Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts joins Glenn Beck to discuss the impact of the Trump administration's new tariffs on China, and the potential for a trade war with the world's second-largest economy. Glenn also talks about the impact on small businesses and other small businesses.
00:02:30.420Bottom line up front, because when you have smart people, which we do at Heritage, while the dogmas of the past are very important, they're instructive, the most important thing to pay attention to is what's going on right now.
00:02:44.080And the diagnosis of President Trump and his cabinet about what's going on right now with the deterioration of communities, the destruction of manufacturing towns, of basically the manufacturing capacity of the United States, is spot on correct.
00:02:58.160And so what we have said this week is we can support tariffs, particularly if they're reciprocal tariffs.
00:03:05.180And they are targeted on the worst violators.
00:03:08.060What the White House has announced in this initial version, I think there's going to be modifications to this, is broader than that.
00:03:13.420We think that it would be very prudent to do this incrementally, to really implement the reciprocal tariffs first, with a zealous focus on China, so that regular business people who are huge Trump supporters, I'm not talking like the Fortune 10 guys.
00:03:27.640I couldn't care less about them, really.
00:03:29.220We're talking about friends of ours who scraped, just like you did, to build your business.
00:03:33.360They told me, just on this trip to visit you, Glenn, that they're with Trump and they're with the idea of the reciprocity, but something with such a broad brush might be more damaging than the president intends.
00:03:45.480And Heritage, to sum up here, wants to support the sort of middle-of-the-road position.
00:03:50.080And the reason we're able to do that is because we read reality truthfully.
00:03:53.980Something has to change with the economic system.
00:03:57.540I want to go deeper on that, but I want to tell you, I got an email last night at 11 o'clock from a friend who said, I'm going to be out of business.
00:04:05.920I got an email at 5 a.m. this morning from another friend who owns a car dealership, wildly successful, but all of his stuff are imports.
00:04:15.880And he said, Glenn, all day yesterday with the tariffs, he said, all I did was field calls from people who said, cancel my order.
00:04:24.240He said, I am going to be out of business.
00:04:36.560Well, I'll tell you in your audience what I just mentioned to this new friend of mine who's a small business guy in the oil field services company.
00:04:45.080You know, people who may not be audience members of this show would think, oh, he's big oil.
00:04:48.780No, this guy pulled himself up from his bootstraps.
00:04:51.700He happens to buy all of his equipment from China.
00:04:54.620He's done that from the same supplier since 1995.
00:04:59.220This guy is with him and also with the president and vice president and you and me on the diagnosis of the problem, which is that this economic system has to change.
00:05:08.520But what he's saying is there is no American factory where he can get that product.
00:05:14.360He's happy to build one, but he needs a few years to do it.
00:05:17.160And so he said, Kevin, when I leave this lunch with you, I'm going at this small business to pay a $256,000 tariff bill that was retroactive.
00:05:28.520But he said, who do I send that cost to?
00:05:30.960He said, the people who are even smaller businesses, very few, very small oil and gas wells.
00:05:38.040And he said, they're going to go out of business and there's going to be a chain reaction that's very unintended here.
00:05:43.340And this goes back to the first question you asked me, Glenn.
00:05:46.000This is why at Heritage we think if there's a modified focus on reciprocal tariffs that focuses on China and the other bad actors, but there's a ramp, there's a timeline for these small businesses who are very aligned with trying to fix this problem to be able to adjust just like your friends.
00:06:03.240I think we can get there because just as important as the economics and sort of the political economy argument here is sustaining the political will for this administration, which is doing so many other good things.
00:06:15.020So I have been against tariffs my whole life.
00:06:17.940It's not one of it's not something in my wheelhouse that I always talk about.
00:06:21.480But I have found myself, as I had to explain this to the audience earlier today on my radio program, I find myself in a unique situation to where everything we have been doing doesn't work.
00:08:06.460He has he's the best negotiator I've ever seen.
00:08:10.320He's a businessman and he's one of the first presidents.
00:08:14.220In fact, I think the first president since Reagan that I actually trust loves America as much as me, not in it for himself, in it for the country.
