Today, the Supreme Court struck down a huge chunk of President Trump s trade agenda. Even two of Trump's appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, ruled against him. Trump then unleashed an unhinged tirade against the justices who dared to put him in his place.
00:01:06.820I don't want to say whether or not I regret it. I think their decision was terrible.
00:01:10.020I think it's an embarrassment to their families, you want to know the truth, the two of them.
00:01:17.720There's a reason why Trump is attacking our country's separation of powers.
00:01:21.520The New York Times writes the court's ruling, quote, amounted to a declaration of independence.
00:01:27.980But let's be real, it took more than 10 months to get here.
00:01:31.680Trump's illegal tariffs were in effect for 321 days before the court stopped the president's unlawful tax on the American people.
00:01:39.280And voters, well, they have felt the pain, with 60 percent of Americans disapproving of Trump's whiplash trade policy.
00:01:46.100But that is not stopping Trump. Breaking just minutes ago, Trump says he signed a new executive order imposing an additional 10 percent tariff on all countries.
00:01:57.160A new effort to bypass the court's ruling.
00:02:00.000Today really strongly said President Trump's tariffs policy is unconstitutional and illegal.
00:02:07.560He said, look, if you want to get tariffs, the way to do it is to go to Congress and ask for authorization.
00:02:13.920And so, you know, it's not a decision about any particular president.
00:02:19.300And the chief justice, writing for six justices, used very strong language about the president, to the president, saying, you know, the Constitution requires you to get this affirmative approval of the Congress.
00:02:31.660And you can't just do this on your own.
00:02:33.780In America, the stroke of the president's pen is not enough to impose taxes on the American people.
00:02:40.220And tariffs are nothing else but taxes, the chief justice said.
00:02:44.280And I think it's notable that this decision wasn't just written by some group of lefty justices, to the extent there even are any.
00:02:51.800It was written by and joined by six justices, including two justices appointed by Donald Trump himself, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both of them saying in full that these tariffs were unconstitutional.
00:03:05.440And so, you know, when I presented the argument to the Supreme Court on November 5th, I made about six key points.
00:03:12.260Every single one, Nicole, of those six points was accepted 100 percent by all six justices today on the Supreme Court.
00:03:20.160Where do you think things stands there?
00:03:22.820There's obviously some competing narratives here.
00:03:25.740The U.S. still maintaining that the bottom line is zero enrichment for Iranians.
00:03:29.840But then you had the foreign minister come on morning, Joe, yesterday saying, actually, diplomatic negotiations are apace.
00:03:36.040And that that is not the bottom line that the administration has, at least in private meetings, offered in discussions.
00:03:43.620What's your take on where things stand and whether or not you think limited strikes, which is what the Wall Street Journal has been reporting, could potentially be effective?
00:03:52.400Well, Jackie, first of all, it's hard to make sense of U.S. policy because it's somewhere between incoherent and opaque.
00:03:59.860The United States has assembled all these forces.
00:04:02.500It's not clear what the objectives would be, what would be our definition of success.
00:04:07.300It's not even clear what triggered it.
00:04:09.260The only new thing coming out of Iran the last couple of months is not their nuclear program, not their missile program, not support for proxies.
00:04:16.500It's their slaughter of Iranian dissidents, and it's not at all clear how American aircraft carriers and the like and airplanes could protect individual Iranians or bring about regime change or anything else.
00:04:28.860So I literally do not understand American policy.
00:04:32.340And by the way, the administration hasn't bothered to explain it.
00:04:35.400Congress hasn't bothered to hold hearings and ask questions about it.
00:04:40.020This idea of a limited strike, yeah, the president may feel compelled to do something because threats don't seem to have moved the Iranians.
00:04:47.440The problem with limited strikes, by definition, is what happens if they don't do the trick?
00:04:51.740Do you then double down or triple down?
00:04:53.920Then we find ourselves in a large war.
00:04:55.840And by the way, Iran has all sorts of ways to inflict pain on oil shipping, on oil refineries and wells, on American forces in the region.
00:05:04.460So we shouldn't kid ourselves, but simply because we want to keep an interaction limited, the Iranians do.
