Shownotes Transcript
Well, folks, we're going to get to the continued chaos in the markets in just one minute. What does it all mean? What does the incipient China-U.S. trade war actually mean? This is what real media looks like. The Daily Wire delivers hard-hitting news led by facts, not feelings. We will cut through the noise with unapologetic truth. When you become a Daily Wire Plus member, you unlock all of it. Ad-free podcasts, the best in investigative journalism.
and premium entertainment that is reshaping culture. America needs bold voices now more than ever. Join the fight today at dailywire.com slash subscribe. There was a lot of puzzlement yesterday among certain quarters about why exactly the stock market dropped precipitously after that massive run-up that happened on Wednesday. So as you recall, President Trump decided that he was going to reverse many of the sanctions, tariffs that he had placed on foreign nations
As of Wednesday morning, 12.01 Wednesday morning, within 13 hours, he reversed the vast majority of those. But he also put 125% tariff on China and retained a 10% baseline tariff against everybody else. While the markets responded to the avoidance of the car crash that would have been the imposition of all those tariffs all at once, based on this bizarre formula, the markets reacted to President Trump's postponement with joy and soared almost 3,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average,
And then yesterday, there was a massive sell-off. And so people were kind of puzzled. Wait, aren't we out of the woods? And the answer is the markets were now pricing in what exactly President Trump is doing. We now have a policy. That policy is going to be much more consistently applied. You're not going to see as much variation, vacillation, back and forth. And so the markets are trying to price in that risk.
And that is why U.S. stocks, according to The Wall Street Journal, fell sharply on Thursday as investors sorted through a global economic outlook that remains uncertain despite drastic improvements over the past 24 hours. The declines accelerated after the White House said the tariffs imposed on China by President Trump in his second term actually added up to 145 percent, not 125 percent. Stocks paired those losses a little bit in afternoon trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down about 1,000 points.
Again, none of that should be particularly surprising. What is a little bit surprising is that the bonds, the bond yields, for example, have been increasing precipitously at the same time, meaning that the market for bonds is really soft right now. 30-year bond yields are up to about 5%, which is a very, very high rate.
And that is happening because people are divesting from American investments overall. And it is not just stocks. It is also typically if stocks go down, bonds tend to go up in their price, meaning the yields are smaller. If stocks go up, then bond yields tend to increase because the price of bonds is going down.
But when you buy a bond, essentially what you're buying is a long-term investment that is going to pay off a certain amount at the end. And it's not a particularly high amount, typically speaking. So if you are risk-seeking, you're going to buy stocks rather than bonds. If you have a lot of faith in the American economy, you're probably going to buy stocks rather than bonds. If you're a little nervous, you're going to buy bonds rather than stocks. If people aren't buying either, what that means is that they don't believe either that the stock market is going to continue to increase at rapid rates
or that the bond market is going to be a problem because America's not going to pay back our debts. So that is just a sign of lack of faith in the American economy overall.
Another sign of that lack of faith is the decline in the DXY dollar index. So that dollar index is a way of measuring the relative strength of the American dollar versus a basket of foreign currencies. As Mohamed El-Erian of Allianz points out, the DXY dollar index is currently trading below 100, a level last seen in early 2022. Unlike past moves, this year's sharp dollar depreciation is feeling worries about an erosion in international confidence in the dollar and in U.S. assets as a whole. And part of that, again, is due to the fact that
that when you actually cut off international trade, the US dollar becomes less important in international trade. There's less demand for the dollar in international trade. And so overall, the dollar can weaken. And so what you see when you look at all of these things combined is enormous amounts of nervousness about the future of the global economy and the American economy in particular. I mean, the thing to remember about what President Trump is doing here is that
It's not as huge and large as it was slated to be on Wednesday morning. It is still really, really big. In fact, here is a chart of the effective tariff rates that President Trump has put in place. This chart shows before Wednesday and then after Wednesday. So as you can see,
The EU's tariff rate that was proposed when he first put in place the tariffs was 20%. Now it is about 10%. Mexico was at 25% and still at 25%. China went from 54% to 145%. Canada is still at 25%. And all the other countries who had varying rates ranging from 46% for Vietnam, 24% for Japan, they all went to 10%.
Overall, the average effective tariff rate actually increased from what it was supposed to be on Wednesday morning, largely due to that massive increase in the tariff rate on China. And we'll get to in a minute the necessity for a war, a trade war with China. That is a real necessity. What President Trump is doing policy-wise makes a lot of sense. However...
The actual comparison should not be, this is what the markets are figuring out right now, the actual comparison should not be to what President Trump would have done if the tariff rates had remained in place on Wednesday morning instead of walking them back for 90 days. The real comparison should be to what the tariff rates were, say, three weeks ago before any of this began or six weeks ago before any of this began. The tariff rates with China were fairly low. The tariff rates with Canada and Mexico were virtually non-existent. Now those are both up at 25%.
The tariff rates with regard to Europe were averaging 2.5%. Now those are at 10%. So no matter how you slice it, if you compare the average tariff rate that the United States had on various countries that were not China compared to what it is now, we basically quadrupled it overnight. That obviously is going to cause a lot of consternation in the market. And this is why...
Scott Pesant is going to be on the phone all weekend long and for the next couple of weeks trying to get trade deals that will reduce those 10% tariff rates back down towards zero. That's going to be his top goal, and it should be his top goal because even if you, like I, agree that we should be fighting a trade war with China, how we go about that trade war makes a very large difference. The overall strategy of containing China, of hampering its economic growth, of preventing it from stealing our IP by basically cutting it off from world markets, that strategy has to be implemented with smart,
cohesive tactics. It's just like any other war. A trade war is just like any other war. It's not enough to know your objective. You also have to know exactly how to attain that objective in the most expeditious possible fashion. And herein lies the issue with regard to China. How fast you go, the measures that you take in order to box China in absolutely matter. Now, China absolutely deserves this. China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States. They are.
