Rose Garden 'Liberation Day' Reaction

Hey everybody, thank you for the Charlie Kirk Show. Immediate reaction, President Trump at

the Rose Garden, exclusively here on the Charlie Kirk Show. We break it all down, what President Trump announced, and the reciprocal tariffs, and there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of reciprocity happening. In fact, just to go through them very quickly, there will be a 34% tariff on China, 26% tariff on India, 25% tariff on South Korea, 24% tariff on Japan, 32% tariff on Taiwan, 10% tariff on the United Kingdom, 46% tariff on Vietnam, 31% tariff on Switzerland, 49% tariff on Cambodia, 30% tariff on South Africa, should be higher than that, 32% tariff on Indonesia, 10% on Brazil, 10% Singapore, and 17% on Israel.
Tariffs across the board, which is long overdue. This is a good idea.
This is a bad idea. Reciprocity is occurring.
I explain how President Trump is fixing a decades-old problem. Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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We have wanted to play this piece of tape a couple times. I did play it a few weeks ago on this program, and it's very important.
It's one of my favorite pieces of tape, and credit to the Jesse Waters Show for compiling it, because I think this piece of tape sets the tone from what President Trump announced in the Rose Garden. It sets the tone as to what we are doing here.
And I'll be very honest with you. As I was watching the Rose Garden speech and all the networks took it, I was getting a little bit emotional.
Not emotional because of what President Trump was doing at the markets, but when I saw a group of 55-year-old auto workers, the white working class with their hard hats on, I thought of the countless MAGA rallies that I've spoke at. I thought at the countless political events that I went to.
And I and President Trump, President Trump and myself, I should say, and myself as proxy, would look these guys in the eyes and we would make a promise to them. We would say to these white working class men, elect us and we are going to fight for you.
We're going to do mass deportations. We're going to stop the stem on the southern border, the flow of illegal immigration and drugs.
And we are going to use tariffs. And these polite, mild-mannered, Midwestern patriots that work for Ford or General Motors, that work in manufacturing plants, those that still exist, would applaud as if it was a lifeline.
As we say in this program, they're the ones that shower before work and they shower after work. And I got a little emotional watching that Rose Garden speech.
As those very same guys that we have campaigned for can say that we voted for this. Donald Trump won the Heartland because of these swing voters.
These are the Reagan Democrats. These are

the Obama Democrats that voted for Obama. And some of them even voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
And they came back home. And you look right there on screen.
These are the garbage truck drivers, the UAW members. And I thought to myself, it is very unique to see a politician do what he said he was going to do, regardless of what the media and the institutions of power threaten him with.
So I want to just set the tone to set the vibe of our conversation around this historic Liberation Day speech. With why we are here.
This is Jonestown, Pennsylvania. Before I was born, this started

this sequence. This right here we're about to play is what President Trump is aiming to solve

in the Rose Garden. 32 years of managed decline.
32 years, 35 years, you could say, 40 years

of the slipping of American manufacturing dominance. It's a very difficult clip to watch and multiply it by 60,000.
It's a very difficult clip to watch and multiply it by 60,000. Playcut 123.
For ages, hot molten steel has been the lifeblood of Johnstown, vigorously pumping dollars and jobs through the city's veins. But now the pulse of the community is in cardiac arrest.
Bethlehem officials aren't making any more comments than what's contained in this press release. They're sorry, but it's simply not cost effective to run the mill any longer.
It does hurt, and there's a dramatic spin-off that's going to come from that, and there's going to be a lot of problems that have to be solved. In part, Bethlehem cites fierce foreign competition and the national economy for their demise.
For some Bethlehem employees, it's hard to look past the shocking news. Don't rely on a corporation that don't want you, in a sense.
And they don't care, you know. You're only a number.
Jobs left and drugs came in. Factories closed and communities shattered.
We thought we were getting a better end of the deal. Free trade, our leaders told us.
George H.W. Bush was president when that happened.
And William Clinton took office soon after, in January of 1993. Neither actually decided to fix the raping of the heartland.
J.D. Vance ran for the U.S.
Senate and eventually became the vice president because he is a son of the forgotten family of the Midwest. He is a son of the forgotten worker of the UAW.
J.D. Vance understands the shared lived experience of the factory workers of Appalachia.
And when President Trump was doing the Rose Garden, he did not have to do this. He could have done what every politician did.
Oh, I'm in my second term. I'm not running again.
Forget this. I don't actually have to deliver on the promises what I said I was going to do.
He could have coasted like Obama. He could have coasted like George W.
Bush. But let's go through the list.
Reagan,