00:05:10.940It only takes one to start something, but it takes two to manage it and end it.
00:05:15.700Today in Seoul, they watched and cheered as if it were a play-by-play, a judge making the final call on the sentencing of former President Yoon Suk-yul.
00:05:24.680And after Yoon's fate was sealed, his critics celebrated.
00:05:33.160I was watching the martial law, which is something I'd only seen in history books, unfold in real time.
00:05:38.960I hoped for a harsher punishment so that history wouldn't repeat itself.
00:05:45.760Watching what appears to be a collapse of rule of law today, I am compelled to question whether we should proceed with an appeal or continue to participate in these criminal proceedings at all.
00:05:58.340It was December 2024 when President Yoon declared martial law.
00:06:03.160His middle-of-the-night announcement sent members of the military to parliament.
00:06:09.000Protesters protected the building and their democracy.
00:06:11.920Inside, the only thing that stopped soldiers from parliament floor, furniture deployed by opposition staffers.
00:06:18.860That bought time until a unanimous vote lifted martial law.
00:06:23.260From start to finish, it was only six hours.
00:06:26.120But it was, and has been, a test of South Korean democracy.
00:06:30.580To me, the most remarkable story is the resilience and the sustainability of South Korean democracy in the face of unprecedented challenges.
00:06:38.920Frank Genuzzi is the president of the Mansfield Foundation, which works on U.S. relations with Asia.
00:06:44.880He calls Yoon's the most momentous domestic trial in more than 30 years in a country that has a history of presidents who've been impeached, jailed, or overthrown.
00:06:53.360Over the last 14 months, South Korea has emerged from this process with due process sustained, rule of law sustained.
00:07:03.840Democracy itself was in the docket in this trial.
00:07:08.200And the South Korean people affirmed the value of that democracy, the resilience of that democracy, without personalizing the crime.
00:07:17.060The outcome from Yoon could have been much worse.
00:07:19.260The prosecution asked for the death penalty.
00:07:23.120Five other former officials were also convicted, including the former defense minister, who will spend the next 30 years in prison.
00:07:29.880Current President Lee Jae-myung, Yoon's longtime rival, has refrained from politicizing the trial, says Genuzzi.
00:07:37.340This allowed him to cool down the temperature a bit and also allowed him to focus really on where he needed to focus, which was his foreign policy priorities,
00:07:47.140sustaining an outreach to Japan and reassuring the United States that South Korea would be a loyal, faithful ally.
00:07:55.240Over the past year, South Korea has faced pressure over trade and promised to increase defense spending.
00:08:02.100It's been a balancing act for a democracy that has now sent a former president to prison for life.
00:08:09.500Richard, real quickly, let's say the president does indeed, does some kind of kinetic action in Iran.
00:08:16.700How destabilizing will that be to the region?
00:08:19.380Again, it all depends upon the Iranian response.
00:08:23.060I think internally, Iran has institutions, can probably absorb it.
00:08:26.920The real question is whether they retaliate and whether they go after the Saudis or go after shipping, in which case the oil prices go up.
00:08:33.500So in a funny sort of way, after we strike, if we do, it cedes the initiative to Iran.
00:08:38.580They've got to decide how they want to manage the crisis.
00:08:41.380So the markets are driven at this point largely by AI, right?
00:08:44.960We've talked about this, the magnificent seven mega tech companies that are not largely impacted by tariffs or mass deportations.
00:08:51.360But if you look under that seven, things are much shakier.
00:09:02.320Foreign investors are not feeling great about investing in the U.S.
00:09:05.820And the funny thing, as happy as people have been about the markets in the last year, look abroad.
00:09:11.260Markets abroad have been stronger than ours have.
00:09:14.620Well, the amazing thing is that they don't react badly to Trump anymore.
00:09:17.980They just kind of grin and bear it and hope to get through.
00:09:20.200And the positive for the markets is that they hope that Trump won't like regulation.
00:09:24.020But when something like this happens today, they really like it because it means that we do adhere to the rule of law here.