All this pretend pussyfooting that's been going on between a wide variety of administrations over the course of my lifetime with regard to China is wrong. And President Trump is the only president who's had the courage to actually just say it. He's the only president who's had the courage to say they're not just a strategic competitor, which is what Joe Biden called them. They're not a rising market that we need to find a way to integrate with, which was the view of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, by the way.
Donald Trump recognizes clearly that China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States, that they have been ripping us off. They've been stealing our IP, that they are spreading their tentacles all over the world. They're working with all the countries that hate our guts. President Trump has the courage to say that thing. Jordan Schachtel, who's an excellent foreign policy analyst, he has a list of the various IPs that have been stolen by the Chinese over the course of the last 10 years or so. Those include
F-35 fighter jet data stolen via cyber attacks and then used to build China's J-20 stealth fighter. Lockheed Martin F-22 data for China's J-31 fighter. Raytheon missile guidance.
to enhance China's missile systems. NASA space tech, hacked on propulsion materials research. Chip designs worth billions, taken for China's memory chip industry. Nuclear missile sensors, infrared detection tech, stolen for military applications. Boeing C-17 data, military transport plane specs hacked and then linked to China's Y-20. Apple's self-driving car tech, ex-employee actually took secrets to a Chinese startup. Qualcomm chip technology, theft via partnerships to advance Chinese semiconductors. Nuclear reactor designs, molar rotor radio systems, intercontinental
Intel semiconductor processes, IBM software code, Cisco router code. China steals, it is estimated by certain measures. China steals no less than $600 billion per year in American technology.
NIP, $600 billion per year. That is a massive number. That is a massive number. So yeah, we should be seeking to contain China. Yes, we should be seeking to build an economic ring of fire around China. Now, in order to do that, a few things have to happen. First, you need better alliances. You need to actually strengthen your alliances around China. So that means better trade deals, better relations with Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the entire Indo-Pacific region.
It means better relations with the EU, which is a major trading partner for the Chinese. It means that you actually need to strengthen your alliance, just like any other war. A trade war works like this. If you're going to isolate China, you have to build better relations with everybody else on the planet so as to isolate China. This, by the way, is what Scott Besson has been pitching. He says that President Trump's strategy here is to isolate China in this way, to flip everybody against China. So it's the U.S. and all of our friends against China.
The other thing that matters here is things like, for example, the strength of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency. That matters an awful lot. It matters because if everybody is still trading in U.S. dollars, we have leverage. If you cut yourself off from world markets, what you end up doing is reducing the leverage you have against other countries, economically speaking.
One of the amazing things that has happened in terms of American power over the course of the last 30 years has been the integration of global financial systems. And it's what has allowed, for example, the Trump administration to successfully sanction the nation of Iran.
The state of Iran has been sanctioned by the United States. Russia has been sanctioned by the United States through use of international financial mechanisms, like, for example, cutting Russia off from the SWIFT system. Doing these things is only possible because of the integrated nature of technological commerce in the modern era. It's not just that the United States can say we're not going to trade with Russia anymore. We don't do that much trade with Russia. It's that the United States could sanction banks that were doing business with Russia.
It is not just that the United States could say we're not going to buy Iranian oil anymore. It's that the United States could threaten any bank or entity that did business with America with a cutoff if they did business with the Iranians. And that has major effect. So, in other words, removing yourself from the international system actually damages you if you're the most powerful person in the system. And the United States is the most powerful being in that system. It is the sun around which all of the other economies orbit.
If we just disappear, if we just dissociate, that doesn't increase our power. It radically reduces our power. So we need to increase our economic power. And that means greater integratedness with other countries economically that are not China. It means more integration into international financial systems that we control.
This is how you build up the power to actually take on China, which is, again, a rising power with the ability to truly throw a wrench into the global economy in amazing ways while stealing American IP. China is a rising power. The United States has to battle its way into shape to take them on. Well, you have to do that, too. Have you ever been caught in the cycle of yo-yo dieting? You know the pattern.
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A few weeks ago, we had on Sham Sankar, who's the CTO of Chief Technology Officer for Palantir, which is one of the new defense firms that does business with the American government. He was saying we need to reorient away from any of these sort of big ticket items in the American military that are a legacy and instead toward new technologies that allows for the United States, for example, to defend the Taiwan Straits or break a blockade around Taiwan. That requires serious expenditure. It also requires serious oversight. It requires a real military strategy, not just throwing things against the wall and not just assuming that
that America's heretofore power is going to be its power dynamic going forward. So you need better trade relations with everybody that's not China. You need more military power, better military tech. And then finally, you need the actual reshoring of national security-laden industries in the United States. And that does require some time. You can't just do that overnight. There's a bunch of stuff that we need that is made in China, including certain forms of semiconductors, including rare earths materials, which we'll get to in a moment,
There are all these things that are necessary. And so in order for you to successfully fight a trade war that theoretically could go hot, if you're going to do that, you really need to put your ducks in a row. So you can agree with the strategy of the Trump administration overall, but the tactics matter. How it gets implemented really, really matters because there are some countervailing possibilities. And this is what the market is trying to figure out right now.
Even if you agree with Trump's tariff blitz on China and that it's going to do serious damage to China, you have to think, how could China strike back? This is how you're going to fight any war. You have to figure out, well, how does the enemy respond to the thing that you are doing? So there are several things that China could do that would really, really damage America and the global economy in a very serious way. One is that China could cut off rare earth mineral exports, for example. Right now, China controls a heavy share of rare earth markets.
Like 90% of global rare earths markets, according to Fox Business, are dominated by China. That is a group with 17 elements essential to defense, energy, and electronics industries. Last week, China placed seven kinds of medium and heavy rare earths on an export control list. That's not an outright ban, but if China just decides they're going to stop exporting all of that stuff, it really gums up the works. In 2010, by the way, the CCP actually did this to Japan. They halted rare earth exports to Japan during a diplomatic dispute.