he opened up free trade, which destroyed the heartland. It's true.
Reagan was good with a lot of stuff. He was terrible with this.
He did some tariffs, but not nearly enough. Bill Clinton accelerated.
George W. Bush was terrible.
George W. Bush was awful.
Barack Obama, terrible. Joe Biden, he's the first president in the post-World War II-based order to say enough.
Because President Donald Trump feels an obligation to people that actually put him into office. He made a promise.
He made a pledge. And to fulfill that pledge and to fulfill that promise requires moral clarity that we have not seen from an American president since probably Dwight D.
Eisenhower. This is J.D.
Vance who understands the ramifications, the weight and the heaviness of exactly what President Trump was contesting for in the Rose Garden speech known as Liberation Day, Playcut 121. There were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization.
The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things. The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things.
You would open an iPhone box and it would say designed in Cupertino, California. Now the implication, of course, is that it would be manufactured in Shenzhen or somewhere else.
And yeah, some people might lose their jobs in manufacturing, but they could learn to design or, to use a very popular phrase, learn to code. But I think we got it wrong.
It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. Now, we assume that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end.
We were squeezed from both ends. President Donald Trump announced a solution to what J.D.
Vance diagnosed as the problem. And I'm going to tell you the exact tariffs that he announced.
It's going to be a baseline 10% tariff on all U.S. imports.
That's big, everybody. You are seeing the redesigning and the restructuring of the artificial intelligence economy.
You are seeing the restructuring of the geopolitical hemisphere that America will lead. The Western hemisphere, the Northern hemisphere that we are in, that we live in, is going to be dominant and self-reliant, reliant on China no more.
You're seeing the recalibration of exactly how we view economic matters. And it's been long overdue because the deal post-World War II is we don't need to make stuff.
We can just consume stuff. We could trade a bunch of money and hedge against it, maybe a little real estate economy, and we'll build software, not hardware, and it has resulted in the crippling of our great nation.
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I want to get into the specifics of exactly what President Trump is issuing as far as reciprocal tariffs and tariffs across the board. But understand, you are seeing a historic reorganization of the global and the American economy.
and it's going to come as a shell shock. And there will be market volatility.
There will be turbulence. It's basically like taking cough syrup.
It doesn't feel good, but it is good for you. It's necessary.
We have been on borrowed time. We have been on borrowed future promises.
And you are not a nation if you do not make stuff in your nation. Let's play cut 122.
The second is that cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch. And it's a crutch that inhibits innovation.
I might even say that it's a drug that too many American firms got addicted to. And so I'd ask my friends, both on the tech optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation.
Indeed, I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy.
And the solution, I believe, is American innovation. So the U.S.
trade representative has chronicled every tariff and every trade restriction on the United States. President Trump has said they calculated an effective average tariff on U.S.
goods. If you combine all direct tariffs and all other trade restrictions, he says we are then retaliating by tariffing other countries that amount directly, but cut in half with a floor of 10 percent.
So you might say, what does that mean? A lot of tariffs. That's what that means.
It's going to be a lot of tariffs with China. And they could reciprocate.
And I'll be very honest, it might be harder to go buy piles of plastic that you do not need. Do you want to be reliant on the Chinese Communist Party? Do you want to be subservient to a foreign land? Are we a colony or are we a country? And I can tell you who's cheering this right now.
The auto workers in Michigan, the welders in Wisconsin, the people that showed up in record enormous numbers to vote for President Trump are enthusiastically giving a standing ovation for this right now. And do you know how you avoid a tariff? You make your product in America.
And understand, if President Trump was just doing tariffs, it's a left-hand, right-hand situation. On the left-hand, you say just tariffs.
If he was only doing tariffs, it'd be a little rough. But he's doing the brilliant second move.
He's doing the brilliant right-hand that makes it all happen. He's doing tariffs plus tax cuts, deregulation, and drool baby drill.
So when you pair those two together, all of a sudden tariffs make a lot more sense. And he's so smart to do this.
So in the spring, he announces tariffs, which he can do with his unilateral authority. Get the tough stuff out of the way.
Take the pill, everybody. Maybe it's not as bad as you think.
And then the all-encompassing strategy is, boom, on the second part, is a massive reconciliation bill of tax cuts, of no tax on tips, of drill baby drill, of balancing the budget. President Trump is also offering tax deductions on interest on car loans, on American-made cars.