00:09:30.280And if we're a country that doesn't adhere to the rule of law, then expect your markets to fly out the window because nobody's going to invest a red cent here.
00:09:39.400This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:09:44.280Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people.
00:10:29.740It's Saturday, 21, February, in the year of earlier, 2026.
00:10:33.500Obviously, a lot of forces in the world are coming together to try to thwart President Trump's populist nationalist revolution here in the United States.
00:10:50.940Spencer Morrison of the great classic book, Reshoring.
00:10:54.140We're going to walk through in a moment all of this with tariffs and really economic nationalism is what it is and putting the country first.
00:11:01.100The American system is thought up by Alexander Hamilton.
00:11:04.820I want to get to the moment, but I've got Captain Fennell for an update.
00:11:09.360Number one, Captain Fennell, latest, we continue to pour assets into the Middle East, into the region, what they call effective as a breaking story about Portugal, the air bridge, more assets coming on the air bridge from Portugal in real time.
00:11:24.960Your assessment of where we stand with this, as President Trump refers to, a vast armada.
00:11:29.820Well, Steve, I think right now we're seeing, as you said, all the chess pieces are getting into the region, into the EUCOM, European Command and Central Command's area of responsibility.
00:11:42.220So from the eastern Mediterranean down into the Gulf of Oman, over on Friday night, it was reported that the USS Gerald R. Ford and its carrier battle group had chopped through, went through, transited through the Strait of Gibraltar and is now in the Mediterranean Sea.
00:12:00.220In the latest reporting on air asset updates, we basically have over 350 combat aircraft that are in the region, both afloat and ashore.
00:12:11.840And more importantly, we have over 100 tankers, which allows our combat aircraft, the F-16s, the F-22s, the Strike Eagle F-15s, the F-18s and the F-35s that have shorter range.
00:12:26.720Those tankers on your screen can get now fuel to be able to sustain what is called air supremacy over a combat area.
00:12:36.960Normally, we talk about air superiority, which is a temporal time and space where you have combat air control over a geographic area.
00:12:48.060But air supremacy is where you can control the air at all times in all in that whole geographic region for a sustained long, long period of time.
00:13:00.120And so it seems to me that we are moving in and preparing our forces for air supremacy.
00:13:05.680And I would just say to Mr. Haas, who talked about managing, if we do a strike, we'll have to manage some kind of deal with the Iranians.
00:13:14.200No, we're not going to manage anything. We're going to come in and if President Trump decides to use military force, we will destroy Iran's military, 100 percent of it.
00:13:24.300We will take down their SRBMs or medium range ballistic missiles and their naval forces and their remaining little air forces that they have and their air defense forces.
00:13:35.720And we will sit over the top of Iran and call fires down on anybody that tries to shoot off an air defense missile or a ballistic missile.
00:13:45.780They may get off one or two here and there, but they're not going to be able to sustain any kind of campaign against our allies in the region and against our forces.
00:13:57.360Captain Finnell, hang on for a second. I want to hold you through the break.
00:14:01.240I want to talk to you briefly about the this President Trump's incrementalism, what they're thinking about, at least leaking to the Wall Street Journal.
00:14:09.860We're going to leave you with Bruce Springsteen in the streets of Minneapolis, the revolt insurgency in this country.
00:14:15.680I might add we're going to talk about South Korea.
00:14:18.080Also, the president got life in prison, almost got a death sentence.
00:14:24.020Bolsonaro in Brazil, Le Pen in France.
00:14:27.360Youn in South Korea and President Donald Trump in the United States of America.
00:14:33.240Remember, Bonnie Willis and these people wanted to put him away for 20 or 30 years.
00:15:01.800The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition do.
00:15:05.020They just announced the Black Friday 30% off sale, the biggest sale of the year.
00:15:10.320The most impressive health and nutrition products in the industry are now 30% off, like Lean, the doctor-formulated weight loss supplement for people who want to lose meaningful weight without injections.
00:15:22.820Let me repeat that. Lean, the doctor-formulated weight loss supplement for people who want to lose meaningful weight without injections.
00:16:20.380Okay, we're going to get to E.J. and Tony and Spencer Morrison in just a moment, but there's updates.