And they've restricted shipments of germanium, gallium, and graphite to the United States over the past two years. As Fox Business points out, U.S. companies would struggle to fill the gap. It takes an average of 29 years to go from mineral discovery to production in the United States. Meanwhile, in China, where they don't give a crap about the environment, they just drill it in months. They're going to get all that stuff in months. So tool number one that China could use against the United States is a total ban on rare earth mineral exports, which could render American missiles, fighter jets, even consumer technology like smartphones inoperable.
So that's tool number one that China could use. Tool number two that China could use to strike back against the United States would be the mass sell-off of U.S. treasuries. So the United States has been, because we like to borrow money and spend it, selling bonds to China at an exorbitant rate. China likely owns well over $1 trillion in U.S. bonds at this point. If China decides to sell off those bonds at bargain basement rates and just take the loss, just realize the loss, it would destroy America's capacity to borrow in the markets.
because bonds are like anything else. It's a debt instrument. If I can buy a bond for cheaper on the open market, then I'm going to buy it from, say, the Treasury Department. Then I'm just going to buy it cheaper on the open market. It makes it very difficult to raise new debt to pay for all the things that America wants to pay for. So that is a tool. That would be a shock to the American system. If China were to just sell off en masse its bonds, it would crater the economy pretty much overnight. So there's that as well. So rare earth mineral export bans,
Treasury sales by the Chinese. And then finally, and most shockingly, China could simply try to blockade Taiwan. They could say, listen, we're so boxed in at this point, we're going to blockade Taiwan and we're going to hold you hostage until you remove the tariffs, until you back off. They might not just blockade Taiwan, by the way, it could theoretically invade Taiwan. Now, blockade of Taiwan is the safer option if you're the Chinese, because basically you're then daring the United States to fire on your ships.
If they were to invade Taiwan and things went hot, that would not be a super shock because Taiwan would fire back. If they blockade Taiwan, they would be daring the Taiwanese to basically fire on Chinese ships and initiate a war that China would likely win. So if they blockade Taiwan, the question is, would the United States actually be able to or have the courage to break the blockade around Taiwan at the risk of a possible hot war with China?
And there are members of the defense establishment who have made pretty clear that they wouldn't. That includes the brand new undersecretary for defense, who was just confirmed by the Senate, Elbridge Colby, who's basically said this. He says we need to shift all of our focus to China. But also, if China invades Taiwan, that's not a core national interest for the United States. Well, China knows that. But here's the problem. If China were to blockade Taiwan, all the semiconductors that are sophisticated semiconductors, all the stuff in your phone, your computer, in our military tech, all that stuff is coming from China and Taiwan, all of it.
And what that means is that we have not yet built up the domestic capacity or the other offshoring capacity to make up for that. So the question is, are enough of our ducks in a row to do the thing that we are doing? This is the reason why there are many advocates of harsh policy against China who say that we should actually go slower here. Instead of jumping to 145% tariff, for example, we should have gone to a 20% tariff on China, gradually cause the reshoring of industries away from China.
Given us time to build up relationships with other countries without, for example, yelling at them about Greenland or how we're going to invade Canada or some such. Now, again, this all could do and probably will do severe damage to China. But one of the things you have to make sure of is that when you do severe damage to a country, they don't try to break out. One of the realities of the beginning of World War II in the Pacific sphere is that it was Western cutoff of oil and rubber largely to the Japanese,
That created the impetus for the Japanese to invade Pearl Harbor. Now, again, the cutoff of oil and rubber made perfect sense. It was a thing that had to be done. China was expanding its grip in Manchuria. It was expanding into areas of the South Pacific, obviously. And so the attempt to cut off resources to Japan, which was an FDR decision, that makes sense. It doesn't make sense if you're not going to then put yourself on a military readiness, military preparedness footing.
I mean, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor is not just that we were surprised. The tragedy is that we weren't ready to fight back immediately because FDR had not done the necessary work in order to ensure that we were ready to go to war at that time. It took a couple of years for the United States industrial complex to fire up such that it could actually take on a war. Japan thought that it had a moment of opportunity specifically because of that. The face that you show to an enemy in a war ought to be impassive, invulnerable. You ought to be a wall.
And that means that everything has to move in lockstep. It means that when you take a trade policy that is likely to push in a more confrontational direction, you have to be ready with the iron fist inside the velvet glove. Economics is the velvet glove. Military force is the iron fist. And if things get too bad economically for China, the chances that they actually try to start something like a hot war over Taiwan are not insignificant at all.
Which, again, is why the tactics matter. It's why the markets are very, very nervous right now. They're not sure exactly what's going to happen. They also don't know whether President Trump is willing to go all the way. What is he willing to do? Is he looking for an off-ramp? What does that off-ramp even look like? Now, in the meantime, again, I'm not saying that the tariff war with China isn't a good idea. I think it is a good idea. I'm just saying that we need to have a very concerted strategy for how we go about that trade war with China. Because international relations is certainly a delicate business.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the gloves are off. The next chapter of U.S.-China decoupling has begun. The pain will be felt everywhere. In jacking up his tariffs on China and pausing steep duties on dozens of other nations, President Trump is pushing the world's two biggest economic powers into a battle that will leave neither unscathed and risks tanking the global economy. The total tariffs imposed on China in Trump's second term now add up to 145%. The tariffs could eventually be walked back, but already there are signs that a portion of the $582 billion in goods trading between the two countries is grinding to a halt.
Now, again, that's going to hurt America. It's going to hurt China way more. As The Washington Post points out, Trump's tariff blitz could hardly have come at a worse time for China. Exports have been a rare bright spot in the Chinese economy, struggling with a property market slump, high youth unemployment and domestic spending that is so weak it threatens to turn into a deflation crisis. The hit to exports threatens the legacy of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who's trying to transform his country from the world's factory into an advanced manufacturing and technology superpower.
