Margaret Brennan interviewed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, mocking the tariffs and trying to embarrass him. She made a fool of herself, but her viewers probably won’t agree or consider how irresponsible her reportage is.
Margaret Brennan: “When we saw the President stand in the Rose Garden holding up that chart that you helped make that wasn’t actually tariffs, that was actually confusing to investors, because it was some other formula, and the countries themselves seemed kind of random, like, why are the Heard Islands and McDonald Islands, which don’t export to the United States and are quite literally inhabited by penguins. Why do they face a 10% tariffs? Did you use AI to generate this?”
She just wanted to get the sound bite out.
Howard Lutnick: “No, no, the idea, look, the idea is …if you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us, any country like we had tariffs.
[That’s obvious, isn’t it?]
“The President put tariffs on China, right? In 2018, and then what China started doing is they started going through other countries to America. He just built through other countries, through America. And so, the President knows that he’s tired of it, and he’s going to fix that. So, basically he said, Look, I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them, through the end of those loopholes, these ridiculous loopholes.
“And now what he’s trying to say is, I’m going to fix the trade deficit of the United States of America. It’s a national security issue. We need to make medicine; we need to make doctors; we need to make ships; we need to have steel and aluminum. Come on. We need the greatness of America to actually be built in America. And he’s tired of getting ripped off by the rest of the world. Okay?”
The Heard and McDonald Islands have been the fake Trump scandal of the weekend. So-called journalists never bothered to ask the administration why they tariffed the penguin-infested islands that don’t trade with the United States. They decided to insult the administration with a half-story, which is what they now routinely do.
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