00:16:26.980And Sam Fadis is going to join us in the second hour to go down and take another cut at this.
00:16:32.340Captain Fennell, the Wall Street Journal has done a pretty good job reporting because the Pentagon and the national security folks leak to them a lot.
00:16:39.880And it's a leak to try to put out into the public President Trump's thinking and get responses.
00:16:45.360What they're putting forward is President Trump's got a strategy, and it's kind of Trumpian.
00:16:50.560You saw that when he didn't do regime change back in June when he took down the total obliteration of the nuclear program.
00:16:56.720And in Venezuela, we took Maduro and the wife and cut a deal with the rest of the regime.
00:17:02.500This would be he would – he's got this deal he wants.
00:17:06.200If they're not there, he'll do a limited strike, dust them up a little bit, see if that opens up to him.
00:17:12.700If not, if it is, they'll go back and talk.
00:17:14.940If they tap him along, he'll hit it again, and he'll continue to do this until he reaches some point where he goes full kinetic.
00:17:22.920Is that a strategy that you think works, sir, from your years in naval intelligence?
00:17:29.400It's clearly a strategy that doesn't work, and we know that from the Vietnam War with Lyndon Johnson.
00:17:35.140It was a failed strategy that ended up us losing that war even though we were winning it.
00:17:40.020So the idea that President Trump is going to tap this along, I'm not really sure that that's what he'll end up doing.
00:17:47.860He may be signaling that now, as you mentioned.
00:17:50.600But I think what we saw at Midnight Hammer was not something that was incremental.
00:17:54.460That was a full-on strike against our nuclear facilities.
00:18:13.460If we do what you want is unload fire on the Iranian military, the Ayatollah, and the Mullahs, and crush it all, who owns the civil war that follows?
00:18:25.840Who owns the chaos that takes place in Iran?
00:19:11.240The reason he had to bail it out is that, as you remember, and this is why the ballistic missiles are on the target list now, is that Tel Aviv was getting crushed.
00:19:19.280Tel Aviv, and now Israeli media reports that, that Tel Aviv was taking incoming.
00:19:24.620President Trump had a very targeted, limited strike for obliteration of a program, but it was not a regime change strike.
00:19:46.880So this time, when the president comes out and says, I am going to take action because the Iranian regime will not give up nukes or will not stop terrorizing their people and murdering their people,
00:19:57.780we don't know exactly what the president will say is his final rationale or the full scope of his rationale.
00:20:03.640But when he says it, he will, in fact, execute forces that he has in the region to do that.
00:20:11.020But if we make the arguments about terrorizing their people and we take out the military and the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs, then we've come to the defense of the people.
00:20:29.940I don't know how you say it falls into chaos.
00:20:32.020The people have been in the streets protesting to take their government back.
00:20:35.900They only cannot take it back because the Iranian regime is murdering them in the dark of the night and in the streets, and they're terrorized.
00:20:44.300So these are all Jeffersonian Democrats that we have.
00:20:59.620The mainstream media is covering this up like it's a return to democracy and that this new South Korean government is some great ally of the United States and Japan.
00:21:08.640Gordon Chang's got a tweet out that I think is reality.
00:21:11.420Yet two days ago we came very close to having a death sentence on a conservative politician that at least tried to work with the United States as an ally.
00:21:22.340Do you believe the Chinese Communist Party and others are in back of this move in South Korea?
00:21:26.520And do you think you can count on South Korea now as a full ally in East Asia?
00:21:33.560I think the cold open with the MSNBC analyst on saying that South Korea is moving towards Japan is not correct.
00:21:41.840They're moving into the sphere of the PRC.
00:21:45.400And we just saw on the 18th of February, as Gordon puts in his tweet, we had B-52 bombers fly into the region, which is a routine operation for our air forces.
00:21:55.520And the South Koreans did not help escort those bombers.
00:21:59.820Only our FNA-18s did that are there in the theater on Peninsula.
00:22:04.340And after that occurred, the South Korean minister of defense called the commander of U.S. forces Korea in and dressed him down for why we were doing that.