A delicate transition that could be thrown off by this bruising trade war. By the way, there is great irony to the fact that while the United States is trying to up its manufacturing game, China is trying to downgrade its manufacturing game and move into high tech. In less than a week, the world's two largest economies have progressively upped the ante to a point where their respective import duties are now at historic highs. Now, again, China requires the export market. It's going to hurt China tremendously. And that's good. We want to hurt China.
But you then want to know what the next step is. After you hurt China, what's the end game? What is the thing that you are looking for? And if the idea is serious containment, then you have to make sure that you don't have holes in the wall of the containment facility. There are no cracks in the edifice. Already, the EU is looking at cracks in the edifice. Already, the EU, again, they're cowards. So, of course, the EU is looking for a way out.
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According to Reuters, China and the European Union have exchanged views on strengthening their economic and trade cooperation in response to U.S. tariffs. The Chinese Commerce Ministry said on Thursday, again, that's not on Wednesday, that's on Thursday, that's after Trump relieved the tariffs on the EU, at least moved them down from what would have been 20% down to 10%. The EU and China are now moving toward closer trade relationships.
So again, if the idea is that the policy is supposed to isolate China by basically forcing everybody to choose between the United States and China, you got to woo. It's not just a steak. It's also a carrot. Right now, we're using a lot of stick with our allies. We need to use more carrot with our allies. Presumably, that's what Scott Besant is going to try to do because there are, in fact, limits to what you can do if there are cracks in the edifice. You've seen this with Russia, by the way, right? All of Europe and the United States were supposedly unified under the Biden administration in fighting off the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And you know what happened? Russia found a way around it. They were able to find cracks. They sold their oil to China. They sold their oil to India. And by the way, they sold an enormous amount of oil still to Europe. Cracks in the edifice mean that there is a way for China to escape the ring that surrounds it.
And if they escape the ring that surrounds it, then you haven't actually achieved what you're seeking to achieve, which is complete containment of the Chinese economy. In a video call on Tuesday, China's Commerce Ministry Wang Wentao discussed with European Trade and Economic Security Commissioner Maros Sefcovic the restart of talks on trade relief and to immediately carry out negotiations on electric vehicle price commitments. One of the things that China's been doing is flooding the European market with cheap electric vehicles. And the Europeans don't like it. So now they're coming to some sort of agreement over all of this.
The EU increased tariffs on Chinese-built EVs to as much as 45 last October, 45% last October. Brussels and Beijing have floated the idea of lifting the tariffs through possible commitments to minimum prices, known as price undertakings for imported cars. So what are the other countries going to do? Are the other countries going to go along with the United States? Will the isolation happen here? That is the big question of the day. And the Trump administration...
needs to make clear that they're looking for deals, deals, deals. It's now deal time. Now let's get those deals. Let's get those 10% tariffs down to zero. Let's make sure that we now have free trade and open markets with all of our allies except for China. President Trump seems to be wavering a little bit on what exactly happens with regard to these deals. Because now again, the rest of the world market understands that deals are necessary for the United States, not just sufficient. It's not just the US wants those deals. The US actually needs those deals. So
There is a bit of a leverage issue. President Trump says we'll have to see what happens if no deals are made after 90 days. Maybe the United States goes back to its former posture as of Wednesday morning. Well, that's what would happen. I mean, if we can't make the deal that we want to make or we have to make or that's good for both parties, it's got to be good for both parties. And then we go back to where we were. Go back to the numbers that you announced last week. I think so. You wouldn't make standard pause? Yeah. We'll have to see what happens at that time.
So if that's still on the table, maybe that's leverage. Maybe leverage is to go back on the table and so you better sign on to a good. But one of the things that is just true about foreign relations, if you continually come with a carrot and then a stick and then a carrot and then a stick to the same countries over and over and over, eventually they triangulate. They start to look for alliances elsewhere. And this is one of the things that seems to be happening in the markets. Again, the reason the bond markets are down and the stock market has been down
And the dollar is weakening is because people are beginning to de-risk from the United States. That is something the Trump administration obviously has to watch very carefully. President Trump is promising a transition. He says great things will happen. Again, there'll be a transition cost and transition problems. But in the end, it's going to be it's going to be a beautiful thing. We're doing again what we should have done many years ago. We're letting it get out of control.
Now, it is certainly true that the Trump administration is moving away from the Peter Navarro end of the administration, which is good. As I said yesterday on the show, if he fires Peter Navarro, you're going to see a bull run.
Apparently, according to Politico, President Trump upended not just his tariff strategy, but his trade team this week. Former hedge fund manager and Treasury Secretary Scott Pessence is now at the helm. Populist Peter Navarro has been relegated to the sidelines. Wall Street punching bag Howard Lutnick has been recast into the role of bad cop, according to three people close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak frankly about internal dynamics.
The diminished roles of Letnick, the Commerce Secretary, who for weeks had been the administration's point person for foreign leaders on tariffs, and Navarro, Trump's trade advisor, reflect this week's turmoil over Trump's trade policy and a shift toward the fair trade policies that Besant has been advocating. So, again, that is a proper and smart shift by the presidents of the United States. That is a much better orientation of his team. Navarro, for his part, is still appearing on television, trying desperately to pretend that he has not been sidelined from all of this.
Before we let you go, this is just breaking here. Sure. The media says you're in the doghouse with Trump. Is that true or is that fake news? That's fake news, Jesse. It's not really fake news, apparently. I mean, at the very least, Trump has shifted his trade policy away from the preferences of Peter Navarro, who is very happy with that gigantic trade war that was going to happen as of Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, in order for President Trump to continue to
prop up and strengthen the American economy. The House and Senate need to get together on the one big, beautiful bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been performing admirably with the world's narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. According to the Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Mike Johnson performed another Houdini straitjacket escape on Thursday, passing a budget outline over doubts on his right flank.
