Donald Trump and a Tariff Love Story — Emergency Powers, Real Costs

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Donald Trump and a tariff love story. Yeah, we’re gonna break down. Tariffs. We’re a year. It’s been a year, baby. Trump’s a year in. We’re gonna talk a little bit about the tariffs. We are still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on these emergency. Emergency. Again, we do this all the time. I’m gonna quote Inigo Montoya.

from Princess Bride. You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means. Problem. We take words and we expand upon them in many ways. Emergency tariffs. Again, we’ve just got another weekend tariff spree against Europe in regards to Greenland. We’ll see where that’s land over the next couple of days. Again, this is trying to in essence,

you’re shaking the Europeans down, we’re going to either, you know, charge you tariffs, which again, which attacks on us here, I’ll get into that a bit, or hand over your land.

Now, again, we’ve talked about Greenland and we’re watching the various different sycophants out there twist themselves into knots trying to justify this. I don’t get it. Anyway, emergency tariff authority. Basically, he can declare, I do declare, do decree an emergency. I do declare and do decree what countries and goods he can hit.

with these border taxes and what rate. Essentially, he can use tariffs whenever he wants for whatever reason he wants. I don’t see how this is the slightest bit legal.

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Tariff apologists are going to say that the tariffs show the use of border taxes for foreign policy. Taxing power, again, I’ve talked about this before. The journal’s talking about it today is in the Constitution of the United States, which is our rule book, which we should probably follow, probably shouldn’t discard. That’s under the purview of Congress.

The US Trade Representative, Jameson Greer, said that if the Supreme Court overturns Trump’s tariffs, the president will quickly rely on other tariff authorities, but they’re a little bit more limited. We shall see. Again, I’m fair. I’m honest when it comes to the rule of law. What I mean by fair and honest. My belief in it that we are a nation of laws, not of men.

I was vehemently against Joe Biden when he said, I do declare and do decree that, hey, nobody has to pay back their student loans. What the hell, what do you mean? You can’t do that. Again, this is an overreach from the executive branch of government. Let’s get into the numbers, shall we? As it turns out, shocker here. It’s funny.

I had this sent to me yesterday. There’s massive study done in regards to who’s paying tariffs. Who’s paying? Americans are the ones paying for tariffs. says that the big study was done. I was like, what’s the study? Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations? No crap, Sherlock. We know this. well, anybody who can’t understand how tariffs work. Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the

higher cost of US tariffs. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his historic tariffs deployed aggressively over the past year as both a revenue raising and foreign policy tool will be paid by foreigners. Such assertions help to reinforce the president’s bargaining power and encourage foreign governments to do deals with the United States. Again, economy has not fallen off cliff.

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Okay, we again, it’s a bifurcated economy without a doubt. We’ve talked about that here on the program, but certain areas most certainly have kept moving along. Study that was done. The impact of tariffs. Okay, they in their feelings is that yeah, it’s slowly but surely show up to an even greater degree. Many people have been saying in 2026, these costs are going to continue to be passed down.

Basically, various different studies is one out of Europe, one by the budget lab at Yale, economists at Harvard Business School, you know, looking at the numbers. And again, this is not an opinion piece. This is a numbers study. Okay. I know I, you know, kind of tilt my head a little bit when I see economists from various different institutions like this. But you look at the raw numbers, $4 trillion of shipments between January of 2024, and November of

25. Okay. The Keele Institute found that foreign foreign exporters absorbed about 4 % about 4 % of the burden of last year’s tariff increases by lowering prices. American consumers and importers absorbed 96%. Now this is something that’s obviously

changed volume had a significant effect on trade volumes. Indian exporters maintain their prices but reduce the volume of shipments to the US by 18 to 24 percent relative to the European Union, Canada and Australia. Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs function as a consumption tax on Americans. There’s no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the United States in the form of tariffs. No kidding.

The $200 billion in additional tariff revenue last year was paid almost exclusively by Americans and this they believe will fuel higher prices down the road. again, I’m going to also break down some of the other nuances when it comes to tariffs. See, it was a great, great bit of work done by fund manager George Noble on this.

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and I’ve looked at the numbers and we talked about China having a $1.2 trillion trade surplus in 2025. That’s the biggest they’ve ever had in history of 20 % year over year. 20%. This is with Trump’s maximum pressure tariff campaign. earlier part, let’s go back to the other part of last year.

Tariffs on China escalated as high as 145%. Later on, deal brought them down to the high 40s, low 50s range. January of 2026, we got a new 25 % tariff on any country doing business with Iran. Iran’s biggest trading partner, China.

