The Tariff Agenda: Make America Make Again

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We have a huge week in store, and this is going to be a very, very intense news week, and we are here for all of it. It's called Liberation Day, coming up on April 2nd.
That is later this week. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump has said that there is going to be a liberation in this country.
There will be tariffs put on every country that has tariffs against us. There will be reciprocity, and there will be tariffs across the board.
The Trump administration is planning its biggest round of tariffs yet this Wednesday. Now, do not look at your stock portfolio.
Do not do that this week. Make a promise to yourself.
Take the app off your phone.

Do not look at your stock portfolio. Say, this week and maybe for a couple weeks, I am not going to look at it because it's going to get a little bit bumpy.
We're in for some turbulence. Now, we already have tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
But what we're getting now is a big wave of reciprocal tariffs. These are tariffs that President Trump is imposing as retaliation for similar tariffs that have imposed on American goods in other countries.
For example, India has a huge tariff on Harley Davidson's, just stuff like this. Big screen TV tariffs in Japan.
If we are going to be tariffed, then we will tariff back. Last year, the U.S.
trade deficit with the rest of the planet passed $1.2 trillion.

That's a record.

And there are no signs of things getting better unless we took dramatic action.

America has been becoming a country that produces nothing and only buys.

That ends in national bankruptcy.

We are seeing a geopolitical restructuring on our terms. We have a choice.
We could ignore what is obviously the rebalancing of the international world order and continue to be a consumer economy. If you are strictly a consumer economy, you are subservient and held hostage to the internationalist and globalist forces.
We are tired of being cheated, and President Trump has talked about this issue

for decades. We have one shot and one shot only to fix this.
We have one opportunity.

While we are still the wealthiest nation on the world, in the world and the incumbent economic player, we have one chance to do this. You see, post World War Two and the World War Two based order, America decided to become a consumer economy.
We don't really make much in this country anymore. We make mobile apps, we build homes, and we have a banking sector that is robust and the best on the planet for now.
What else do we actually physically make? Now, there are some small manufacturing companies that have still persisted, but we signed a series of trade agreements, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. We allowed China to go into WTO in the late 1990s.
We also have decided to get rid of almost all tariffs over the last 30 to 40 years because we believed that free trade would make us richer. Now, while free trade has allowed us to get more stuff, has it actually made us a richer country? I had this debate with a strict libertarian on campus.
He called himself a libertarian economist. And I said, the political question is not just whether or not we are getting economically wealthier.
It's whether or not our communities are strong. Our families are staying formed.
It's whether or not an average worker can afford

to have his or her part of the American dream. It's whether or not we have a

vibrant and connected culture in our country.

We have lost 5 million manufacturing jobs in the last 20 years. 5 million.
And what we have learned is that when we lose those manufacturing jobs, when those factories are closed, there is a wage reduction for that worker by 11 to 22 percent. This was a bipartisan study done by Congress.
So when a factory worker is no longer building a dishwasher or a big screen TV or a pickup truck and they find a replacement job, there is a wage reduction of 11 to 22 percent. Wages since the World Trade Organization entrance of China into this compact and since NAFTA was passed, wages for the bottom 10% have only rose 4% over the last 30 years.
We have closed 60,000 factories in the last 12 years. 60,000 factories.
We call them the muscular class on this country, and the muscular class has been completely and totally decimated, eliminated. In 1985, it took 30 weeks of work to support a family of four.
30 weeks of work to be able to have housing,

health care, send your kids to school, get a car. That means you could save money.

That means your wife did not have to go into the workforce. She could if she wanted to,

but if she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, it made financial sense. Now it takes 62 weeks of work for an average worker to be able to support a family of four.
62 weeks of work, which means that one of two things have to happen.

The family has to go into debt to just support a family of four,

or the wife has to go into the workforce, which then means the kid has to go to daycare.

And if you have to do daycare, that's obviously necessary for a lot of people.

But it's not ideal for many families.

Many moms would prefer to be with their kids when they're 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, seven years old. They would prefer to be stay-at-home moms during those formative years.
Free trade absolutism has hurt our nuclear families. It has weakened our communities.
So we have one shot to do this. We have one shot, and there is going to be a hardware renaissance the same way that we have seen a software renaissance.

Advanced robotics and advanced manufacturing is going to be the new economic growth curve.

Where are these tools of the future going to be built?