Now comes the hard work of ironing out the tax and spending details of a policy bill. That mission is no fail. The House voted 216 to 214 to advance a budget bill. That's the starting gun for passing a tax bill of 51 Senate votes under reconciliation. Johnson only lost two Republican votes. The line of the week came from President Trump. Close your eyes and get there.
Points to Trump on that one. The House holdouts fear the eventual policy bill will not include real spending restraint. They're right that cuts are always promised in Washington and seldom delivered. But they held a fight on is the detail in the final bill, not the budget outline that just opens up the debate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also said that they were aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlines in terms of savings.
supposedly there's supposed to be $1.5 trillion in savings in the budget. We'll see what actually materializes. This is the first step toward getting the big, beautiful bill. So Johnson is steering that through. If that bill were to fail, it would sign effectively the death knell of the Trump administration in terms of its possible efficacy.
Meanwhile, Democrats are already pouncing, hoping desperately that all of this collapses in like a house of cards. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury Secretary who did a brilliant job of ushering in 40-year inflation, she of Hobbiton, she explained that this was a massive self-inflicted wound, all a massive self-inflicted wound.
I'm afraid I could not give it a passing grade. I'm sorry. I think policy has been, this is the worst self-inflicted wound that I have ever seen an administration impose on a well-functioning economy.
Okay, I'll take that with a giant block of salt, given the fact that, again, she presided over the worst inflation that we've had in this country since 40 years, leading to the inflated stock market that then has come down pretty significantly because of the tariff war and all of the rest. Well, join me online to discuss all of this is someone more expert than I in these matters. Mike Gallagher, of course, a former U.S. representative representing Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District. He is now the head of defense at Palantir. He's the former chairman of the Select Committee on China. Mike, great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Thanks for having me.
So let's talk about the tariff regime that President Trump has now placed on the entire world, but mostly China. So he's gone to a 10% baseline rate with pretty much everybody except for Mexico and Canada. And he's gone to a 145% tariff rate on China. Now, I'm obviously very warm towards smacking China as hard as humanly possible. What do you think of the implementation of the policy? What would a smart tariff policy look like? The case that I've made is that strategically, obviously orienting toward China as a geopolitical enemy is correct.
But the tactics of how you actually box them in that that matters an awful lot here. What do you think President Trump is doing right? What is he doing wrong? Well, the first thing I think President Trump should take credit for the 301 tariff investigation he launched in his first term. And if you read the documents justifying the 301 tariffs, it's actually an incredible piece of work and really lays out in unprecedented fashion in terms of its scope and scale.
the economic war that China has been waging against America since they acceded to the WTO. And so I think the 301 tariffs on China are justified. I would go further and say, as we endorse in a bipartisan manner, even Democrats agreed to this on the committee, I think the time has come for us to remove permanent normal trade relations status with China. You can argue that the tariffs effectively have done that
already. But if you remember, when we ratified PNTR, we basically said that China's economy is permanently a market economy. China's economy has never been a market economy at all. And so continuing the three-
tariffs, removing PNTR, and cutting off the flow of outbound capital investments from America to China, at least when it comes to military items, I think is critical. Because right now, we're subsidizing our own destruction, right? Chinese ships, military equipment, American asset managers are subsidizing that. So I think Trump can go hardcore on that.
And then at the same time, and this is where the strategy comes in, I do think you need to, I don't, I'm less sympathetic to the 232 tariffs. I think you have to, in order to mitigate the economic impact of China tariffs, but also just to rally the world against China's predatory practices, you need to find ways to break down economic and technological barriers within the free world and expand the bounds of the free world to include countries that don't fall neatly into the ally category. For example, even with our closest allies,
the UK and the Aussies. We have the AUKUS arrangement. There are still barriers to collaboration because of outdated ITAR regulations that we could get rid of. And Trump could claim, hey, I'm bringing the free world closer together. We are joining hands to push back against the commies who are trying to destroy us right now. That's like the highest level grand strategic move I think he needs to make.
So, Mike, I was talking about this on the show, and one of the things that I've suggested was that if you are preparing for this level of a trade war, which could get into some pretty severe risks of the actual shooting war, and we'll talk about that in a moment. If you're doing a trade war like this, one of the things you have to make sure of is that all your ducks are in a row. And what that means, you have to draw your allies close. You actually have to build these alliances to the point where they don't fracture. You don't have the EU working back channels with China, for example. You have to actually build up our military mechanisms together.
such that if China should decide that it wants to try something, it's dissuaded by deterrence from doing that thing. And you actually have to reshore or allow for the reshoring of crucial industries away from China. All those things take a little bit of time. And so perhaps the idea of a gradual escalation here that sort of boils the frog slowly, as opposed to turning the flame all the way up, would have been a better idea. What do you make of that?
I agree with that. If you read the final economic report of the Select Committee on China, when we endorsed getting rid of PNTR, we argued for the gradual phasing in of a new tariff regime. There's some things that we care less about. For example, I want Wisconsin farmers to sell soybeans to China. And quite honestly, I don't have a problem if Americans want to buy cheap textiles from China as long as those textiles aren't made with slave labor.