00:08:23.900And so I'm sitting here going, I'm not going to give him a pass forever.
00:08:27.300I mean, a year from now, if we are really struggling because of this, I'm not going to be saying the same thing.
00:08:31.920But I think we have to let the chef cook the meal.
00:09:03.480And it's it's a quibble right now because I think it's going to change anyway, because the larger thing is also true.
00:09:08.960And the larger thing is what you explain, which is Donald Trump's great love for this country, a cabinet that I think is the best assembled in modern history.
00:09:16.640I think maybe since either Lincoln or I first time I saw the cabinet altogether, I said, look at the brains.
00:09:23.920I haven't seen this since the founding era.
00:09:30.780And I think, by the way, the star out of this and no disrespect to anyone else involved in the administration is going to be Scott Besant, because given Scott's success with the capital markets and he is making the point that you just made preaching some calm.
00:09:45.840There might be some some economic choppiness for an economic quarter or two.
00:09:50.980But to your point, anything that's beyond that signals that this isn't incremental enough in the change.
00:09:57.640And I think as conservatives, we can recognize that the current status quo, the status quo is just not working.
00:10:03.700That basically what leaders of the West, especially in Davos, are telling us is we're putting the patient, which is Western civilization, on palliative care.
00:10:53.560And forgive me for continuing the analogy.
00:10:56.140But what he's saying is, just like when you get cancer treatment, even though the prognosis may be very good, there's going to be a little bit of short-term pain.
00:11:03.520The treatment is going to be a little painful.
00:11:05.880I think the key thing is that we give him the opportunity to do the treatment so that in a year, this is working.
00:11:14.120And what we're saying at Heritage is focus on the reciprocity, focus on the trade abuser, starting with China, and continue to communicate about fairness, equaling free trade.
00:11:24.660And then you're going to keep the center right that elected him together.
00:11:27.360Okay, so here's the part of this that bothers me.
00:11:38.420You have to have not a continuation of the tax cuts we got eight years ago.
00:11:44.800We have to have actual tax cuts for people who are going to build businesses and hire people and a massive, I mean, chainsaw to regulation.
00:11:58.720If he doesn't get those next two pieces in quickly, tariffs will have, if we're lucky, they'll have an effect that's not negative.
00:12:08.700But they will not have the impact that they need to have until he can unleash and take all the regulators off of this engine.
00:12:38.600And especially given your point about, and it's so true, about the tariffs can't be standalone.
00:12:43.980They're never going to have whatever positive benefit they will have without being done in conjunction with deregulation, with cutting the budget, with the other treatment that you would give a patient with cancer.
00:12:55.560Now I think the best would be by Memorial Day.
00:12:58.340And the problem with that is there will be several weeks for the media to completely misconstrue about the best aspects of a reciprocal tariff.
00:13:06.180Hopefully, this is an encouragement to congressional Republicans to get with the program, to get this reconciliation bill done along the line to what you're saying.
00:13:15.460But this is really key, especially for the fuzzy math that's happening in Congress right now, to really cut the budget and to really pass real tax cuts.
00:14:48.580And look, I think that a couple of key figures in this drama have been really good.
00:14:53.980Speaker Mike Johnson, I think, has been a real stalwart on this.
00:14:56.940He was beset with a truly ridiculous ploy by a member of his conference on proxy voting that ended up,
00:15:03.660the only way for the speaker to handle this was to not have votes this week just because of the rules of Congress.
00:15:08.060It's foolishness like that, political game playing for clicks and campaign funds by members of the Republican Party that have gotten in the way of it.
00:15:17.540Only, to your point, Glenn, only Donald Trump can break that.
00:15:21.220He needs to take the verve with which he announced these tariffs yesterday and apply that to Congress getting this done now.
00:15:27.480And the beautiful thing about that, beyond the substance, is that politically, those on the political right who are Trump supporters but still not sold on this tariff regime will say,
00:15:38.160OK, I can be a little calmer about these tariffs if I see that they're being in conjunction, being done in conjunction with deregulation, tax cuts, and cutting the budget.