So when you then look at the entire picture and you are a foreign company, you have to ask yourself a very simple question.

Do you want to be able to access the American consumer?

What President Trump is doing is he's saying, hey, in order to access the American consumer, you've got to make the stuff here.

Because the American consumer is the golden prize on the planet. Let me say that again.
The American consumer is the golden prize. We consume more than any other nation.
We are a consumerist economy. We buy and we buy and we buy and we go out to eat.
The Japanese are not like that at all. They have a deflationary problem.
They save their money under pillows, basically. That's why almost nothing goes up in downtown Tokyo.
They have a deflation problem. They got to keep on printing money and going through quantitative easing.
In America, it's the exact opposite. We have high leverage and huge money velocity and investment and risk-taking and entrepreneurialism.
So we are the golden prize. We are the top accomplishment.
If you are a Dutch company, a German company, an Argentine company, a Colombian company, you can never reach global international success if you cannot get into the U.S. market.
But now in order to reach the U.S. market, you have to make that good in the United States of America.
Employ American labor.

Not just say, hey, I want to access the American market.

Thanks so much.

Let's trade some dollar bills.

I'm going to bring all the profits back to Bogota.

I'm going to bring all the profits back to Brussels.

I'm going to bring all the profits back to Copenhagen.

I'm going to bring all the profits back to Amsterdam.

Meanwhile, all we get in return is a pile of plastic.

No, instead we say, if you want to be able to do that, make the good. In Knoxville, make the good in Marshallton, Iowa.
Make the good in Flagstaff, Arizona. Employ American labor.
China has now taken the most extraordinary step of building in Mexico to avoid tariffs and access America's prized market. We are the largest market in the world.
We're going to start acting like it. Hey, Charlie Kirk here.
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Several issues to discuss here with a really good guest, Will Tebow, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute and also an Army veteran. Will, welcome to the program.
Will, we complained while Biden was president that there were separate fitness standards in the military for men and women. If a woman wants to be in the military, she should have to do the same amount of pushups, the same amount of pull-ups, and run at the same pace as a man.
In battle, the enemy does not shoot less or deploy less IEDs or fight softer if he finds out that it is a female combatant versus a male combatant. Tell us about the announcement that Pete Hegseth has made that women must now be able to have the same strength and fitness standards as men in the military.
Tell us. That's exactly it, Charlie.
It is finally common sense again at the Pentagon for men and women to be evaluated based on the same rubric, right? What is it that, frankly, the defense establishment in both parties have told us for over 10 years now, men and women deserve the same opportunities in combat that they do in the rest of life. And so long as everyone passes the same standards, well, then they should have that opportunity to serve in these brutal roles.
Well, we are finally taking a step towards that being a reality after about 15 years of meddling with this delusion. Now, when a man or a woman are evaluated based on their fitness, they're evaluated on the same scale.
Before this week, a woman had to do about 42 pushups to get an A plus on her fitness test while a man had to do 84 pushups. All the while, we were told that that man and that woman were able to do any combat job in the same capacity even though they're being judged by the same standard.
It was this bait and switch that, frankly, both sides of the aisle would tell the American people. And Pete Hegseth has finally fixed that by saying when it comes to these gruesome, excellent driven jobs, that it requires the same standards.
So we're not playing identity politics with the infantry. Yeah.
So just to get into more of the details of how it was. Yes.
Thank you. You guys found it.
Great job. Put 44 up on screen.
This, by the way, this entire rubric was so memory hold. It was really hard to find this very hard.
So if you are a woman in the U S military, again, this was a little bit goofy, so you guys have to help me understand. They also made the chart in this backwards way.
It's very difficult. So guys, help me understand this.
So if you are a woman for push-ups, a female, in order to get the most amount of points, had to do 53 push-ups, where a male had to do 57 push-ups.