in Xinjiang province, but continuing our dependency when it comes to advanced pharmaceutical ingredients, rare earth and critical minerals, all things that we know are going to be weaponized by China. If we find ourselves in a confrontation over Taiwan, for example, strikes me as a very bad example
you know, strategic misstep. So to me, it's easy to start to revive a kind of bilateral trade agenda. I don't think anyone's arguing for a big multilateral trade agreement, perhaps a digital regional trade agreement in the Pacific. But you could see a post-Brexit gold standard trade agreement with the UK with a docking provision. I've argued for a free trade agreement with Taiwan, provided the standards are high. You could start to build that. The hardest thing with all of this, I think, is how do you actually effectuate
the onshoring, right? Because I think the CHIPS Act provides a good example of how not to do this, right? We're not going to fork over $50 billion for every industry we decide is important from a national security perspective. And we certainly aren't going to have a good effect from that if we also saddle those grants with absurd,
conditions, right? Like in order to get a chipset grant, you need to build like a woke daycare next to your facility. So there, I think the best mechanism for onshoring is a combination of bilateral trade agreements, technology agreements, and radical deregulation of the domestic economy and leveraging our asymmetric advantage, which is not throwing a ton of human's
and money at the problem, it's innovation, it's leveraging software to reimagine, manufacturing, things like that. Above everything you said though, Ben, I want to hammer home the most important variable, the variable that matters more than anything else is the balance of conventional military power. Our economic moves are important, they're non-trivial, but if we don't fix the balance of conventional military power, which is sliding in the wrong direction,
The odds of a war with China that will not end well for us go up and up and up. So one of the points that I've been making is that we are building this economic cordon or attempting to build this economic cordon around China. Historically speaking, when countries feel that cordon tightening, it actually does lead to war. I mean, this is presumably what happened with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The historians basically suggest that because the West was working so hard to deprive the
Japan of rubber and oil that basically Japan felt that the only way that it could break out was to preemptively strike the United States before the United States actually had time to mobilize its military capacity. So one of the things that becomes very clear here is that as the news tightens around China, which is obviously what the Trump administration would like to do, China could pursue some pretty significant retaliatory measures. And three that come to mind right away that we've been discussing on the show are the deprivation of rare earths minerals,
China controls a huge percentage of rare earths minerals. They could theoretically just stop exporting those. Two would be the mass sell-off of American bonds, try to undermine the American economy by basically killing our debt. And three would be the most extreme measure, which would be a blockade or even invasion of Taiwan. Maybe you can talk about those various risks.
Well, maybe I'll attempt to connect sort of the economic dynamics you started with to the invasion of Taiwan, because traditionally, particularly when people on Wall Street analyze this problem, they say, well, China would never invade Taiwan, right? It would be an economic catastrophe. I think that is a dangerous form of mirror imaging. And I think it actually gets the causality backwards, right? Because they'll say, well, China's economy sucks.
Therefore, Xi Jinping wouldn't be foolish enough to invade Taiwan. Well, part of the reason China's economy sucks is because Xi Jinping is actually preparing his country for a war with America and the West over Taiwan, right? He's encouraging his citizens to eat bitterness, to use a phrase he's used to young Chinese citizens.
citizens, right? He's trying to sanction proof his economy. And I think the more we engaged in that dangerous form of mirror imaging, the less prepared we are. So how do you deal with it, right? Just to reinforce the fact you need to develop the ability, not just the threat, but the ability to put the entire PLA Navy on the bottom of the Taiwan Strait if they do something as foolish as trying to take Taiwan. That's point one. Point two, figuring out the onshoring and critical...
industries. I mentioned APIs earlier. If you remember in the early stages of the pandemic, Chinese officials threatened to cut off the export of pharmaceutical ingredients and plunge us into a sea of coronavirus. And in the war gaming we did on the select committee, we started off in the conventional military.
domain. But we increasingly realized a lot of this would play out in the economic space. It would become supply chain warfare. And then third, I would say we have to, as of yesterday, develop the capability to deal with the cyber weapons that China has pre-positioned in our critical infrastructure. Imagine someone went around the country strapping sticks of dynamite to every water utility or grid system around the country. Well, effectively, that's what's happened with
revelations surrounding both typhoon and salt typhoon that's a huge vulnerability and one thing that's also apparent if you do any war gaming around taiwan the united states homeland is a target for attack especially in the cyber domain in a meaningful sense you can say the invasion of taiwan has already begun in
the cyber domain. And therefore, in order to have an effective deterrent in cyber, we also need to develop the offensive capability to tear down the gray firewall in China. I've argued that that should take on a position of importance in our grand strategy, similar to the way tearing down the Berlin Wall was a centerpiece of late stage old Cold War strategy. So, Mike, obviously, as we watch all of this play out, I think we both agree that the orientation of the Trump administration is correct right here.
I'm asking you to look into a crystal ball, but again, you work at a company called Palantir, so I suppose that's OK. What exactly do you think is going to be the Trump administration's plan going forward? Do you think they stick with this high level of tariffs? Are they able to broker these bilateral agreements? Or do you think that the Trump administration will look for some some form of off ramp? Because one of the things that we have to consider here is President Trump has said that he uses tariffs as leverage.
The problem I have is I'm not sure exactly what leverage you could ever receive from China that would be sufficient to make anyone sanguine about going back to anything like a trade normalized relationship. I mean, they're stealing $600 billion a year in our intellectual properties just as starters. Well, I do think the Trump administration has an opportunity to go around the world now and cut various deals with countries that they'd threaten to tariff. I think that would be good for Americans. I mean, a lot of the devil will be in the details.
The area that my crystal ball or my palantir seeing stone is most murky is when it comes to the future of our economic relationship with China, right? Because President Trump has signaled time and again that he wants to cut a deal with Xi Jinping, right? In the first term, they had a phase one trade agreement with Xi Jinping. And there were a lot of other priorities that got held up in pursuit of that deal, right? I had an amendment to the defense bill that would have imposed the death penalty.
on Huawei and ZTE, big Chinese telecommunications companies, that got delayed for a while as they pursued this trade deal. China, of course, like every other agreement they've made internationally since the founding of the party, didn't fulfill the terms of that agreement. They never kept
their promises. And so I think it would be unwise to pursue a phase two trade deal, at least until they come into compliance with phase one. And then the catastrophe scenario would be if some trade agreement with China or concession is bound up in a broader geopolitical agreement where we basically surrender a certain amount of our position in the Indo-Pacific. Now, I don't think that's what's going to happen, right? Because
I know Mike Waltz. I know John Ratcliffe. I know Pete Hegsett. These are hawkish folks when it comes to China. I think they see the threat of the CCP clearly. And to sort of end where I began, Trump does deserve credit for the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, right? The end.
