President Donald Trump's rebalancing of global trade might come with political risks and some market volatility, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tells Newsmax the rewards are too great to ignore and the work on behalf of working Americans is long overdue.
"Let's just get it fair," Lutnick told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" in an exclusive sit-down Wednesday. "It'll be better for America, I get it, but we're not just America first and America exclusively.
"We are America first, but we love our allies and it's going to work out great for them as well."
Lutnick tells host Rob Schmitt in a nearly 25-minute interview that he is tasked by Trump to work trade deals "with the rest of the world," leaving the "big dog" challenge of China up to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trump himself "at the top."
"Everybody wants to make a deal. Of course they do, because we are the consumer of the Earth," Lutnick said.
"So the concept of: 'Oh, I'm not going to do business with America!' I'm going to do business with who?!" Lutnick continued.
"We're the customer, right? If you ignore the customer, you do it at your own peril. We all know that.
"We're the greatest buyer of everybody's products, so they all need to sell to us. They all want to sell to us. We want to buy from them, but let's do it fairly. We need to be able to sell our products; you can't block us out and take advantage of us," he continued.
It is a coming to "balance" the $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit that will ultimately calm nerves on the global market, Wall Street, and with everyday Americans, Lutnick told Schmitt.
"That's 4% of GDP that we give to other people," Lutnick estimated, based on a $30 trillion annual gross domestic product , including $1 trillion deficit directly to "big dog" China alone.
Just being the "right" president in the Oval Office, according to Lutnick, Trump can affect U.S. GDP by 2 to 3 percentage points annually.
"You take that awesome economy, the greatest economy in the world, and you put the right guy in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, you could have 2-3 points of GDP growth," Lutnick said, noting that is just on rebalancing trade without considering the repatriation of American manufacturing.
"We've let everybody else take advantage of us."
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