00:00Really going the extra mile. I want to just wish the American people a happy Labor Day.
00:07It's actually my favorite holiday because at the White House here, I'm the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
00:16And my job is actually to make sure blue-collar America in particular is fully employed and has their wages rising.
00:24So I just wanted to give you a little report card for President Trump in the first six and seven months of this administration.
00:36Glowing reviews here. Let's start with the amount of jobs we've created, 2.5 million jobs since President Trump took office for American-born citizens.
00:48That's truly remarkable. One of the craziest things you saw during the Biden regime when we had the influx of illegal aliens is we lost millions of jobs for Americans.
01:00And the job growth was primarily among the illegal alien population, as reported by the Department of Labor and Commerce.
01:08It was truly stunning. We've reversed that trend.
01:11Now, one of the most important metrics for workers, and the one I follow the most closely, is whether real wages are rising,
01:23which is to say whether the wage growth is outpacing inflation.
01:27During the Biden regime, you had 26 straight months, 26 straight months where inflation rose faster than wages.
01:36That's just death knell for blue-collar workers.
01:41So far, we're up 1.4 percent annually, second fastest in American history.
01:49And every single month, real wages have gone up in the Trump administration.
01:55Inflation is trending below 2 percent.
01:57So that's an incredibly stellar performance.
02:01What else can I tell you?
02:02Well, if you look at the big, beautiful bill, here's what's coming.
02:05And we're going to have an average of $15,000 tax cuts for blue-collar and middle America.
02:13That's a good deal.
02:14We're going to have $63 billion in benefits for no tax on overtime for seniors.
02:21The no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, is going to mean $1,500 a year more in the pockets of service workers.
02:31So that's a really big deal.
02:33And the last thing I'll tell you, in terms of the statistics, $8 trillion have come into this country in terms of pledged investment.
02:44And why is that important?
02:46From an economist's point of view, I can tell you that when you have investment, you have an increase in productivity.
02:53And productivity increases is the key to wage increases.
02:57So the future is very bright.
03:02Now, let's shift gears a little bit.
03:04I know you want to ask some questions about the court decision on Friday.
03:10I heard one of your colleagues talking about that to the world.
03:14This case is arguably the single most important economic case that has ever come before the Supreme Court.
03:26If the lower court's ruling is upheld, President Trump has correctly said, that will be the end of the United States because it will be impossible to defend ourselves from the fentanyl poisoning and all of the trade environment,
03:43which is hollowing out our supply chains and creating very dangerous problems for the American people.
03:50So let me break the case down for you a little bit.
03:54There's a piece in The Washington Times.
03:57It's out online today.
03:58It'll be in print tomorrow.
04:00I urge you to read.
04:02Here's a top line.
04:03If you look at the politics, reporters are making much of the fact that it was a 7-4 majority.
04:10If you look deeper at the numbers, it breaks down to the exact same kind of partisan weaponization of the courts that we're seeing in other decisions with respect to illegal immigration and other kinds of things.
04:27What you've got is six out of seven of the judges striking down the tariffs.
04:33Democrats, the one Republican was an H.W. Bush free market Republican.
04:40So you can read absolutely nothing into that.
04:44And on top of that, there were 12 states that intervened and argued against the Trump tariffs.
04:54Guess what?
04:55Every single one of them, yep, Democrat, blue state, Democrat governor, Democrat-controlled legislatures.
05:02And the most interesting thing, which you're not going to find widely reported in the press, but it tells a lot about the source of the lawsuit, five small importers, mostly importing crap from China,
05:17had big law firms.
05:20And when you track at least some of that money, it's alleged to track back to donors like the Koch Network, which are infamously anti-Trump, infamously free traders who have supported the offshoring of American jobs and the influx of illegal aliens for decades.
05:40So that's the that's the that's the root source of that.
05:43Now, with respect to the law, there were three big issues that are raised here that the Supreme Court will have to contend with.
05:54As I said, the dissent provides a very useful roadmap.
05:57Well, let me walk through them quickly.
06:00The first is whether or not the fentanyl killing Americans constitutes a national emergency, whether the trade deficit constitutes a national emergency.
06:12Of course, they do.
06:14It's it's unconscionable that communist China in league with the Mexican and Canadian drug cartels are killing Americans with fentanyl.
06:26And now this new designer drug is called nitidine.
06:30We're losing by the end of the day, we'll lose another couple of hundred Americans.
06:34It's over a million since the fentanyl war against America started.
06:39And if that's not a national emergency, I don't know what is.
06:43And by the way, the tariffs have helped start to stem that flow.
06:48So they're working with respect to the trade deficits.
06:51It's it's one point three trillion dollars a year, 18 trillion dollars of our wealth have been exported over the last several decades.
07:00That has had the effect of costing this country.
07:05Millions of jobs over 100000 factories.
07:10But equally important from an economic and national security point of view, what countries around the world have done exploiting their mercantilism is take apart key aspects of our supply chains, whether it's in pharmaceuticals, whether, as you've seen recently, with the rare earth magnets, a ball bearing.
07:31And there's all sorts of things that our defense industrial base and our manufacturing base simply can't produce anymore.
07:39We've got to get those back.
07:41So and also, I mean, there's a lot of ways you can think about this.
07:46The trade deficit leads to budget deficits and we're having to fund a lot of these deficits.
07:54That's eating into our ability to fund our own government.
07:58We're exposed by that debt to blackmail from other countries, including communist China, which holds a lot of our debt.
08:07So clearly on the first question, these unequivocally are national emergency economic emergencies and qualify under IEPA.
08:17The second point has to do with what is a semantical one.
08:24Basically, the question is whether tariffs constitute regulation of importation.
08:31Would it qualify as a form of regulating imports?
08:35And yes, of course it will.
08:37There's good case law.
08:39I go over this in my Washington Times article that that support that and nothing rules out the use of tariffs.
08:46And I think we're on very solid ground there.
08:50There was a third issue raised, which I think was a clear red herring, which is the claim by the majority, the partisan Democrat majority,
08:59that because the tariffs were alleged to be permanent, that that isn't covered by IEPA.
09:07The claim is ridiculous.
09:08Neither Howard Lutnick, Jameson Greer, Scott Bessett, myself, or the president himself ever said that these tariffs were permanent.
09:19If, in fact, people stopped dying from communist Chinese Mexican-Canadian drug cartel fentanyl tomorrow, the tariffs would be lifted.
09:30We would have no reason to do it by the same token.
09:33As soon as our trade deficit went away tomorrow, tariffs would be lifted.
09:39And, by the way, Barry the lead, every single year we have to revisit these tariffs with Congress.
09:48So, that argument doesn't, doesn't, doesn't, doesn't hunt as well.
09:53So, on all three of those grounds, I think we're in very good shape.
09:57Bottom line is we're optimistic that the Supreme Court will rule on this.
10:03We don't have to, the tariffs will remain in place at least to October and perhaps beyond until the Supreme Court rules on this.
10:12And, again, President Trump has said correctly, if the court does not uphold the Trump tariffs, it will be the end of this country.
10:24We will lose all sorts of bargaining power and the rest of the world will continue to do what it has been doing, have its way.
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