Entire now bipartisan realignment in a hawkish direction on China was started in 2017 with the first Trump term. Now, the administration was divided on key issues. The division, however, was resolved at the end by what we saw with China's behavior in the pandemic and covering up the origin of the pandemic. If we had any lingering doubts.
about the genocidal Marxist-Leninists we were dealing with in Beijing, the pandemic sort of removed all of those doubts. So similarly, now is the time to see our enemies clearly, work with our allies and partners to push back on that threat. It's not going to be easy. I think it's more complex than the old Cold War because we were never economically entangled with the Soviet Union. But it is well within our power to not only prevent a hot war, but to win a Cold War against the CCP.
That's Mike Gallagher. He's the head of defense at Palantir and former chairman of the Select Committee on China. Mike, really appreciate the time and the insight. Thank you, sir. Preborn's network of clinics are on the front lines nationwide, on standby for women deciding between the life of their babies. Preborn seeks these women out to help them choose life, not just for their babies, but for themselves. By introducing mothers to the life growing inside of them through ultrasound, her baby's chance at life doubles.
$28 a month could just be the difference between life and death of so many lives. To donate securely, go to preborn.com slash dailywire. That's preborn.com slash dailywire. A single heartbeat can echo across generations. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was dealt a bit of a blow with regard to its immigration plans. The Supreme Court on Thursday, according to the Associated Press, said the Trump administration has to work to bring back a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador.
The court acted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that was the Salvadoran citizen, who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation to his native country over fears he would face persecution from local gangs. So the U.S. District Judge had ordered Abrego Garcia return to the United States by midnight on Monday. The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
The chief justice had already pushed back the deadline, and the justice said that the court order had to be clarified to make sure it didn't intrude into the executive branch power over foreign affairs. So it basically split the baby. The order says that they have to work to get this person back from El Salvador. It was a Venezuelan immigrant who had basically been labeled by the administration and also in a formal court case, a likely member of MS-13.
He had not been convicted of that crime, but he doesn't have to be. The foreign policy of the United States suggests that the executive branch does have the ability to deem whether somebody is a likely threat and then remove that person if that person does not have citizenship in the United States. This person happened to have a hold on him based on a claim of essentially asylum.
The administration admitted that they had made a mistake in deporting the guy. So basically, the court said a few things. The court said, number one, you got to work to bring this person back. Number two, the district judge has to make sure that they're not intruding into the executive branch's determination of what this person's status is.
So this is not a complete rebuke to the Trump administration, as many of the headlines would suggest. It is not them saying the executive branch no longer has the power to adjudicate whether this person should be in the country or not. It just means they have to go through the proper process in order to actually do that. So the...
Next move, presumably, would be for the Trump administration to actually work with the Salvadoran government in order to bring this person back. And then the person will go through due process and then probably will be removed anyway. Meanwhile, the Iranian government is obviously attempting to slow play the Trump administration with regard to its nuclear negotiations. So President Trump wants to get to the end point, which is Iran dismantling its nuclear arsenal, its incipient nuclear program.
It is pretty obvious that Iran can do this at literally any time. So there's not much to negotiate over. If they want to be ushered back into the community of nations and have their economy unlocked, all they have to do is get off the nuclear pathway. Instead, what they're trying to do is slow walk the administration so as to rebuild some of their air defenses to prevent against the possibility of a joint Israeli-U.S. strike. All that would really amount to, by the way, is the United States loaning Israel some B-2s.
The real question for a while has been whether Israel has the unique capacity to actually hit the nuclear facilities in Iran. The problem for Israel is that unlike, for example, the Syrian attempted nuclear reactor 15 years ago or so when Israel hit the nuclear reactor that the Syrians were building. The biggest problem for Israel is that these nuclear reactors are actually built underneath mountains. So the best that Israel might be able to do is they block the entrances. It's unclear whether Israel has the capacity.
overt capacity on its own to simply take out the entire nuclear facility. You need bunker buster bombs and all the rest. Iran is trying to slow play the United States. They're trying to slow play President Trump. According to Axios, Iran is considering proposing during talks with the United States that the two countries work on an interim nuclear agreement before pursuing negotiations over a comprehensive deal.
President Trump set a two-month deadline for negotiations with Iran on a new nuclear deal and has ordered a pretty significant buildup of U.S. military force in the Middle East if diplomacy fails. If a deal is not reached, Trump could order a U.S. military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities or support an Israeli strike. The latter is obviously much more probable. Trump has basically said so himself.
The sources said the Iranians think reaching a complex and highly technical nuclear deal in two months is unrealistic. They want to get more time on the clock in order to avoid an escalation. Now, again, when they say that it's unrealistic, actually, it could be very realistic. You could sign a single page deal that says full transparency to the IAEA and to international inspectors. We're dismantling our entire nuclear program. We are shipping all fissile material out of the country to a third party. They could do all of that today. That does not require a heavy negotiation in any way, shape or form.
So all this really is them trying to buy time pretty clearly. An interim agreement could include suspending some of Iran's uranium enrichment activity, diluting its 60% enriched uranium stockpile, allowing UN inspectors more access to Iran's nuclear facilities. But apparently that would only slightly, even if that were done, that would only slightly decrease their time to break out, their time to the bomb. Also, apparently that interim agreement would force the Trump administration to suspend his maximum pressure campaign on Iran's economy. So there's no reason for the United States to buy into that.
