Secretary Bessent sat down with Tucker Carlson to discuss President Trump’s tariff plan and its impact on the middle class.
Secretary Bessent select interview quotes:
TARIFFS
“The good news is, we have President Trump’s previous term, when everyone said none of this was going to work: ‘Oh, the China tariffs are going to do this. They’re going to cause inflation.’ They didn’t. ‘This is going to hurt working-class Americans.’ Well, guess what? Working-class Americans-hourly workers-did better than supervisory workers. The bottom 50% of households-their net worth increased faster than the top 10% of households.”
“…The distribution of equities across households, the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities, 88% percent of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12%. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills. They rent their homes. They have auto loans. And we’ve got to give them some relief.”
MANUFACTURING
“Bring your factory here … That’s the best solution for getting away from a tariff wall. Move your factory from China, from Mexico, from Vietnam-bring it here.”
“We’re going to re-lever the private sector. The private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years. This is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again, because it’s been hemmed down by excessive regulation, and it’s been crowded out by the government.”
NATIONAL SECURITY
“We’ve gone to a highly financialized economy. We’ve stopped making things-especially a lot of things that are relevant for national security. I think one of the few good outcomes from COVID was we had a beta test for what maybe a kinetic war with a large adversary could look like, and it turned out that these highly efficient supply chains were not strategically secure. We don’t make our own medicines. We don’t make our own semiconductors. We don’t make our own ships anymore.”
“Economic security is national security. President Trump and I have talked about that a lot. This is a national security issue that we’re seeing here.”
CHINA
“The Chinese business model and economy are the most imbalanced in the history of the modern world. We’ve never seen anything like this in terms of their export level relative to GDP, relative to population. So, I think it is going to be very difficult for them to try to change the model. They’re trying. They’re in a deflationary recession-slash depression-right now. They’re trying to export their way out of it. And we can’t let them do that.”
“Finally, academics are saying, ‘Oh gosh, the American workers never recovered from the China Shock. What a surprise.’ President Trump sensed it 40 years ago … he has promised the American workers that the old standard of living can come back. Because what we’ve seen over the past at least 20 years since the China Shock-but more like the past 30-are these massive distributional problems, where the coasts have done great, yes, and the middle of the country has just seen quality of life, life expectancy, decline.”
TAX BILL
“We’re pushing to get the tax bill done so we can guarantee low taxes, full depreciation within the first year.”
“We’ve taken in about $35 billion a year just on the old tariffs-not the new ones. In the CBO window, that’s about $350 billion, which pays for a lot of the President’s promises: no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, and making interest deductibility available on autos made in the U.S. Think what the President is doing here: he is backing into an affordability solution for the bottom 50% of wage earners. They are the ones who will benefit from all four of those programs.”
ENERGY
“We’re working with Secretaries Burgum and Wright on energy security. We’re working on getting the regulations down.”
“We’re working on getting the regulations down … Taiwan Semi, the biggest semiconductor manufacturer in the world, needs permits. Lee Zeldin, the EPA commissioner, is working to push through all the permits they need. Because we’ve just gone into this regulatory morass where it takes so long to get things done in this country.”
UKRAINE
“It was a real economic partnership. They put in assets. We put in loans through our development banks. We put in American know-how. We don’t make any money unless they make money. You know who didn’t like that? People with their hands in the till. Because we were regulating the flow of money. That’s part of the glitch. I’m hopeful that it was a bug, not a feature.”
“We’re expecting a Ukrainian technical team next week. I’m hopeful we can get it signed and return to a win-win. President Trump’s plan was: Sign with Ukraine, show Russia we stand with Ukraine economically, and bring Russia to the table. The sequencing’s been thrown off-but I think we can fix it.”
U.S. DOLLAR
“No one should listen to anyone in the markets talk about the U.S. dollar other than President Trump or myself. We’re the only ones who speak for this administration on dollar policy. We have a strong dollar policy. And we’re putting in all the ingredients to make sure the dollar is strong over the long run.”
“Can it go up and down in the short run? Sure. Can there be bilateral moves between the dollar and other currencies? Sure-that’s what I made a living doing. But over time, if we put in sound fundamentals and follow through on this transformation, the dollar will do great-and so will the American people.”
Watch the full interview here.