00:16:01.280I said the other day, this is as dangerous to his presidency as him in August standing in open fields and talking to supporters in open fields.
00:16:15.880That was dangerous for him personally.
00:16:58.840That's why when we started talking about it at Heritage, to your point about your team always speaking with one voice, we do that same thing at Heritage.
00:17:04.060Sometimes it can be a little messy, always very collegial, but we let everyone say their piece.
00:17:15.160Well, the people who argue against it have, they're either really tied to what they think is the success of an older regime and they've not caught up with the times.
00:17:50.880And yet what the folks who are saying, you can't support reciprocal tariffs at Heritage, is they have faith that we can have a one-way approach to this.
00:18:02.260That the United States can say, we are free trade absolutists, even when other people are imposing all these tariffs.
00:18:09.720And it's that kind of stuff that has meant that our manufacturing sector, along with over-regulation and other ridiculous policies, has become damaged.
00:18:22.400But as the vice president said at an event at Heritage on Tuesday, he said, folks, let's remember, this is going to take a generation to sort itself out.
00:18:30.080This is why we have to get going with it right now.
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00:20:35.600I think in the medium or long term, some jobs might come back, but I acknowledge your point.
00:20:40.240I think the goal is to reset the sort of Davos, Brussels, kind of New York-driven economic system in the world in which you have to bend your knee at the altar of globalization at the expense of American interests.
00:20:54.360And Trump's trying to completely upend that and bring people to the negotiating table.
00:20:58.860I am convinced, Glenn, that the purpose of this might be heartfelt from Trump's economic philosophy on reciprocal tariffs, but it's really about fairness.
00:21:09.840He's just trying to get every other country who's benefited on the backs of Americans to acknowledge that and come play ball with us.
00:21:18.840And he's confident enough in our ability to withstand the short-term economic pain that he'll be able to get us there politically and that the jobs will return because American investors will say, I've got confidence, I've got certainty, clarity enough to be able to invest.
00:21:33.900So one of the things that I felt important to express today again on my program is the jobs that are coming back.
00:21:46.980It's not the steel mill in Pittsburgh.
00:21:50.080If we rebuild Pittsburgh and make the same steel mills, we're just going to create a second disaster in Pittsburgh.
00:22:20.300I don't want you doing anything on the inside of that building.
00:22:23.480I want the private sector to do all the cloud servers, let them lose money when there's a new server farm that needs to be built.
00:22:30.020But I want castles protecting all of that infrastructure.
00:22:36.240There are things that we need to do that look over the horizon because in five years, you know, you look at what's happening with the Pentagon and they're talking about, you know, well, we've got a new F-47 coming out in 10 years.
00:23:10.360And I know that his key advisors get it.
00:23:12.800And I want to underscore the point that you make because I work with a lot of smart people and they, over the last several months, have convinced me that what you said about the new nuclear power plants is the single most important thing that we can do.
00:23:28.640Economically, from the standpoint of our government, it actually will help to foster, help to cultivate the kinds of new jobs that are very likely to come to the United States if we don't allow the Chinese Communist Party to continue to lap us.
00:23:41.540And it really is a revitalization of the energy industry.
00:23:44.600It can include fossil fuels and all the other renewables, but the really key thing is the new nuclear because we're not going to be able to implement the AI possibilities that are so beneficial to the economy without that energy.
00:23:57.280And if you don't have that, you have nothing.
00:24:10.720And I think it's the new thorium, right?
00:24:13.540New thorium plants, they're safer than already the safest form of energy ever devised by man, nuclear power, but it's much safer, it's smaller, and that's where the government can help.
00:24:39.480You go to other countries, their airports are beautiful.
00:24:42.820We're sitting with Soviet air, you know, style air traffic control rooms where they're passing, oh, here's a plane, let me get it to you on paper.
00:25:29.500Get the government out of the way, that alone.
00:25:30.980But then secondly, they can also, the government can make sure that they're really secure, that they can't be infiltrated by particularly the CCP or that.
00:25:48.140Even if the next two economic quarters are choppy, guaranteed, history will tell you, the United States in a year is going to be ascended again.