00:22:13.020This has never happened before, as Gordon notes, and he's correct.
00:22:16.380And this is not, this is an indicator of where Lee is and where his head is at.
00:22:21.200So we need to be very careful and not allow the same people that told us that we should go along with six-party talks and all these other crazy schemes on the peninsula.
00:22:32.420We need to be careful where we're proceeding with South Korea, and we need to hold them to account.
00:22:39.220We have 25,000-plus American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen on the peninsula, and they're there to defend them.
00:22:46.280And if they're going to treat us like this, then we need to talk to them about that and where we're at.
00:22:50.760And I'm afraid, though, that this could be a ploy for them to justify removing our troops there,
00:22:56.500which would be something that would be very dangerous for America and the region's national security.
00:23:02.420Do you think, President Trump, should we insert ourselves now, since you've seen Bolsonaro or Le Pen,
00:23:07.600should we insert ourselves now in this situation with the South Korean government and say,
00:23:11.700it's just not acceptable to us, the guy got life in prison, sir?
00:23:14.820Well, we should have said something before the presidential elections and influenced the elections to the extent that we said this is what we stand for.
00:23:24.260And we didn't do that, and so we're eating the results of that in action.
00:23:29.780So today we should be saying something.
00:23:32.500I would hope that President Trump and Secretary Rubio would be contacting the South Korean president privately first to express our displeasure,
00:23:41.300how they reacted to our flights in the Yellow Sea and the West Sea and their lack of support and, in fact, dressing us down.
00:23:49.080And if they don't want to deal with us on that, then you have to take it public.
00:23:55.200Captain, we're not going to be back on the show until Monday, and we'll get you back on.
00:24:00.160You've been, as much as I may not like it, you've been correct in everything about this Iran buildup.
00:24:06.380What are you looking for over the weekend, the next 24 to 48 hours?
00:24:10.860What are you looking for as tells of what actually is going to happen here, sir?
00:24:14.960Well, I think the Iranians came out today or last night and said that they're trying to pin together some kind of compromise or some kind of deal.
00:24:52.220And do the Iranians try to play any games with sneak attacks or shutting down the strait or attempting to shut down the strait that they may try?
00:25:01.120So I think for now, it's back in the diplomatic court.
00:25:07.980Maybe we have another option to ratchet up.
00:25:10.740If they don't come to the table cleanly, maybe President Trump says, hey, I'm going to send the Bush now, and we'll have three carriers over there.
00:25:18.460So he's still got room to maneuver to get across to the mullahs that we're not going to accept this anymore.
00:25:27.140Again, as I said, this is about not Israel and other things, even though there's issues there, and I know you like to talk about them.
00:25:34.980But we have to remember, in 1983, the Iranians killed 241 Americans in Beirut, and they've killed Americans in Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and a host of other things.
00:25:46.360So this is not exclusively about Israel.
00:25:49.340This is about what Iran's done to us for 47 years, and the pimple is about ready to be popped.
00:25:55.320Let me – I also will remind you that President Reagan removed every other military and said it was the biggest mistake he made.
00:26:04.080And, of course, we made decisions to not hit back at the others, which I think you're correct there.
00:26:11.440You've brought up something here that I think people need to get their arms around, the great power struggle.
00:26:17.080Your point – we've got about a minute.
00:26:18.600Your point is, hey, when you put this amount of assets in as commander-in-chief, you don't really have options of not using it.
00:26:25.940Is that where we are right now in the greater war with the China and, unfortunately, the Russian partnership that right now, if we get this many assets in there, they're going to be used?
00:26:38.600Well, there's nothing as determinist, so we can always – and I think President Trump has demonstrated that he is ability to make decisions contrary to popular opinion or determinism.
00:26:51.120But I think we're in a position right now where everything's moved forward and the Iranians are not compromising.
00:26:57.080So if they're not going to compromise, there's only one other solution.
00:27:02.240Captain Fennell, where do we get your writings?
00:27:04.200I know occasionally you're putting stuff up on American Greatness.
00:27:19.240Captain Jim Fennell, former head of Naval Intelligence for the Pacific Fleet.