The hardware renaissance to build the rockets and the potential flying cars and the autonomous vehicles, President Trump understands that there is this window. There is this momentary window where we can finally rebalance and course correct the mistakes of the last 40 or 50 years.
And you can only do that while you are still the incumbent economic player. And as that window is starting to close, President Trump is trying to run right through it.
And that is what he means by Liberation Day. Germany does not allow us to sell Ford vehicles in Germany without ridiculous tariffs.
So why is it that we should allow the importation of VWs and Mercedes-Benz and BMWs? Japan is the same. Why should we allow the importation of Toyota and Honda? South Korea, the same.
Why should we allow Hyundai to have themselves dump their products into the United States? So what is about to ensue is, ladies and gentlemen, there is turbulence ahead. There will be some bumps coming.
But on the other side of this bumps is a recalibration of how we finance our government and how our economy is structured. Because if we do nothing and we continue to engage in the cheap money spigot brought to you by unfettered free trade policies, we will have no manufacturing base.
We'll be nothing but a consumerist economy where we are just a colony that buys stuff. No, a country is definitionally strong based on whether or not you make stuff in your nation.
And if you don't, you're no longer a country. You're simply a colony that barters goods.
It is a geopolitical restructuring on our terms. And President Trump has the political courage and mandate to make it happen.
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That is 1-800-4-RELIEF, 1-800-4-RELIEF. Okay, so Liberation Day is coming Wednesday.
I want to play this piece of tape here first from the head of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. What he says is very important.
Tariffs and the threat of a tariff is a forcing function to allow companies to make them re-domicile. We want to onshore manufacturing.
We want to see a re-domiciling renaissance. Playcut 82.
There is plenty of opportunity, and I've had companies tell us point blank that they're going to have to bring product back here if those tariffs are implemented. I thought it was a little longer than that, but it's still very powerful.
And that's exactly right. The president of the UAW understands that all of the parts associated with making a vehicle, these companies might have to bite the bullet and they might have to say no to their McKinsey consultants and bring them back to America.
I want to do a one-two combo here. This was played on Jesse Waters' show and I have to give the Jesse Waters production team a lot of credit.
This is a phenomenal poll. This video has been memory hold.
This is a video before I was born in 1992 of a frontline report in Allentown, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where they were talking about one of these 60,000 factories that were closed. Listen to this frontline news report and then multiply this by 60,000.
We just handed China global superpower status. What we did throughout all of this is we handed China global superpower status.
Here, China, go become our greatest enemy. Why? Because we want cheaper plastic and trinkets, and the Wall Street class wants to be able to go make an extra couple hundred million bucks.
The people like Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. 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. That reminds me of a scene out of the movie Wall Street, which is a phenomenal movie.
Anacoste Steele. In fact, Ryan, we should cut up parts of that movie Wall Street.
As far as in drama form, it goes to show the moneyed Wall Street class that parachuted in and closed and deindustrialized our country. The top 1% benefited massively from this because they got higher margins.
It used to be where you were able to build an automobile, a computer, a skyscraper, an ocean liner, a fighter jet, entirely with parts manufactured in the United States. The era where you could do that was the apex of American success and power.
Now, the country that can build all those things on its own is China. Is it any surprise that they're now our number one rival and probably our enemy? Is it any surprise it looks like they are winning? When you make things, you learn how to design them.
When you stop making them, you forget the brainpower, the design power, the skills, the ability to fix things, build things, poof, all gone, vanished. And President Trump is now maximizing this opportunity we'll never get again.
Look, all of our stocks are going to go down, my stocks, your stocks, for a moment of time, and then it will be a golden era ramp up. It is a short window.
And this is long-term intergenerational thinking. Finally, we are resisting the momentary pleasure for long-term success.
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is senator rick scott from the great state of florida a senator i want to continue this conversation about president trump's tariffs and liberation day it is time for us to re-industrialize the country you have a background that i think would be interesting you've done a lot of venture capital you know a lot of investments and things that have actually built stuff in this country. Talk about the need that we invest in the backbone, in the muscular class of our country.
Number one, we want American jobs. I built the largest hospital company in the world.
And then after that, I built a variety of manufacturing companies. If you have a Corvette, I probably made your outer body.
If you have a John Deere tractor, I probably made your chain. If you have a towable recreational vehicle, I probably made your chassis.
I built the biggest companies in those industries. And we need more American jobs.
I was competing against China. China subsidizes their companies.
They don't comply with any trade deals. Their quality, in many cases, is horrible.
So if we want good paying American jobs, we got to protect American manufacturers. So what Trump is trying to do with having fair, fair protection, trade protection policies is saying, look, if you are going to protect American companies for being able to sell into your country, which China's example does not let us compete fairly in their country.
If you're not going to protect American companies from being able to sell into your country, which China, as example, does not let us compete fairly in their country. If you're not going to be fair, then we're going to put tariffs on you because we're going to protect American jobs.
If we go to war, we're going to want to know that we can build things in our own country. We want to buy our drugs built in our country.
We want to buy our military equipment built in our country. We want to buy everything we can built in this country and protect American jobs.
So what he's doing is he's doing exactly what he says he's going to do on the campaign trail. He's protecting American jobs.
I want to play this piece of tape here. This is cut 124.
This is Japanese executives now admitting and acknowledging they're planning U.S. expansion.
You see, that's the thing. How do you avoid a tariff? You avoid a tariff by just making your good here, by building a factory in Iowa or Kansas, Mississippi, or in the great state of Florida.
Let's play cut 124, please. Based on your research, it sounds like President Trump's tariffs are one of the factors here.
Yeah, D.D., they definitely play a part. A new survey from a Japan-based news agency polled executives at 144 major Japanese corporations, and around 30 percent said they were expanding their operations in the U.S., and another 20 percent said they were exploring options for expansion.
So President Trump's 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts, that is expected to start next week. So tell us about, though, the changes that we're actually already seeing with regards to foreign automakers making ahead of this.
Yeah, so according to a list released by the White House, which they got from reporting by Reuters, Honda will be producing its new Civic hybrid in Indiana instead of Mexico. Also, Hyundai Motor and Stellantis have announced their plans to set up shop here, too.
Let's play cut 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. Separating the design and the manufacturing is two completely different things.
Senator, your reaction to both clips? Well, the most important thing is we've got to figure out how do you build American jobs? Here's how you do it. I mean, I build companies all over the United States.
I did business probably in 40 states. Issue one, you make sure that you got the best employees.
You make sure you don't have regulations that your competition doesn't have. You make it easy to get a permit.
You don't have taxes and fees that your competition doesn't have. And if you do, American ingenuity is always going to win.
But when other countries subsidize their industries, then we've got to do what Donald Trump is doing. He's going to say, that's not fair.
Then we're going to do the same thing in ours. And the way he's going to do it is through tariffs.
So I'm glad that the president is standing up for American jobs.

