have to look at is that double squeeze we get for people who even were in support of this idea. We've had three months now of manufacturing jobs contracting. That was a huge justification for these. And if you're not getting your manufacturing job back and your costs are going up, at what point do you start to say this isn't the economy I wanted?

RAJU: Yeah. And we talked about the politics of it. There was an interesting comment from Mike Rogers, who's the Michigan Senate Republican candidate endorsed by the Republican leadership. He was asked about this. He said, "the shoe is going to pinch every once in a while, and the good news about the White House is even when there's a case that comes up that doesn't seem fair or rational, we even call, and they're at least open to a conversation, which is great."

He is in a complicated position here because of Michigan, because of the auto tariffs, because of Canada, which they do a lot of trade with.

BLAKE: Yeah. And you're going to have to see how these Republican candidates especially speak out because they have a lot more at stake when it comes to these policies over the next 18 months. But if you look at the Republican Party base, and I was just looking at these numbers before I came up here, they are overwhelmingly believing that this is a long-term winner. It's like an 86 to 10 issue among Republicans.

Trump responds to what his base wants. He doesn't really care so much about the Independents. And as long as there is this belief in the Republican Party base that this is going to pan out over the long term, I think he's going to move forward with it.

RAJU: All right. We shall see, and we'll see Trump's -- as Phil Mattingly says, these tariffs are here to stay. Well, we'll see if that is indeed the case. Phil's usually always --

MATTINGLY: You're doubting me.

RAJU: Phil's usually always right, so I will never, never doubt Phil.

All right. Up next for us, Kamala Harris is answering questions for the first time since her election loss.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHEN COLBERT, HOST, THE LATE SHOW: Because that's what I'm hearing, like, you don't want to be part of the fight anymore.

KAMALA HARRIS (D), FORMER U.S. VICE President: No. Oh, absolutely not. I'm always going to be part of the fight.

COLBERT: OK.

HARRIS: That is not going to be --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: So what's the plan for the fight? We have the details next.

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[12:15:00]

RAJU: Nine months after losing the White House, former Vice President Kamala Harris is back in the spotlight. But what does she exactly plan to do now that she opted against running for California governor? Well, she went on Stephen Colbert show last night to explain.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARRIS: Why is it then when we think we want to improve a system or change it that we're always on the outside on bended knee or trying to break down the door? Shouldn't we also be inside the system? And that has been my career. And, recently, I made the decision that I just for now, I don't want to go back in the system. I think it's broken.

I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that, they're not as strong as they need to be, and I just don't want to -- for now, I don't want to go back in the system.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: All right. My terrific reporters are back. Now, Jasmine, you covered the Harris campaign last -- during this past cycle. What did you make of her response there? Because she says that she doesn't want to go back in the system. She calls it broken, but still wants to help fix the system.

[12:20:00]

WRIGHT: Yeah. I guess, my -- I have a lot of thoughts of this. I don't know if we have enough time, honestly.

RAJU: Come on let it all out.

WRIGHT: My initial thought is the system. Are people going to recognize what she means by that? I think consistently, she has this problem where she has this amorphous phrasing, when she's just trying to say something like, people aren't having access to X or Y or Z, and it makes it so difficult for people to understand what she's saying.

I mean, I think if you look back to her trajectory, she's been an elected official for 20 years who has fundamentally always believed that it was better to be inside in a position of power to affect change versus not. And now she's saying that she wants to do the opposite.

So it's fine, I think, that she wants to come as an outsider looking at what's going wrong in American democracy. But I think what people want are solutions, and she has not said a single one.

And consistently, people want her to be descriptive about what she says is wrong, and I don't think that that interview, she was able to do that. And it's a shame because she's had six months to figure it out.

RAJU: She hasn't said anything really for six months.

WRIGHT: She hasn't said anything for six months.

RAJU: What'd your take of that?

BLAKE: I'm really struck by -- I think it back to you know, we had Biden speaking last night. We've also had our President Barack Obama occasionally giving a speech. There was one that was, like, behind closed doors, but stuff about it leaked out afterwards.

And they're often making this very similar point about how the institutions are under attack, and we're in dark times right now. But we don't see, like, a very consistent message from Democrats on this. Maybe that's because they don't have somebody with kind of the heft and the constant presence in our daily lives to drive that message.

But it seems like something where they pop up every once in a while and say, hey, this situation's pretty bad, and then they kind of fade away. And it just doesn't seem like Democrats have been able to drive that message very well.

RAJU: You know, she was so guarded last night. I mean, I was a bit surprised because she had been gone. She's now not running for office at least at the moment, and she was not perhaps as maybe pretty forthcoming about some of the issues with the campaign than maybe I that I personally expected.