On Thursday, the former head of Iran's National Security Council, a person named Ali Shamkhani, who is now a foreign policy advisor to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Mullah, said the continued military threats against Iran may lead to deterrent measures. He suggested that Iran could actually expel IAEA inspectors and cease to cooperate at all with the nuclear watchdog. Well, if they do that, then the bombs are coming. President Trump is not likely to sit on his hands with regard to all of this. Okay, meanwhile, I know it's a Friday, so we're going to do a little bit of culture. I've been told there's a movie called The Minecraft Movie, and it apparently...
had $300 million in global box office revenue its first weekend. And I was forced by my producers to watch this movie. And those are hours of my life that I wish I had back. It is, I must have a massive disconnect with the younger generation now. I've now reached full-on middle age. I no longer am able to connect with people who think this movie was funny, entertaining, or interesting.
I'm hoping that all of it is just a big in-joke that if you really love Minecraft, then you're just laughing and nodding at jokes that I don't understand because my entire exposure to Minecraft was another YouTube video that we made one time where I was forced to sit there and play Minecraft with one of our employees and basically wanted to hang myself. I hated the game. I thought it was stupid. I didn't understand how it worked. Again, me being a dad of four and all of this. In any case, apparently for Minecraft fans, this thing is like heaven.
And there are a lot of them. Minecraft is a very, very popular game. And I'll give it to the producers of the movie because at least they know the crowd to whom they are appealing. They totally went for all the in-jokes. And apparently, as I say, I saw the same movie all these people at this theater were about to show you saw. But they reacted like crazy to a chicken jockey, which is a character, I suppose, from the game that barely ever appears. It's a rare and quirky creature.
It's something of a digital unicorn. It's a baby zombie riding a chicken. It barely appears in the game. Sort of a rarity. And so apparently fans are very into it. And so here's what happened at one showing when the police had to be called because people were so enthusiastic about the appearance of the baby zombie riding a chicken. Okay, and people are losing their minds over the appearance of the chicken jockey. People standing up, screaming, cheering.
The police had to be called to calm everybody back down. Oh, boy. And then the police removed people. So this is what our culture has become. I have been informed by Producers Act that there was something once called the Gentle Minions Movement, which was apparently a bunch of high schoolers and college students who, when the Despicable Me movies would come out or the Minions movies would come out, they would dress up in like tuxes or suits and they would go to the theater as sort of a joke.
as sort of a funny in-joke. And apparently that has now devolved into people going to these movies and finding the dumbest parts of the movies and acting rowdy and crazy. So cool, like everything else in our culture, something that began as ironic is now no longer ironic. It has just become people acting like trash at the theater. The actual movie itself is quite bad. Again, perhaps I'm just missing all of it because I don't play Minecraft, but I'll give you the outsider's perspective. If you don't play Minecraft, this movie makes no sense at all. It's not entertaining.
The performances are ridiculous in the extreme. Jack Black has just been playing the same character since School of Rock. And now he has a beard and he's pretty significantly fatter. So that's pretty much all that's happened to Jack Black right there. Jason Momoa is always Jason Momoa. And so he's just playing fat Jason Momoa, like slightly overweight Jason Momoa. He's basically doing a riff on sort of fat Thor from the Marvel Universe.
It is not good. The plot makes no sense. The acting is bad. Jack Black sings a couple of songs for no reason that I can discern. The graphics are kind of interesting, I suppose, in the sense that they mimic the game, but kind of more 3D and more well done.
But it was a painful experience. And so, you know, if you're not a Minecraft fan, I would just suggest that you do not engage with this movie because you'll want to gouge out your own eyeballs fairly quickly watching this thing. Okay, meanwhile...
My producers have exposed me to a new three-part Netflix docuseries that explores the shadowy world of child influencers called The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, and this is quite frightening. Again, none of this is shocking to me because it turns out that a huge number of people who are interested in having their kids be famous are really screwed up. That is not a shock at all. That's been true for generations. The entire musical Gypsy is based on this. But apparently, in this documentary...
There is a person named Tiffany Smith who is the mother of a child named Piper Raquel who began her career at age eight and created dance videos, pranks, challenges, and crush content on YouTube. And her channel amassed over 12 million subscribers and was generating at its peak $625,000 per month. These tween influencers were known as The Squad. And apparently the mom manager, Tiffany Smith,
I mean, the only way to describe this would be sociopathic behavior. Apparently, this clip, she sold her daughters used underwear to random men on the internet. Yeah, guys, I think the internet was a bad idea, maybe. Piper had acting lesson, voice lesson, one of those.
After we dropped Piper off, Tiffany was like, "I have to go to the post office and drop off some things." And she had a bag and she pulled out what looked like Piper's underwear. And I asked her, like, "Why are you, like, shipping those out?" And she told me that old men like to smell them. And I was confused. I was like, "What is she talking about?" But I confronted Tiffany.
She's like, stop being so dramatic. Yeah, well, you know, instead of just confronting people over that, you might want to call the cops. I mean, that's child exploitation right there. So there's that. Yes, there's an entire side to the Internet that is fake and made up and and exploitative in the extreme. Now, my kids do not appear in any pictures online. We keep my kids offline. I will not take pictures with people on the street unless my kids are not in frame.
It is very, very bad for kids to be exploited in this way, obviously, and a culture that knows what's going on. I mean, let's be real about this. We've known what's going on in these spaces for probably generations, and it's certainly been true in Hollywood for a very, very long time. There's a reason why every child star, with very few exceptions, ends up incredibly screwed up as an adult.
And that is not because high levels of famine exposure are good for kids, especially when they are surrounded by adults who are willing to take advantage of them. Horrifying stuff, obviously. Apparently, in January 2022, 11 X-Squad members filed a lawsuit alleging emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and the case was settled for $1.85 million, which seems kind of low, frankly, if the career earnings of these people were presumably in the tens of millions of dollars.
All righty, folks, the show continues in just a moment. We're going to be answering your questions. But again, if you want your question answered or you want to see my answers, you have to become a member. Become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.