00:27:24.100Okay, we're going to pivot now to economic nationalism.
00:27:28.420Yesterday, was it a death blow, as the media once reported to President Trump's redoing of commercial relationships through trade deals and tariffs?
00:27:38.280Or did they shut the front door but open up the back door?
00:27:41.680We have two experts, Spencer Morrison of the classic book, Reshoring, and of course, our own E.J. and Tony, one of the smartest guys out there about the American worker.
00:27:53.900We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:28:13.260The world is getting more unstable and chaotic every day.
00:28:20.100It seems like everywhere you look, there's another crisis, another controversy, another conflict, or just outright catastrophe.
00:28:28.940You can't control what happens out there, but you can control how you prepare for it.
00:28:34.540You can make sure that no matter what happens, you have the basics covered in case one of these disasters reaches your doorstep.
00:28:43.700You know, things like having enough food to eat when the shelves are empty, and when it comes to my family's food security, I trust my Patriot Supply.
00:28:52.820They've helped millions of Americans get prepared, and they have over 90,000 five-star reviews.
00:28:59.460Right now, you can get their best-selling three-month emergency food supply kit for $100 off.
00:29:07.180My Patriot Supply almost never offers a deal like this.
00:29:11.500To take advantage of it, go to preparewithbannon.com.
00:29:15.840That's all one word, preparewithbannon.com.
00:29:20.120This food kit gives you 2,000 calories a day, lasts up to 25 years.
00:29:25.560And best of all, it's $100 off for a limited time.
00:29:30.640Go to preparewithbannon.com and get yours right now.
00:29:45.580You know, one of the things we try to do here, whether it's geopolitics, capital markets, everything related to the fight, the legal aspects, the fight for our country, obviously lots of economics, populist, economic nationalism.
00:30:03.140We always try to put you ahead of the curve by bringing the smartest people that really talk, understand topics and really talk it through.
00:30:11.600That's why Captain Finnell, and look, obviously, I disagree with a lot about this Iranian situation, but the reality is he's been dead spot on about the military aspect of this.
00:30:23.340What's interesting, Sam Fadis is going to join us later.
00:30:27.840I think a lot of this is going to come down to intelligence, exactly where the military in Iran is, where the Aitollahs are, not physically where they are, but what this really is, President Trump's incremental, because obviously he's running that up the flagpole.
00:30:41.420Is there a chance to do incrementalism here, or are the Persians just going to negotiate, which they're famous for, negotiate to have another negotiation?
00:30:51.340That's what we had Trita Parsi on last night.
00:30:53.700Now, he's quite pro-Iranian, but he brought up the part that I think has to be addressed immediately.
00:31:00.040We're not in direct negotiations with them.
00:31:02.640It's all this kabuki theater where they talk to, you know, they're in Oman, they've got Oman, they're here, they talk, and they go in another room and talk.
00:31:08.960Look, even Trita realizes that with this type of military surrounding them, you've got to stop with the formalities and drop the internet.
00:31:17.440You've got to get in a room with Kushner, and you've got to get in a room with Steve Witkoff, the president's emissaries, and see if there's a deal.
00:31:24.380If there's not a deal, then the balloon's going to go up, folks.
00:31:31.280Okay, President Trump, he's doing something to change 50 years of sellout of the American worker.
00:31:40.940Number one is the big, beautiful bill, which is the supply side.
00:31:44.180It maximizes, to the extent you can, the reinforcement of investment in capital equipment in the United States to bring manufacturing jobs back.
00:31:52.120Because President Trump has seen through the folly of gutting our manufacturing and trying to turn us into a service economy.
00:32:02.140Everybody that told you on Wall Street and all these puns were not kind of wrong, they're dead wrong.
00:32:06.940Now he's redoing the commercial relationships.
00:32:08.820He's using trade deals and tariffs as a forcing function to force international operations to make their plant and equipment here and therefore hire American workers and have this whole ecosystem around manufacturing.
00:32:23.060That will rejuvenate our economy based upon a plan written by Alexander Hamilton that is just one level down from the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution.
