The Charlie Kirk Show
What the Trump's Tariffs Mean for You, Today and For The Future
Fri, 04 Apr 2025
Short term loss for long term gain. That's what the people voted for and that is what Trump is delivering. Charlie talks to economist Oren Cass about Trump's tariff reveal and and why there are more things that matter than just the day-to-day fluctuations of the stock market. Watch ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are Trump's tariffs and why are they important?
Hey everybody, I know the market is down. What does that mean for you? It's happening, but will it stay down? Is it going to go back up? President Trump is trying to rebalance the global economy with tariffs. It is a risky move, one that voters voted for. We discuss. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Chapter 2: How are the stock markets reacting to the tariffs?
Wall Street Journal, stocks suffer steepest slide since 2020. Tariff shock waves circle the globe. The stock market does matter. 62% of Americans have something that they have worked hard for in the stock market. It should not be diminished. It should not be minimized. Now, markets did know that this was coming. Markets knew that there was going to be some sort of a recalibration.
There was going to be some sort of a hiccup, and you're seeing it and experiencing it. President Trump ran on tariffs, and let me bring you into the room of the calculus. He knows that he wants to do tariffs to get better trade deals and rebalance the deficit.
If he knows he has to rebuild American manufacturing on one side, and he also simultaneously knows that he is going to have the greatest liberator of economic growth, which is tax cuts and deregulation, which one would you do first? Would you do the tough stuff first or the easy popular stuff first?
So President Trump, knowing he has to do tariffs and that people voted to have him do tariffs to reindustrialize the country and onshore jobs, he said and has decided to do the tough fight first. Get it out of the way. Shock and awe. Now, out of all the tariffs that President Trump has applied, the ones on China are the are. the most bold of them all. The boldest, I should say.
Chapter 3: What is the impact of tariffs on China and the global economy?
You see, the Chinese Communist Party could very well go into an economic depression over this. Now, whether or not we will go into a recession, we will see. But the Chinese Communist Party is so reliant and so dependent, they are so married to the American market that they require... unfettered free trade, even though we do not have free trade with the Chinese Communist Party.
We are not able to open our banks in China. Many of our goods and services and our products, we're not able to import many of our vehicles. It is not a reciprocal market. Every U.S. tech company is restricted in China. Out of all of the tariffs that President Trump has issued, the one that is making the markets the most jittery, the one that is making the markets most nervous is China.
The Chinese Communist Party is showing its hand. They know that this could mean. The end of the current Chinese Communist Party uptick over the last 25 years. They know it. They sense it. And they feel it. But understand the sequence of events because what's coming after this is going to be almost nothing but good news. You start with the tariffs. And then what is coming next? Deregulation.
Drill baby drill. Oil permits. And then no tax on tips. No tax on Social Security, extending the Trump tax cuts, major middle class tax cut, heavy machinery depreciation. So you start with the stuff that is going to kind of be a little bit of a gut punch to the markets, and then you build your way up from there.
All the while, what tariffs do is they are a forcing function to redomicile companies to the United States. These systemic changes will help us long term. President Trump is looking to implement a long term systemic change to help make our country stronger. But it will undoubtedly come with some bumps and some hiccups and, for some people, some short-term economic pain.
What is going on here, what is unfolding on the markets, which right now is a red bloodbath, is a moral question. Are we willing to delay the immediate sugar high of gratification, even though we know it is unsustainable and bad for us, to break through on the other side to have a vibrant and strong and long-term durability? That is the question in front of us.
And ever since the Greenspan put, ever since the tradition of easy money and the influx of artificially low interest rates, the stock market has gone up and up and up. And we have seen us enter into an era where we don't make stuff, but we certainly consume it. You cannot print wealth, and the trade deficits coupled with our national debt have left us in a rather precarious situation.
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Chapter 4: What is the long-term strategy behind the tariffs?
You know how easy it would be for President Trump to just punt, to delay, and not confront this problem head on. America has for decades operated on a plan of trading U.S. dollars for things produced in other countries. We trade paper for goods. We trade paper for goods. If people ever decide they don't want the paper anymore, we are helpless. China makes things. They engineer them.
They design them. They have tens, if not hundreds of millions of people that are in the manufacturing sector. And we believe the propaganda from the free trade absolutists. that you are somehow liberated and an enlightened economy if you do nothing but brain work but no body work, as the great Victor Davis Hanson said in our program. Instead, you need both.
You need both the brain and the body of an economy. In fact, despite what all of the experts and the prognosticators told us, we are about to see the greatest hardware demand that humanity has had since the Industrial Revolution. Almost all of the wealth that has driven the stock market over the last 10 years, outside of Apple, Apple is the exception, has largely been software breakthroughs.
Tesla could be the other exception. But you look at Google, you look at Amazon, you look at Meta or Facebook, you look at Netflix, So much of that is software breakthroughs. It's applications, social media data companies. Now, NVIDIA, to their credit, does do a fair amount of hardware, but it's coupled with some software advancements.
If we are serious about entering this golden era of America, we have to strip ourselves of the old economic alliances and worldview, the allegiances that have plagued us for quite some time. And the easy decision, the simple decision would be delay it. Extend the good times. Who cares? Draw down the inheritance. It's not our problem. And understand,
That during COVID, during the lockdowns, we saw on display the instant gratification moral issue. The instant gratification during the lockdowns. was print as much money as you can, flood the zone with cheap money, inflate the market. Who cares if your 15-year-old grandkid is going to commit suicide? Who cares if they're going to get fat? Live for the moment.