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Right now, right now, and this is the Tax Policy Center, they estimate that the average tariff rate on all US imports is sitting at around 17%. Budget Lab at Yale estimates these tariffs raise consumer prices by 1.2%. Now, 1.2%, that’s about $1,700 per household. They feel that all of this is gonna get further passed on down to consumers in 2026.

But you have to also take a look at the jobs data because that was one of the selling points, correct? Correct me if I’m wrong, was jobs. After the tariff announcement, factory employment fell by 68,000 jobs. The tariff exposure back in 2018 to 2019, that was Trump’s first term when he put tariffs on, reduced manufacturing employment by 1.4%.

Tariffs create few jobs once you account for higher input costs something that we have explained here on the program So I’m move all these jobs back to the United States. Well again certain materials need to be Procured from other areas of the world those costs go up again. It’s just a numbers game people That’s all it is just and it doesn’t matter what it is. Okay, you can you can

replace Trump’s tariffs with Barack Obama’s highest corporate tax rate in the world, which was the case under his presidency. What happened? Businesses moved. I mean, that was the greatest. mean, they should have statues in Dublin, Ireland to Barack Obama everywhere because the amount of businesses, in particular pharmaceutical companies that moved to Ireland via a tax

inversion where a smaller foreign entity acquires a larger American entity that was done solely because, hey, their corporate tax rate was much lower. I remember at the time, Joe Biden was calling these as he was vice president, all right, it’s unpatriotic companies, it’s terrible. And Elizabeth Warren wanted to do something about it. And I said, very simply, the CEO of any publicly traded company has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

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And that duty includes lowering costs. And if it’s legal to lower one’s costs by moving it to a different locale, you do that!

Anyway, same thing holds true with Donald Trump’s tariffs. Same scenario. Certain companies move production from China to Vietnam, to Mexico, to Malaysia. Supplies didn’t come back to the United States. They just found a less expensive way around the tariffs. Exports from China to the United States fell by 20%.

But everywhere else, they grew up 26 % to Africa, 13 % to Southeast Asia, European Union up 8%. China maintained 14 % of global exports, four times more than India and Vietnam combined. Trump didn’t destroy China’s export machine, he just redirected it. That’s all. Now.

this as well. get this sometimes from listeners and you know, bless your heart and I don’t mean to be rude, but the notion that these tariffs are going to replace the income tax that they are going to eliminate the deficit is absurd, quite frankly. Absurd. The most. You can look at a super optimistic case.

Sue, I will go crazy optimally. Let’s say they were at five, we’ll say $500 billion in tariffs, which is over $100 billion more than the largest estimate out there. I’ll throw in another $100 billion. Our budget deficit last year was over $2 trillion. It doesn’t come close. Income tax revenue, $2 trillion. How do you make that?

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math work. Okay. Let me again, I mentioned this, I think I mentioned this past weekend on the radio show you want undefeated. Okay, we’ll give you the Indiana Hoosiers football team this year. You know, it’s been undefeated forever. Year in year out never never taken a loss. Math. Math never takes a loss. Now, again, we’ll see what happens.

with the Supreme Court moving forward, how Trump is going to react to this. know lawsuits have already been filed, people looking to recoup, know Costco was already filed lawsuits, already talked about securities that were put together based upon this. I don’t know. I don’t know. However, again, if the Supreme Court comes down and does the old,

King Solomon split the baby and try to almost, you know, word it in some ways. Okay, can’t do this anymore. But let bygones be bygones. That would be probably the best scenario out there. We shall see. We shall see. And again, I don’t think we’re going to hear anything now that Trump is a Davos and he’s threatening tariffs on various different European nations. I don’t know if the Supreme Court’s gonna even want to get itself involved in this mess. Again, I mentioned this before.

Okay, I don’t have any problem with reciprocal tariffs. Okay, you’re doing this to us. We’re gonna do it to you. I get it. I get it. And I’ve talked about this for years here on the program. They put together these trade deals and then there’s a TPP and all these other things that are 1000s of pages long. To me, a trade deal is one page. One page, okay, we’re not going to tear up your stuff. You don’t tear up our stuff and we’re done.

That’s not even a page, okay? It’s a couple sentences.

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That’s how they should be crafted. And that’s okay. Okay, that’s the direction we should be heading into. Trying to move supply chains back to the United, it’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen.

certain areas of the country that have you’ve talked about been hollowed out for it’s not just because man a lot of manufacturing moved overseas there’s other reasons as well to think that they’re magically going to come back they’re not We don’t have the workers nor have we trained the workers to do these jobs I talked about the conversation with the guy from brooks sneakers CEO from brooks sneakers No matter how high they raise

the tariffs. They don’t have the people here in the United States that can stitch the sneakers like they do where they manufacture them in Vietnam. So that’s where they’re going to be made.

Again, reciprocal, okay, across the board, emergency nonsense has got to go. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.