Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent started rambling about the border, deportations and tax cuts when asked by FBN's Maria Bartiromo what the reasoning was for the tariffs on China.
Here's the back and forth from this Wednesday's Mornings with Maria, where Bessent also repeated the nonsense that Trump has some sort of a mandate for this madness:
BARTIROMO: Now people are wondering, is that still the reason to put tariffs on China? Is it to raise revenue? Is it to get supply chains into America? Is it to answer the fentanyl problem?
People, business leaders are saying to me, Why are we doing this?
Everyone was very excited about President Trump's agenda, deregulation, tapping into energy, tax cuts, and now boom, with these tariffs, everything has changed. Why are we doing this?
BESSENT: Well, Maria, I think it's, as you said in the last segment, it's all of the above. President Trump was elected with a mandate.
He's closed the border, so check on that. We are doing the very large deportation of people, criminals and people who have overstayed their their visits, their their periods, so we're in the midst of that.
And now president Trump is tackling the trade agenda and this isn't done in isolation, Maria, as you just interviewed Senator Haggerty, we're running the parallel processes here.
So there's tariffs, there's tax. Tax is going extremely well. That... the Speaker Johnson, Leader Thune, from the leadership of people like Senator Haggerty, Jason Smith, Senator Crapo, I can tell you that that's going very well.
So at a point, in the not too distant future, I think we will be back to firing on all cylinders. We have the response to the countries who want to come and sit at the table, rather than escalate has been overwhelming.
Our allies, Japan, South Korea, India, and I will note that they are all around China. We have Vietnam coming today, so everyone is coming to the table and basically China is surrounded.
BARTIROMO: That's kind of the point.
Bessent failed to mention the real reason, which is that Trump is taking trade policy advice from the lunatic Peter Navarro.
Editor's note: Even though the tariffs are "paused," we consider the reactions, lies and angst from right wing media to be relevant and worthy of note.
