President Donald Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China will go into effect as planned, and how long they last will depend on the response from those countries, Dick Morris, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump and host of the Newsmax show "Dick Morris Democracy," said Saturday.
"Trump understands that the United States, with our population, our income, the personal wealth in this country and our freedom, our ability to buy and shop and acquire what we want is really unique in the world," Morris told Newsmax's "Saturday Report."
In colonial times, he added, countries like Britain, France, and Germany expanded their empires so they could create new markets, but the United States doesn't need to do that.
"What it needs to do is regulate access to it, so that it can use that access as a fulcrum and a lever to promote peace and freedom in the world," said Morris. "Under the old doctrines of previous 100 years, when a country offended us, we sent in troops or we alerted the media."
But with Trump, "what we do is we close our markets and we say, you can't import to the United States unless you control fentanyl, unless you open your car manufacturing to American ports unless you give us the chance to sell you as much as we buy from you," he added.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday that tariffs of 25% will go on Canada and Mexico Saturday, along with 10% tariffs on China.
Meanwhile, Morris said Trump has to correct "all sorts of misdeeds" from the Biden administration.
"We need to understand a little more about Donald Trump's motivations," he said. "Trump is a true, true patriot and a true believer in what the academics call American exceptionalism, that America was placed between two oceans with magnificent national resources, natural resources, and is to be a unique force for peace and freedom and liberty throughout the world."
Trump's view of American power is not primarily based on its military strength, but on its natural resources, which the United States should use to "make this a safer and more democratic world."
Trump also believes that America's main international strength is "that it is the place that you go to sell your products," said Morris.
"By setting the price of admission to the United States high with tariffs, and to insist that our goods and our products have access to other markets, we can be extremely powerful," he continued.
"So rather than military force, he uses our power, our natural resources on the one hand, and our power as a consumer, on the other hand, to make our way in the world. It's a totally new approach, a totally new theory, and one that seems to be working very, very well."
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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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