We baby boomers have earned it, and we are going to sell our kids off, and it doesn't matter if they'll be indebted and sick and helpless and abused. That was the moral decision made during COVID. Now we are finally embracing a delayed gratification strategy, one that built the West, and it is not necessarily going to be warmly received of the people that are used to sugar highs and dopamine hits.
This is the tough stuff. And on the other side will be a country that can last another 250 years. Private student loan debt in America is a major problem. WhyRefi.com, they help make all of that possible. If you go to WhyRefi.com, you can read testimonials from other people who have been where you are and how they've escaped.
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Chapter 5: How are tariffs affecting the U.S. manufacturing sector?
will take away your steel industry, your aluminum industry, your copper industry, your electronics industry. So what President Trump is saying is these are the injustices you have to remedy. This isn't just about moving around some lines on a ledger.
This is about remedying the systemic injustice that says the streets of America are filled with European cars and Japanese cars, but the streets of Europe and Japan have no American cars. This is about saying that the American steel industry, which once built and sustained the modern world...
This is another important point. I think at its core, a lot of Americans appreciate certain forms of trade and importation. If your country is full of great artisans and craftsmen, and you're importing something that is incredibly unique, something that that nation is known for, For example, Colombian coffee. Fair enough. Or Canadian maple syrup. French wine is a great example.
The tariffs are not targeted towards that. I mean, they might be caught up in that, but the essence of the tariffs is not trying to go after Italian olive oil. It's not trying to destroy the native cultural export of a certain nation.
No, instead, what we have a problem with is trading when a nation becomes an industrial mill of unnecessary piles of plastic, unnecessary amount of garbage that then floods our streets, our communities. And we have no attachment with what we're actually buying. We become so hyper materialistic. We are not here to try and stop French wine from coming to the United States.
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Chapter 6: What moral questions do tariffs raise about the economy?
In fact, though, I will say the wine producers in Fredericksburg, Texas, and Napa Valley would love that. Instead, we want American products, the stuff that we're good at making, which is a couple things here or there, to be able to go into other nations without penalty or tariff. Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here. The April 15th tax deadline is coming fast. Do you have an unfiled tax return?
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Talk with one of their strategists today. It's free. Stop looking over your shoulder and put this behind you. Call Tax Network USA at 1-800-958-1000. That is 1-800-958-1000. Or visit TNUSA.com slash Charlie. Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com. To help us make sense of the tariffs and the philosophy behind them is Oren Kass, the chief economist at the American Compass. Oren, great to see you.
Oren, what is your take on President Trump's tariff announcements? But even more broadly, let's start with why are tariffs a good idea for the United States of America to implement?
Well, at the end of the day, I think tariffs are important because making things matters. I've found you have to start all the way back there because we've gone through 30 or 40 years where economists and policymakers said making things doesn't matter. We're going to have a free trade system where we are perfectly happy if all of our manufacturing jobs go to China.
They'll make cheap stuff for us and we'll find something else to do. And what we've seen is that's a terrible model. It is terrible for working people who see good jobs leave and not so good jobs replace them. It's terrible for the economy. We've seen less innovation, lower growth. And it's certainly terrible for our national security.
If you can't make stuff, you know, you can't defend the country with bowling alleys. And so the entire argument for free trade and just saying you don't care where things get made, if that's not right, then in fact, you probably do need some sort of tariff. You need a finger on the scale that says all things equal, we would rather things be made here.
And by having a tariff, you change prices a little bit so that people deciding where to build, where to make things will think harder about doing them here in America.
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Chapter 7: What role does delayed gratification play in economic policy?
We should think about the goal that we have. And if the goal that we have is to encourage people to find ways to make things here and then we do want that to show up in prices. And what we've seen historically is that when you actually do this, the result is that people do come make stuff here. And once people invest here, they can make it very efficiently. I mean, look at Japanese cars.
They all used to be imported from Japan. It was the Reagan administration that basically forced Japan to send Honda and Toyota to come build cars in America instead. No one's walking around complaining that Toyotas and Hondas are too expensive. We're happy that we have them investing here and hundreds of thousands of jobs as a result.
So the consensus of Wall Street right now is that these tariffs will create a bitter, ongoing trade war of which there will be no resolution. Comment on the details of these tariffs, President Trump's strategy, and any feedback you might have.
Well, I think it's important to notice that there are kind of three different tariffs that he's pursuing. One is China. And, you know, he has at this point come in and put very high tariffs on China. They're getting up toward 50 or 60 percent. He has also endorsed Trump.
And this is a bipartisan position at this point that we should revoke what's called permanent normal trade relations, that we should sort of permanently say we don't We don't want free trade with China. China is an adversary. China is not a market economy. And so I would expect to see that trading relationship go downhill. And frankly, I think we should want it to go downhill.
That doesn't concern me at all in terms of what the long-term strategy is. The second piece is the kind of global 10% tariff. And that's the piece that I think fits the view that I was describing at the beginning, that if we have a preference for making things in America, then we should want to have some sort of tariff that puts a finger on the scale.
And if other countries want to do the same thing, I think we should say that's reasonable. Tariffs at that level will create some friction that I think we should want in the system that encourages domestic production. It's not going to ruin the global economy or whatever else.
And then the third piece, which I think is the most complicated, is what they're calling these reciprocal tariffs, where they went country by country and looked at how big a trade deficit do we have with the country? How big is the imbalance? And the bigger that imbalance is, the bigger the tariff we're going to put on you.
And I think my interpretation is that that is clearly what I would call a negotiating tariff. What they're saying is, look, if we can get trade back to balance, we would love to get rid of these tariffs. We would love to have no extra tariff on you and have balanced trade with you. What we're not going to tolerate anymore is this situation where we have highly imbalanced trade.
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