Wednesday was “Liberation Day” in America. President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs to be imposed on imported goods from dozens of nations. Liberal reporters, Keynesian economists, Democrats, and Libertarians were apoplectic.
It’s amazing that all these people can lie to Americans about the impact of tariffs when we had such a recent example of how they work. President Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel during his first term. We didn’t experience inflation from that, the sky did not fall, and all of Trump’s critics were proved wrong.
Trump’s tariffs drove the inflation rate down to 1.5% for the first time in a generation. Steel manufacturing started to come back to the US. It started to spark a manufacturing renaissance in the US before the 2020 election was stolen.
The tariffs generated hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from China alone. Trump’s tariffs on China were so successful, in fact, that the Biden regime took credit for them and kept the money. If the tariffs didn’t cause a catastrophe before (when all the critics said they would), why should anyone believe them this time around?
Donald Trump has been talking about the need for tariffs, to level the playing field for American companies and workers, since the 1990s. The people need to trust that he knows what he’s doing on this issue.
Here’s Vice President JD Vance talking about the ramifications of Liberation Day and what it’s going to mean for the American economy:
