The Trump administration's trade strategy is all going according to plan, even with the turnabouts on tariffs, as it addresses the United States' "national emergency" of being too dependent on foreign goods, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Sunday.
"In the previous administration, you can say, if you're thinking about it in the football analogy, is that they were running out the clock," Hassett told CNN's "State of the Union." "And what's going on now in the Trump administration is, across a wide array of policy areas, we're in a two-minute offense."
Part of the offense is the push for a reconciliation bill so that Americans can get tax relief, while the other parts include deregulation and trade policy, he added.
"The whole point of the trade policy is to address the national emergency that we're too dependent on foreign products in the U.S., especially if we were at a time of conflict, and we're doing something about that," said Hassett.
Meanwhile, 130 countries have agreed to negotiate with the United States on tariffs, with President Donald Trump agreeing to pull their rates down to 10%, he added.
"It's kind of almost a two-world system," said Hassett. "There's a process about China, and that's very, very nascent, if at all, and then the process for everybody else. So the process for everybody else is orderly, it's clear."
The emergency, he added, is because "the influence of China into every little corner of our country has just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger," and there is an "uncomfortable amount of Chinese input in our actual weapons systems... President Trump thinks it's urgent that we address these matters."
Hassett also stressed that while he is the director of the National Economic Council, its chairman is actually Trump.
"What President Trump does is, he sets out a path for everybody, for Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, and for Jamieson Greer on how they would move forward on a particular policy matter," said Hassett. "Then it's my job as director to make sure that the president's wishes are being fulfilled. I'm kind of there to help everybody succeed."
He added that the staff has been working hard on trade deals, over this past week, "we had a few of these deals that are so close to baked that we could announce that we have a deal in principle."
And as there was so much progress so rapidly, Trump went for the "10% pause," he said.
Hassett also commented that the Trump trade policies will benefit the nation's small businesses.
"The small business person who's concerned that the price of their goods is going to be higher when they sell it to their customers, the thing that they also have to remember is that these policies, which the president successfully enacted in the first term, are going to increase the demand for labor, increase wages, up by almost $6,500 in the first three years of the Trump administration," he said.
And even if the price of a cup of coffee goes up, "that person walking into the coffee shop is going to have a lot more money," said Hassett. "In the 15 years after China entered the WTO, real wages went down. So wages went down by more than prices, as we thought these cheap goods were going to revolutionize America. In fact, it was the opposite."
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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