00:25:56.900And the really key thing politically, going into the midterms, the naysayers right now who, unlike you and me, who are offering some constructive criticism as friends of the administration on the universal tariffs, you know, these people don't want this to succeed at all.
00:26:10.860They will have to say, this is, in fact, the golden age of America.
00:26:18.140We actually take our place back prior to the progressive era, to when we were the first building trains across continents, when we were actually leading the world, you know, coming up with electricity, lighting up cities.
00:42:15.720Even people who disagree with him or don't quite know him well yet, when they get the
00:42:19.560opportunity to spend some time with him or really think about what he's saying, he's
00:42:23.260doing the kind of forward-looking thinking that you specialize in, you have in your career.
00:42:28.560He's the kind of guy bringing in, is the guy bringing in a lot of these, not necessarily doctrinaire conservative voices, but people who love America, to be able to build the America of 2040 and 2050, rather than fight the political battles of 1985.
00:42:43.700How is he on the, because I hear people say one of two things, conservatives, one of two things.
00:42:49.800He's, you know, he's in with all the Silicon Valley people.
00:42:53.180And the Silicon Valley people, they don't love America.
00:42:55.980Um, I hear that, or I hear he's fantastic.
00:43:00.660Um, how is he on the founding documents?
00:43:04.680How is he on the, what our true root is?
00:43:08.680I think he has a phenomenal understanding and it would be good to get great professor Beck to do an interview with him.
00:43:14.960Uh, I will say this on the Silicon thing.
00:43:45.920He, he maps to them rhetorically, but also to the specific question about Silicon Valley, a lot of those guys and gals are really with us more than we might recognize.
00:43:55.420And, and I'm a late comer to realizing that.
00:43:57.900And I tell them that, uh, but we ought to have a certain wariness about the whole group, because if they get inside the administration, like the worst ones get inside the administration, this is what Zuckerberg has been trying to do.
00:44:11.360We ought not think that they're our friends.
00:44:14.280And, and you know what, you know, I don't have anything about against Jeff Bezos, but he's so hepped up on steroids now.
00:44:21.920And I don't, I mean, he's like, you know, it's, it's, it's a little frightening.
00:44:26.340Um, and, and, and, and some of the other people are not people I would necessarily trust, but there are good people that are, that are in the administration.
00:44:35.360The ones that I worry about are the ones around the administration that you see.
00:44:39.260Um, but it's always the hangers on, you know, whether it's those folks or the hangers on and Washington around members of the Senate.
00:44:46.240Um, uh, I'm glad to hear you say that.
00:44:50.040Um, let me ask you, um, you have talked about a second American revolution.
00:44:57.360Liz trust said to me, this time we might be on the right side.
00:45:51.920And, and what I mean, when I say second American revolution is precisely what you're talking about, but to be one step more precise, I think about Alexander Hamilton.
00:46:01.140I mean, when he leaves Yorktown as Washington's aide to camp and the war's over the couple of years of peace negotiations, as you know, well, goes back to being a practicing attorney in New York city.
00:46:12.420He and his wife get really involved in building institutions, little institutions, lawyers, associations, social clubs, institutions that are less formal than schools.
00:46:22.960Although they contributed, they participated in building some of those, but that happened up and down the States in Virginia, huge upheaval.
00:46:30.180And it was an upheaval from the old light churches to the new light churches.
00:46:35.020In addition to being a theological one for Virginians, that's the American revolution implemented.
00:46:40.680The warfare was vital to winning the politics vital, but the real work always is in society and culture.
00:46:47.660And I think that's what we're doing now, November, 2024 was Yorktown.
00:46:53.220And after this Yorktown in 2024, each of us gets the opportunity, whether we have platforms like you and I do, or whether we have people who are in your audience or friends of heritage who aren't in the limelight, but doing even more important work to do what?
00:47:06.920To rebuild the American dream locally through our institutions.
00:47:11.480And that's why the administration cannot forget that as you're trying to repair the damage done to those people, that you do so in a way that keeps them on the team.