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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Charlie Kirk on President Trump's Liberation Day Tariffs and the Fight for American Manufacturing
Charlie Kirk examines President Trump's historic tariff announcement, delivered in the Rose Garden with autoworkers present. Kirk reflects on the emotional weight of seeing Trump fulfill his campaign promise to the white working class and Rust Belt communities who voted for him. Unlike decades of politicians who spoke about manufacturing but delivered managed decline, Trump implemented a baseline 10% tariff on all imports, paired with tax cuts, deregulation, and energy independence. Kirk argues this represents a fundamental restructuring of the American economy away from Chinese dependence and toward domestic production, making companies choose between accessing America's consumer market or manufacturing overseas. The strategy forces foreign companies to employ American labor if they want to reach American consumers.
President Donald Trump very well could have done what every other politician does when it comes to trade and American manufacturing: say one thing to the heartland of this country and then kowtow to the Wall Street class. This program has gone into great detail on what tariffs are, where they come from, why certain countries embrace them, and why they don't. When you are the incumbent economic power, tariffs can be a tool to bring more money, more investment, more capital back to the homeland. However, in order to use tariffs, you have to be willing to look the markets in the eye and say: I know you might be a little ugly, I know you might be a little mean, but I am willing to persevere. I'm willing to push through the instant pain so that we can have long-term success.
As Charlie Kirk has said many times on this program, the West was built thanks to delayed gratification, not instant gratification, but instead delaying the inevitable payoff.
An Emotional Moment in the Rose Garden
Kirk admits that as he was watching the Rose Garden speech, with all the networks covering it, he got a little emotional. Not emotional because of what President Trump was doing with the markets, but when he saw a group of 55-year-old autoworkers, the white working class with their hard hats on. Kirk thought of the countless MAGA rallies he'd spoken at, the countless political events he'd attended. He and President Trump would look these guys in the eyes and make a promise to them. They would say to these white working-class men: elect us and we are going to fight for you. We're going to do mass deportations, we're going to stop the flow on the southern border of illegal immigration and drugs, and we are going to use tariffs.
These polite, mild-mannered Midwestern patriots that work for Ford or General Motors, that work in manufacturing plants—those that still exist—would applaud as if it was a lifeline. As Kirk says on this program, they're the ones that shower before work and they shower after work. He got a little emotional watching that Rose Garden speech as those very same guys that they have campaigned for can say that they voted for this. Donald Trump won the Heartland because of these swing voters, these are the Reagan Democrats, these are the Obama Democrats that voted for Obama and some of them even voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and they came back home.
32 Years of Managed Decline: Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Kirk wanted to set the tone and vibe of the conversation around this historic Liberation Day speech with why we are here. This started in Johnstown, Pennsylvania before Kirk was born. What President Trump is aiming to solve in the Rose Garden is 32 years of managed decline—35 years, 40 years you could say—of the slipping of American manufacturing dominance.
The clip shows how for ages, hot molten steel had been the lifeblood of Johnstown, vigorously pumping dollars and jobs through the city's veins. But then the pulse of the community went into cardiac arrest. Bethlehem officials stopped making comments beyond a press release saying they're sorry, but it's simply not cost-effective to run the mill any longer. Bethlehem cited fierce foreign competition and the national economy for their demise. For some Bethlehem employees, the shocking news was hard to process. Jobs left and drugs came in. Factories closed and communities shattered.
"We thought we were getting a better end of the deal," Kirk says. "Free trade, our leaders told us." George H.W. Bush was president when that happened, and William Clinton took off soon after in January of 1993. Neither actually decided to fix the devastation of the Heartland.
JD Vance and the Forgotten Worker
JD Vance ran for the US Senate and eventually became the vice president because he is a son of the forgotten family of the Midwest. He is a son of the forgotten worker of the UAW. JD Vance understands the shared lived experience of the factory workers of Appalachia.
When President Trump was doing the Rose Garden speech, he did not have to do this. He could have done what every politician did: "Oh, I'm in my second term, I'm not running again, forget this, I don't actually have to deliver on the promises." He could have coasted like Obama, he could have coasted like George W. Bush. But let's go through the list: Reagan opened up free trade which destroyed the Heartland (Reagan was good with a lot of stuff, he was terrible with this; he did some tariffs but not nearly enough). Bill Clinton accelerated it. George W. Bush was terrible. Barack Obama was terrible. Joe Biden is the first president in the post-World War II-based order to say enough, because President Donald Trump feels an obligation to the people that actually put him into office. He made a promise, he made a pledge, and to fulfill that pledge requires moral clarity that we have not seen from an American president since probably Dwight Eisenhower.
JD Vance understands the ramifications, the weight, and the heaviness of exactly what President Trump was contesting for in the Rose Garden speech. Vance explained that there were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization. The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things. The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things. You would open an iPhone box and it would say designed in Cupertino, California—the implication of course being that it would be manufactured in Shenzhen or somewhere else. Yeah, some people might lose their jobs in manufacturing, but they could learn to design or, to use a very popular phrase, learn to code.
