Former President Donald Trump, in an interview with members of the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, argued that his plans for higher tariffs for foreign manufacturers, combined with other plans including tax cuts, will return the United States to prosperity, despite claims from a bipartisan group that said his proposals would add $7.5 trillion to the U.S. debt.
"To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff," Trump told his interviewer, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. "It's my favorite word."
That's because stiff tariffs on foreign manufacturers wanting to sell goods in the U.S. will boost U.S. manufacturing, Trump said.
"We will bring the companies back," he said. "We will lower taxes further for companies that will make their product in the USA. We will protect those companies with strong tariffs because I am a believer in tariffs. I am not sure you are. I don't think you are."
Micklethwait pointed out that the bipartisan Peterson Institute has said Trump's tariffs plan will bring in just $200 billion, but Trump argued that he was just getting started on imposing tariffs when he was president when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
"Tariffs are two things," he said. "No. 1, it is for protection of the companies we have here and, the new companies that will move in. We will have thousands of companies coming into the country ... we won't have somebody undercut them."
Trump pointed to Detroit as an example of his plan.
"We have been talking about Detroit coming back for 40 years, and it has never come back and it is very dependent on the car industry," he said. "They have lost 60% of their business over a long period of time."
He also rejected an argument that his plan for tariffs would plunge the U.S. into a trade war.
"All you have to do is build your plant in the U.S., and there are no tariffs," Trump said.
Meanwhile, he said other countries, including China and India, as well as the European Union, are tough on U.S. sales.
"They don't want anything from us," Trump said. "We have deficits that are crazy. We won't have them anymore. We will put tariffs on them ... the higher the tariff, the more likely it is the country will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn't have to pay the tariff."
Trump also argued that his tariffs kept foreign countries from dumping substandard steel into the U.S.
"China, as you remember, was dumping steel at levels nobody had seen before and I put a 50% tax on that," he said. "It was what they called dirty steel, not good steel, a bad thing for structural components of buildings and things like that. They were dumping crap into our country. I raised it to 50% [tariffs] and they stopped dumping steel. I saved our steel."
Trump also argued that tariffs will also help with foreign policy, and said U.S. allies have taken more advantage of American industry than "our enemies."
"Our allies are the European Union," he said. "We have a trade deficit of $300 billion dollars with the European Union. Our allies are Japan."
He described the late President Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated, as a "great friend of mine," who questioned why the U.S. was not negotiating with Japan.
"I renegotiated a whole trade deal from a little bit of a disadvantage because I was stuck with a bad deal," Trump said. "We have the worst trade deals all over the world."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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