00:32:34.040The report on manufacturers that the genius Alexander Hamilton wrote in his earliest days as the first secretary of the Treasury.
00:32:43.420And you heard Scott Besson talk about it yesterday at the Dallas Economic Club.
00:32:47.080And I want to reinforce Rob Sigg and Parker Sigg to play that entire thing yesterday shows you the difference between Real America's Voice and other channels.
00:32:56.540Other channels are going to run around and talk about the noise of the day.
00:34:21.920If we go back to this particular law, though, from 1930, it actually gives the chief executive the ability to issue tariffs up to 50 percent.
00:34:32.320And if he wants to go beyond that, he can issue outright embargoes.
00:34:36.400So, again, this is an incredibly powerful law.
00:34:38.840And in order to do that, Steve, what he needs is to find as a fact, the law says, that there has been some kind of discrimination against U.S. commerce.
00:34:48.080Well, that is an incredibly broad definition.
00:34:52.340It's a very large umbrella under which you will find everything that Trump is trying to fight against.
00:34:58.220When the Chinese engage in intellectual property theft, when they engage in subsidization of industry and dumping of products here in the United States, when Canada imposes quotas on U.S. dairy, when you have American automotive manufacturers who face unfair trading practices, whether they be tariff or non-tariff barriers in the EU.
00:35:20.620I mean, you name it, all of the different things that were cited in that book that Greer and his folks put together last year.
00:35:29.660All of the different unfair trading practices from around the world, all of these different discriminations against U.S. commerce that are faced, that are instituted by other nations, again, from literally around the globe, everything falls under the umbrella laid out in Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.
00:35:49.640And I believe, actually, if I remember the opinion correctly, in Justice Kavanaugh's dissent, I think he actually mentioned this law as well in his list of about half a dozen different tariff authorities the president can use.
00:36:02.920So, Steve, what I'm getting at here is this.
00:36:05.360Although getting rid of IEPA, saying IEPA no longer can be used to institute tariffs, that does limit the president in terms of his speed and his flexibility with which he can implement tariffs.
00:36:17.140But that's about it. This changes, in my opinion, this changes nothing in the long run.
00:36:23.060It has a short-term impact on the president's trade policy, absolutely.
00:36:27.320And again, it affects, I think, the speed and the flexibility he has in terms of making decisions with these negotiations.
00:36:34.320He can't necessarily make the snap decisions, turning tariffs on and off.
00:36:38.220But, again, as long as he can demonstrate some kind of discrimination against U.S. commerce, as the law says, he finds it as a fact, it's a blank check.
00:36:48.560Spencer, you've written the definitive – E.J., we're going to come right back to you.
00:36:53.400Spencer, you've written the definitive book on reshoring the time he couldn't have been perfect, came out last year.
00:36:58.420Your assessment, E.J. saying, hey, 301s, 232s, all the stuff we used in the first term.
00:37:03.840And I know Navarro and those guys, Jamison Greer, they got all the analysis done.
00:37:06.860They're going to springboard this thing forward.
00:37:08.940Your assessment, sir, since you're the expert.
00:37:13.520Thanks for having me on the show, Steve.
00:37:17.500The reality is that there are many, many different legal avenues for President Trump to impose further tariffs.
00:37:23.760This is sort of a hiccup along the road.
00:37:28.420But, ultimately, I think this is a good opportunity for the president to sort of take stock and look at what we actually need to do to set up a trade policy that's not going to just be something that's at the whim of the presidency,
00:37:43.700but change the entire sort of economic cultural shift.
00:37:48.440Right. And what we have to do is we have to get back to the situation where we were, you know, 50 years ago, where tariffs were not simply being imposed sort of on an ad hoc basis,
00:37:59.160but were baked into the fabric of the American legal and economic landscape.
00:38:04.460America prospered under the American system, which was derived, again, from Alexander Hamilton's report on manufacturers all throughout the 1800s,
00:38:15.400that period where America industrialized and the average worker grew to become the most prosperous worker in the world.
00:38:23.500All of that was done under a high tariff regime.
00:38:26.920America had the highest average tariff rates in the world, over 40 percent, over 40 percent.