"But I think we got it wrong," Vance said. "It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. Now we assumed that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends."
The Tariff Announcement: Liberation Day
President Donald Trump announced a solution to what JD Vance diagnosed as the problem. It's going to be a baseline 10% tariff on all US imports. That's big—everybody.
You are seeing the redesigning and the restructuring of the artificial intelligence economy. You are seeing the restructuring of the geopolitical hemisphere that America will lead. The Western Hemisphere, the Northern Hemisphere that we are in, that we live in, is going to be dominant and self-reliant. Reliant on China? No more. You're seeing the recalibration of exactly how we view economic matters, and it's been long overdue because the deal post-World War II was: we don't need to make stuff, we can just consume stuff. We could trade a bunch of money and hedge against it, maybe a little real estate economy, and we'll build software, not hardware. And it has resulted in the crippling of our great nation.
You are witnessing the reorganization and the reorientation of the wealthiest country on the planet to make sure that we remain the wealthiest country on the planet.
The Strategy: Tariffs Plus Tax Cuts and Deregulation
There will be market volatility, there will be turbulence. It's basically like taking cough syrup—it doesn't feel good, but it is good for you. It's necessary. We have been on borrowed time, we have been on borrowed future promises, and you are not a nation if you do not make stuff in your nation.
Vance explained the second conceit: that cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that inhibits innovation. He might even say that it's a drug that too many American firms got addicted to. So he asked his friends both on the tech optimist side and on the populist side not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed, he'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators have the same enemy, and the solution is American innovation.
The US Trade Representative has chronicled every tariff and every trade restriction on the United States. President Trump says they calculated an effective average tariff on US goods. If you combine all direct tariffs and all other trade restrictions, he says we are then retaliating by tariffing other countries that amount directly but cut in half, with a floor of 10%. So you might say, what does that mean? A lot of tariffs. That's what that means. It's going to be a lot of tariffs with China, and they could reciprocate.
Kirk is honest: it might be harder to go buy piles of plastic that you do not need. But do you want to be reliant on the Chinese Communist Party? Do you want to be subservient to a foreign land? Are we a colony or are we a country?
Kirk can tell you who's cheering this right now: the autoworkers in Michigan, the welders in Wisconsin, the people that showed up in record enormous numbers to vote for President Trump are enthusiastically giving a standing ovation for this right now. And do you know how you avoid a tariff? You make your product in America.
Understand, if President Trump was just doing tariffs, it's a left-and-right-hand situation. On the left hand, you say just tariffs. If he was only doing tariffs, it'd be a little rough, but he's doing the brilliant second move, he's doing the brilliant right hand that makes it all happen. He's doing tariffs plus tax cuts, deregulation, and drill baby drill. So when you pair those two together, all of a sudden tariffs make a lot more sense. And he's so smart to do this.
In the spring, he announces tariffs, which he can do with his unilateral authority. Get the tough stuff out of the way, take the pill—everybody, maybe it's not as bad as you think. And then the all-encompassing strategy is boom, on the second part is a massive reconciliation bill of tax cuts, of no tax on tips, of drill baby drill, of balancing the budget. President Trump is also offering tax deductions on interest on car loans on American-made cars.
The American Consumer: The Golden Prize
When you then look at the entire picture and you are a foreign company, you have to ask yourself a very simple question: do you want to be able to access the American consumer? What President Trump is doing is he's saying, hey, in order to access the American consumer, you've got to make the stuff here, because the American consumer is the golden prize on the planet.
Let Kirk say that again: the American consumer is the golden prize. We consume more than any other nation. We are a consumerist economy. We buy and we buy and we buy and we go out to eat. The Japanese are not like that at all. They have a deflationary problem—they save their money under pillows, basically. It's why almost nothing goes up in downtown Tokyo. They have a deflation problem. They've got to keep on printing money and going through quantitative easing. In America, it's the exact opposite. We have high leverage and huge money velocity and investment and risk-taking and entrepreneurialism.
So we are the golden prize. We are the top accomplishment. If you are a Dutch company, a German company, an Argentine company, a Colombian company, you can never reach global international success if you cannot get into the US market. But now, in order to reach the US market, you have to make that good in the United States of America. Employ American labor. Not just say, "Hey, I want to access the American market, thanks so much, let's trade some dollar bills, I'm going to bring all the profits back to Bogotá, I'm going to bring all the profits back to Brussels, I'm going to bring all the profits back to Copenhagen, I'm going to bring all the profits back to Amsterdam." Meanwhile, all we get in return is a pile of plastic.
No. Instead we say: if you want to be able to do that, make the good in Knoxville, make the good in Marshalltown, Iowa, make the good in Flagstaff, Arizona. Employ American labor.
China has now taken the most extraordinary step of building factories in Mexico to avoid tariffs and access America's prized market. We are the largest market in the world. We're going to start acting like it.