Am I reading that correctly? I believe I am. Yes.
Where in order to get the next threshold of points,

yeah, this is all based on age. So basically the accommodation, again, so there's an age bracket here.
It's very complicated. And by the way, they got rid of pull-ups completely, it looks like.

They just got rid of pull-ups. But the running is the most dramatic, which I think is one of the

Thank you. very complicated.
So, and by the way, they got rid of pull-ups completely, it looks like. They just got rid of pull-ups.
But the running is the most dramatic, which I think is one of the most important parts of physical, of military preparedness and fitness, where the man has to be able to run in 13 minutes and 22 seconds. The female can be two minutes slower than a man in a battlefield under the Biden physical fitness standards.
The deadlift, this one I find to be so flummoxing. So to get a max score on a deadlift, a man needed to be able to deadlift 340 pounds, a woman 230 pounds.
So Will, explain to me, you're in a battlefield in Yemen. You're in a battlefield in Iraq.
You're in a battlefield. And basically, a woman under Joe Biden would not be able to lift an average weight of a soldier and still be able to be on the front lines.
Am I understanding this correctly? Precisely, Charlie. And that's what the deadlift was put in the Army combat fitness test to measure.
The ability of a soldier, again, we were told of any gender, to lift a heavyweight off the ground, like say the body of your fallen comrade, and then carry it out of harm's way. It is brazen, as far as I'm concerned, to say that there is this equal standard for all, when just as you showed, it was a different standard.
I'm pretty sure you were just kind of reading off some of the minimum standards, and that's not even in consideration for Army combat rules. It's important to note, and you mentioned this, there was even a point where they changed the test.
It was the leg tuck, close to a pull-up, that proved, even with a gender segregated score, to be too, quote, discriminatory for women. So you had senators from both sides of the aisle and female army generals who demanded that the Biden administration and the army under the Biden administration take out that event from the army combat fitness test.
So when we say that, yes, it may be the same test that measures people, well, it's been a test that's been altered in order to meet the realities of gender disparity in physical performance. So it's grading on a curve.
Is that fair to say? Basically, we have a grading on the curve for military preparedness. Precisely.
That's exactly what it is. And it's a curve for our most serious roles.
You know, if you if you asked yourself, hey, who would I rather drag my son or daughter's body out of combat? If you had to choose out of a hat, it would be a man or a woman. Anyone would choose a man if they had to choose, right?

It's the perfect case of where the exception proves the rule here.

But it's about what the military is.

The military is not a bastion of equal opportunity.

It is not a place where you necessarily deserve a fair shot at the job that you might think

you deserve.

It's a job where only the best is needed and where masculine virtue is absolutely necessary.

And there's no greater way of laying that disparity clear than in the physical fitness test, but it is where we were told the most brazen lies. And it's why, although this policy change, of course, by the defense establishment is kind of tasked aside and said it's just an issue of identity politics, that's not true.
It is at the core of what it means to be in the military. And that's to maintain physical excellence and to be capable of going to what we called in the Army, the limited advance with your unit, no matter the challenge ahead of you.
That's what the Army Combat Fitness Test measured. And we're finally one step closer for it to being a genuine test of physical excellence and not just a pass-fail metric before you can include all other characteristics of identity politics.
Let's hear it in Pete Hegseth's own words. Let's play Cut 295, please.
Here at the Defense Department, we are restoring the warrior ethos, and that means we've got to be fit to fight inside all of our formations. That starts with standards and going back to basics.
So for decades, the military I joined, there were different male and female physical standards because men and women are different. And that's understandable.
But there were certain jobs, combat MOSs that were only for men. And so you had a male standard.
Then in 2015, under the Obama administration, against the advice of the military services, opened up all those combat MOSs to males and females. Fine, if that's their decision.
But they never changed the standards in a lot of those roles. So you still had higher standards for men than for women in a lot of those combat MOSs.
Some changed it, but not all did. We're fixing that.
Will? Right. And that's the point.
One thing that I think is worth making explicit again, under the Obama administration, standards became mere pass-fail metrics for the bare minimum of what it took to serve in some of these units. Even when I joined the Army, what the fitness test was, it was a means of determining who is the best and who is the rest from first to worst.
And if you were first, you got whatever job you wanted and you filled out the units by order of merit from there. Standards have not been that since the policy change that Secretary of Defense Hegseth describes.
That's a fundamental difference when we're measuring our military on pass-fail minimum metrics, as opposed to genuine excellence in the pursuit of being the best. I'll also say, he glazed, you know, military generals, uniformed generals recommended against this policy change, even back in 2015, about 10 years ago.
You know, I would be hard pressed to think that there are many two, three and four star generals who would put their career on the line and recommend against such a policy change today. You know, as I said at the start, there were many generals who lost their mind when it became clear that women weren't performing as well under the first iteration of the Army combat fitness test.
And so with help from Democrat senators, the Army changed that test. So let's also use this as an occasion, ask serious questions about the military leaders who are implementing this policy.
In many cases, these are the same leaders who carried forward the Obama policy and for different units. And now we're expecting them to all of a sudden faithfully execute Trump administration policy.
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Okay, I want to get into this, but I do want to play the second part of Pete Hegseth's tape here. Very important.
Playcut 296. We're ensuring that any combat position across any of the services, and the services are evaluating that has the same standard