00:38:32.520And that was at a time in history when we didn't have bulk shipping.
00:38:36.140That was at a time when, you know, foreign trade was not such a large proportion of our overall economy.
00:38:42.680Okay. So what President Trump needs to do at this stage.
00:38:51.400You're saying, hey, the individual trade deals and redoing the commercial relationships is fine.
00:38:56.460But you're saying we have a deeper he has a deeper challenge here.
00:38:59.880We got to bake it into the into basically a tech, a tech bro oligarch and Wall Street lords of easy money that are adamantly opposed to what you're saying, sir.
00:39:10.880Right now, they're spending all day in the in these frickin frontier labs trying to get rid of the American worker.
00:39:16.820So how are we going to I agree with you a million percent.
00:39:20.100Tell me how President Trump is going to do that when you got both Wall Street, the corporate America and most importantly, the tech bros that spit on the floor as soon as you mention that, sir.
00:39:31.920I mean, it's an uphill battle, but it begins and ends with the American people.
00:39:35.600President Trump has to take this case directly to the American people and have people understand exactly what's going on.
00:39:42.740I think that this needs to be packaged in a way that people can understand.
00:39:46.180Everybody understands, you know, that national security is is an important national security is of utmost importance.
00:40:14.020And the entire country is over the last 50 years has been integrated into a global economic system and in such a way that the economy is now dependent on foreign countries products.
00:41:04.440This is why you guys are going to be the forefront of changes.
00:41:07.900The House Trump could not get if you put it to if you go back to the Republican conference and you go to the Hassett rule, which you have to have a majority of of the majority.
00:41:19.040Right. You have to have enough in the House conference to put forward his trade policies today.
00:41:23.740If put to a vote of the House, let me be brutally frank, would not do it because they're still neoliberals.
00:41:31.240They're they're they're they're believe in the school.
00:41:33.480They're raised on the mother's milk of Milton Friedman.
00:42:10.640And I'm not necessarily sure you need to get different people in there.
00:42:13.980I think it actually was Milton Friedman.
00:42:17.460One of the things he said that I definitely agree with was that getting the right things through Congress is not necessarily a matter of getting the right people in there, but giving the wrong people the right incentives.
00:42:28.300In other words, it doesn't matter who you put in Congress necessarily, but if they know that voting against these things will result in their loss in the next election, then chances are they're going to change their mind and they're going to vote the way the people want them to.
00:42:42.120So I think the problem is maybe more so we have to change the hearts and minds of more voters out there.
00:42:48.360We need to get people to understand that the kind of ivory tower world from which Milton Friedman was often speaking is not what we have today.
00:42:57.700Look, if you are coming at this problem, or I should say if you're coming at any kind of situation from a perfectly idealistic world, then you would never want to impose tariffs.
00:43:08.720In other words, if everything is already fine, if there is no problem, you don't want to then impose tariffs.
00:43:14.460If the patient doesn't have cancer, you don't want to give them chemotherapy.
00:43:19.840In the mercantilist strategy of the Chinese Communist Party, right, which they learned from the British East India Company, we're going to take a short commercial break.
00:43:28.120Spencer Morrison, the author of Reshoring, and the great E.J.
00:43:32.720And Tony, who knows more about the American working man than anybody in the United States of America.
00:43:39.100Also, we're going to Georgia in the crime of the century.
00:43:46.200Imagine having the world's most connected financial insider feeding you vital information.
00:43:51.360The kind of information only a handful of people have access to.
00:43:56.400And that could create a fortune for those who know what to do with it.
00:44:01.300That's exactly what you get when you join our frequent guest and contributor, Jim Rickards, in his elite research service, Strategic Intelligence.
00:44:10.880Inside Strategic Intelligence, you'll hear directly from Jim and receive critical updates on major financial and political events before they hit the mainstream news.
00:44:22.000He'll put you in front of the story and tell you exactly what moves to make for your best chance to profit.
00:44:28.980As a proud American, you do not want to be caught off guard.
00:44:32.200Sign up for Strategic Intelligence right now at our exclusive website.