This is what Mark Cuban, who is, of course, was a Harris surrogate, said about this just a few weeks ago about the way Harris conducted herself during the campaign and what she's like behind closed doors.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK CUBAN, HARRIS 2024 SURROGATE: Kamala, when you sit down -- have you ever sat down and just spend one-on-one time with her?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have. I have.

CUBAN: Yeah. She'll start saying (BEEP), this da, da, da. She's a normal human being that's smart, that is -- you know, has some charisma to her, but they don't let any of that come out. You know? And I think that really held everything back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: And that's part of the issue that --

PRICE: Yeah.

RAJU: Critics, even supporters of hers.

PRICE: Right. And last night was not -- I mean, it stood out. She was especially robotic, but that is a long standing problem for her. She even looked physically uncomfortable. Like, her shoulders seemed up to be her neck most of that interview, which was just striking because, you know, she has nothing to lose right now. She could be energetic or much more candid than she was in that interview.

I just -- it seemed more like a lament for where things went last year, where the party is now. There was no message of leadership or moving forward or even clarity on what -- again, like Jasmine said, what is the system? Is she talking about the California gubernatorial system?

RAJU: Yeah.

PRICE: The election system.

WRIGHT: If you want to run for governor, then say, I don't want to run for governor. I want to survey my options. But I think that after how damaging 2024 was, not just for her personally, but for the Democratic Party, I think that what is required of her is to really be honest about what went wrong in her campaign, what went wrong with the party, and what she wants to do.

And, yes, maybe that happens on that listening tour that she's going to go on in December, but I think people want those answers from her now, and she had the time to create them.

MATTINGLY: I think I want to jump on this, because I think this is really important, because what Cuban says is right. And I think Jazz has more experience than any of us at this table

WRIGHT: She is fine.

MATTINGLY: -- but I've experienced it too. She's a different person off camera than you see in the interviews, which is fine. I don't -- it's tough to be on camera sometimes. It's tough when there's a 100 different people in your ear telling you how you're supposed to say something and why you're supposed to say something.

But it was particularly tough in this campaign where she was constantly pulled from 50 different directions and throughout had President Biden standing over her or beside her saying, hey, kid, don't -- remember our legacy. Right? Like, don't be disloyal to me. And I think that the opportunity that this moment has for her or creates for her is to just let it rip. Right?

Like, she doesn't need to be concerned about looking disloyal or about going against the administration's -- the last administration's agenda. She can say what she feels, what she thinks, and what she thought happened, during that race, which I think people would appreciate that.

Authenticity, obviously, wins in this moment.

RAJU: Yeah.

WRIGHT: I think there'd be a lot of appreciative for.

(CROSSTALK)

PRICE: -- questions about candor with President Biden and Vice President Harris to feel even more closed off than usual is giving voters the opposite of what they seem to wanted.

RAJU: What do we think that she's actually going to say in this book? Because we didn't really hear much about her view was of Joe Biden last night.

BLAKE: Yeah.

RAJU: Is she going to rip the band aid off? Tell us what really was going on with her real, honest assessment of the President's condition?

[12:25:00]

BLAKE: I mean, judging by what we saw last night, I would not be expecting that. Certainly, you would think that she would tease something like that or at least get people a little bit more interested in that.

You know, these campaign postmortems are very rarely about kind of ripping the band aid off and really getting at the problems that were underlying, especially for a politician like Kamala Harris who seems to have future aspirations.

That's not the 2026 California governor's race, but it could be a Presidential campaign down the line. The idea that she's going to burn bridges by lashing out at the Biden team or something like that or say Joe Biden hung on too long. You know? I think that's going to be very difficult for her to say.

RAJU: But she going to have to say something about it.

WRIGHT: She's going to have to say something, and I think that there are certainly people around her who are pushing her to be more expressive about what she can say or what she should say and maybe tearing down some of these quote, unquote "systems" that she no longer wants to be a part of.

I think she consistently, as a black woman politician, coming from a certain era, is looking around and trying to put her point together in a way that doesn't offend and doesn't make her look like a certain type of way, make her look bad. Or, you know, it's just it's a very polished type of speaking pattern that she has. And I think it would behoove her to get rid of that and to be more open and honest about what she sees is going wrong. And I just don't know if that is a track that she's on from that Stephen Colbert.

RAJU: Yeah. No. No question about it. And if she were -- she conducted herself that way, would the election gone differently? Who knows? But it's a great discussion, and we'll see what she ultimately says as she -- this book comes out and goes on this listening tour.

All right. Up next, is this Smithsonian rewriting history at the Trump administration's request? Well, we'll have the details next.

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