I'm excited. I think people I think these companies worldwide are going to come back to America.
We're going to see a renaissance of new jobs. You already saw it, I think, in the February numbers.
Under the Biden administration, we've been losing about nine thousand manufacturing jobs a month. His first month, February, we added 10,000 manufacturing jobs.
So I think that's going to continue. So Senator, how do we empower Congress to deregulate the ability to build factories and to have manufacturing here? The biggest hurdle to manufacturing in America is not wages.
It's actually the regulatory hurdles and the cost of building. Are there any ways that Congress or the Trump administration can lower those barriers? Well, part of it is the agencies can do on their own.
These regulations have been put in place over the years. They can eliminate those regulations.
They can make it easier to get a permit right now. If you're dealing with the Corps of Engineers, it's like it's a black hole.
You don't even know how to get a permit. It takes forever to get a permit.
So then the Congress can do some things. Congress has passed legislation in the past that makes it harder to do business in the country.
We have to say, look, we're competing globally. We got to compete globally.
If we're going to compete globally, that means we can't have rules and regulations that don't make any sense. Next, our state governments have to do the same thing, and our local governments have to do the same thing.
Some of it's local, some of it's state, some of it's federal. Some can be done by the Trump administration on their own.
Some has to be done through Congress. So it's got to be all hands on deck.
And what businesses have to do is they have to be very clear. I tell them all the time, tell me where your problem is.
If I have to call a governor, I'll call them. If I have to call a mayor, I'll call them.
If I have to call a secretary that works for Trump, I'll call them. Tell me what your problems are because I want more jobs in America.
I did the same thing when I was governor of Florida. We added 1.7 million jobs in my eight years as governor and the state had lost 800,000 jobs the four years before I became governor.
So that's what we have to do. We have to go solve companies' problems and we'll get more great American paying jobs.
And you can go buy American. Stop buying anything made in China.
They want to destroy your way of life. Look, if Amazon doesn't tell you where it's made, don't buy it.
If you get online anywhere, they don't tell you where it's made. Assume the worst.
Don't buy it. So, Senator, shifting gears here for a second, there is a fair amount of consternation around the special election in Florida.
I'm told that we are surging. What's the latest that you've learned? Well, what I what the election's not over until tomorrow night when the election is close.
We've got two elections. We've got Jimmy Paterniss taking Matt Gaetz, and we've got Randy Fine taking Mike Waltz's seat.
So we've got to get our vote out. And these special elections are always scary because the turnout is so much lower.
In Randy Fine's case, his opponent raised over $10 million because with Act Blue, they were all in. So here's what I tell everybody.
Get out and vote. If you're in Randy Fine's area, you've got to get out and vote.
If you're in Jimmy Petronis, go vote. Don't take a chance.
Make sure we have a big win. I think we're going to win, but it's all vote on ballot.
It's turnout today and tomorrow. And so, Senator, more broadly, why is it that we are struggling, at least on the surface, on special elections? And how do we change the Republican Party's approach to some of these off year and spring elections? We just have to understand that every election, every election matters and we got to stay active.
So it's your, you know, you as a candidate's got to do their job. Now, let me tell you, Donald Trump is doing his job.
He's done telephone town halls for both Jimmy Petronas and Randy Fine. He's done tweets.
He's done everything he can. He endorsed them.
He's doing everything he can to get the votes out. I've endorsed them.
I've done telephone town halls. I'm going to do everything I can to continue to help them get the vote out.
But all of us have to, you know, we have to volunteer. We have to, and you don't have to be in that district to volunteer.
You can make phone calls. You can send texts on behalf of Randy Fine or Jimmy Jimmy Petortis.
But that's true in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Anywhere where we have an election, we nationwide have to be all on board to help make sure we win.
Senator, thank you for your leadership on all this. Just really quickly, anything happening in front of the U.S.
Senate this week that our audience should be aware of? Reconciliation. I think our first vote on reconciliation is going to happen this week.
We've been working our tail off. By the way, I saw President Trump Friday night down in Mar-a-Lago.
He is absolutely on board to figure