for men and women, which means anybody can join, but the standard is to meet what it takes to do that combat job, rigorous physical standards so that your sons and daughters, those that join our military have the best possible units, the most lethal units. So this is a standard review looking at combat units,

looking at men and women. No standards will be lowered only at the highest level.
And we look forward to all our best warriors joining those units. It's a review that's important, long overdue, and the kind of thing we promised inside the Trump administration.
Will Tebow continues as Army veteran and director of American Military Project at the Claremont Claremont Institute, cut 325 up.

Under the Biden administration, there was a celebration of pregnant Air Force pilots. Pregnant Air Force pilots.
That's what the military has become. Of course, we're all for people having families, but the military should be to crush our enemies.
Will, what percentage of women are going to make it through these fitness standards that are now equal for men and women? Perhaps a handful. But the point is, what does this do to the culture and the unit cohesion of these units? Frankly, Charlie, I can tell you firsthand that even if it's just one or two women in a large unit, that is a kind of a reorganizing principle based on something other than lethality and readiness.
The whole framework for how a unit trains and fights is different because I was in the infantry when it became gender integrated and there was working groups, there were new resourcing requirements, time in the woods where we would spend three weeks in the field and not really think about it too much. We're all of a sudden unique because of the different kinds of demands that men and women need when they're supposed to live in austere environments.
And obviously a lot won't make it and the vast majority won't. And there might be some that do, but does that mean that it's worth it to change the fundamental character of a war fighting formation? Again, not a McKinsey consulting class, not a Harvard Law School class, but an infantry platoon, a platoon that is meant to fight in a war no matter the consequences and no matter the conditions.
It's been a while since we've had sustained combat that looks like that. And I fear that we may naturally fall into this trap where we think 21st century values merged with 21st century war fighting.
We will just assume that it works that way and that all will be the same, even if it's just a few elite, you know, great, excellent women who can meet these standards. Frankly, my wife was one of those women who could meet those standards, and she served alongside special operations units.
That's how we met. But she would be the first to tell you that, you know, again, the exception doesn't prove the rule and her predilections or, you know, willingness to serve does not mean we need to change the fundamental character of previously all male war fighting units.
I think there's still some more questions to ask here. Will Tebow.
Excellent. Yeah.
I mean, look, it does beg a deeper and broader question. should women be in combat units.
I think there's still some more questions to ask here. Will Tebow.
Excellent. Yeah.
I mean, look, it does beg a deeper and broader question. Should women be in combat units? And that's a deeper question.
And at least from the fitness standards, at the very least, in order for that question to be answered, you have to at least be able to have the same fitness standards. So let's just start there.
This is just a very simple, common sense way. That's a controversial question.
and there's plenty of supporting roles. But if you can't even do the physical stuff, if all of a sudden your fellow Marine has his leg blown off and you can't put that Marine on your back to be able to hike a mile with him to be able to get necessary, immediate medical support because you had a special deadlift accommodation, you should not be in a combat role.

Will, thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always,

freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.