out how to balance his budget. So what we've got to do is we've got to go back to pre-pandemic

spending because we can't be running these $2 trillion deficits. We've got to give the

president the money he needs for the border, the money we need to make sure we plus up our military,

and we've got to make sure we keep the Trump tax cuts in place so we keep this economy going.

I don very optimistic. All those things are going to happen.
Senator, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Thank you. See, Charlie, have a good day.
Bye bye. Thank you.
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I want to play more piece of tape here. Here is how much money that could be raised through tariffs.
Now, mind you, this is only taking imports, then dividing the percentage that could come in as revenue. I actually hope it's not this much because I want the manufacturing base to then onshore into the United States of America.
But just look at the enormity of money that we've been leaving on the table. Playcut 118.
Administration estimates the Trump tariffs will bring in $600 billion in the first year to the Treasury General Fund. The president's extra 25% tariffs on autos alone expected to generate $100 billion on top of the reciprocal tariffs.
So those tariffs on just about all countries is meant to level the trade playing field. The extra 25% tariffs on autos and others meant to protect seven industries.
The president has deemed critical. You see those industries there, autos on the list, along with semiconductors, labor, steel, aluminum, and the others.
And when you look at the entire picture, the entire analysis, it's very clear that we hold the cards. We still hold all the cards.
Now, that window is going to close. If President Trump delays this even two years, China could surpass us.
This is the only window where we could do this. And look, all the Wall Street types I have CNBC on, they're getting very jittery.
Ooh, the market might go down a little bit. Look, I don't want to discount that.
That's people's 401ks. It's their savings.
It will recover and will recover with gusto. But Wall Street has become short-term thinkers.
What built the West? Many things.

Christian values built the West.

A belief in the divine.

But also a Christian principle that is directly at odds with third world nations.

A Christian principle that is directly at odds with why people stay poor.

If you had to distill all the reasons why somebody stays poor, there's one major reason. Instant gratification versus delayed gratification.
It's one of the main reasons why people stay poor. There are cycles of poverty.
If you look at third world nations, they consume what they grow immediately. They don't save for the future.

The West was largely built on a principle of delayed gratification. I might suffer today, but my children will prosper.
I might struggle today, but my children will flourish. I might have a tough day today, but my grandchildren will live in a free society.
And we have now assumed the instant gratification mindset, the very same one that is at odds with our birthright. China is our chief foe.
They think in terms of 50, 100, and 250 years. In order for us to compete, we need to think longer than your three-month 401k Wall Street portfolio.
We need to have the intergenerational maturity to say, my goodness, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And if we fail to do it, if we fail to rebalance, to reconfigure, to redomicile, we will never be able to bring back that domestic industrial base.
We have to set right four decades of degradation.

Four decades of Wall Street going in and raping 60,000 factories.

Of the moneyed class parachuting in and telling union labor that worked with their hands, you're done.

It's closed.

It's going to mainland China.

It's going to Wuhan.

It's going to Shaoxing.

It's going to mainland China, it's going to Wuhan, it's going to Shaoxing, it's going to Shanghai. We have to teach America to make things again.
We have to applaud the people who shower before work and after work. And we've lost those 5 million jobs in the last 20 years.

We are on a precipice of a hardware renaissance.

Let me summarize by saying we have to make America make again.

Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.