2,422 videos 1,389,747,653 views US Joined Aug 30, 2018
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 Trump's Tariffs Plus Deregulation Strategy and the Path to Economic Independence from China
Charlie Kirk breaks down President Trump's economic approach, combining tariffs with massive deregulation and tax cuts to rebuild American manufacturing. Kirk argues this differs fundamentally from socialist tariff policies, as Trump simultaneously liberates the domestic economy while creating trade barriers. He emphasizes that DEI regulations have been a silent albatross on corporate America, making the country less competitive. With Senator Eric Schmitt, Kirk explores the reconciliation process, potential spending cuts, and why America's position as the world's premier consumer economy gives Trump leverage in trade negotiations with 70-plus countries now coming to the table.
Trump's Unique Tariff Strategy Combined with Economic Liberation
The market has experienced turbulence, but positive indicators are emerging. The inflation report shows terrific numbers, interest rates are plummeting, and oil prices are dropping significantly. Deregulation is happening at a pace not seen in years. While President Trump famously said that for every one new regulation, we should eliminate two regulations, the argument can be made that we shouldn't add any new regulations at all—just slash five, six, or seven thousand lines of regulation that make it harder for businesses to operate, hire, and deploy capital.
Maria Bartiromo points out that decreasing oil prices will be felt at the pump within two weeks. Interest rates are going down, and by the end of the year, we might see a significant cut in rates which will help first-time home buyers. President Trump is not going to bend on his commitment to build an economy that is independent rather than relying on China for things like prescription drugs.
The Critical Difference Between Trump's Tariffs and Socialist Tariffs
The contrast between what President Trump is doing with tariffs versus what someone like Bernie Sanders would do is incredibly important. If Bernie Sanders were to implement tariffs, he would create a domestic controlled socialist economy. What President Trump is doing is incredibly unique—he is implementing tariffs while liberating the American market economy. It's exactly the right ingredient.
Tariffs are trade barriers, but you can avoid a tariff by making products here. One of the reasons we've been falling behind on manufacturing is because it's so hard to build new factories. One of the greatest regulations of all is DEI. DEI is the silent regulation that is an albatross around the neck of corporate America. DEI makes us less competitive, less entrepreneurial, and causes us to take fewer risks. It prioritizes equity and racial parity or racial preferences over excellence.
DEI was written into every single corporate handbook by soft corporate and soft cultural decree post-Floyd. It was more about outcomes over opportunity—honestly about a very perverted tribal racial preference doctrine that was force-fed into corporate America.
Making America Both a Consumer and Production Economy
What President Trump is attempting to do is liberate the American economy through massive tax cuts, deregulation, and an energy boom while having trade barriers. That mixture should work. People voted for this. There would be grave concerns about tariffs if President Trump was talking about massive tax increases, more regulation, more government programs, more government redistribution and tariffs—because then why would anyone want to do business here?
What President Trump is doing is making it more appealing to invest while also having a penalty to not invest. He's doing both things simultaneously. He's making the penalty to not invest be higher because we are the world's consumer. We are the premier consumer economy on the planet. Every country desires to be a consumer economy. Every country wants to be a consumer economy. We have achieved that. We also now want to go back to being an industrial economy.
Here's the secret: it's so much easier to rebuild an industrial sector than suddenly become a consumer economy. In order to become a consumer economy, you must be insanely rich. Very few countries are insanely rich. China can't be a consumer economy internationally. They can domestically because they don't want other countries' stuff to be sold in their country. Being a consumer economy is not necessarily bad. What is bad is also not being a production economy. If you are both, you are a superpower the likes of which the world has never seen. And we can get that back.
The Budget Resolution and Reconciliation Process
Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri provided analysis on the House passing the budget resolution. The budget resolution sets the framework by which we now move into the reconciliation process. It unlocks the process for the committees to go do the work, like Ways and Means or the Senate Finance Committee, to start to put meat on the bones of these ideas that have been talked about—principally making the tax cuts from 2017 permanent and extending those.
The resolution includes provisions for no tax on tips, money for border security and deportations, defense funding, permitting reform on energy, and spending reforms. In 2019, we were spending about $4 trillion. We spend $7 trillion after the last four years of the Biden budget and the COVID spending. We take in five trillion. If we can actually have some reform and bend that curve, have revenues with all of the good things that are happening with President Trump catch up, it's realistic to think we can have a balanced budget in a few years.
If the House can hang together and Senate Republicans can hang together on this, we don't need a single Democrat vote. The reconciliation process only takes a simple majority in the Senate.
Where Spending Cuts Can Come From
The amount of money we are borrowing is extraordinary. When COVID happened, we decided to just put back all of our fiscal impulses of fiscal discipline and have decided to basically embrace the cheap money guzzle. There are rumors that we might increase the Department of Defense budget to a trillion dollars. The greatest threat to our national security is our national debt, not even any existential foe.
We spend a trillion dollars a year on the interest on that $36 trillion debt. That's only going to grow as some of these things become more mature and they need to be refinanced with higher interest rates over the last few years because of Biden inflation. There are two ways to find savings. One is discretionary spending that Doge is finding. Take USAID as an example—all of that money going to gender programs, DEI in Burma, LGBTQIA programming and Sesame Street in Iraq. That all adds up.
Marco Rubio said that 83% of the stuff we were doing, we're not going to do that anymore. The 17% that remains, we're going to move in further American interests overseas. Work requirements are broadly popular. If you're an able-bodied adult, you should be required to work. That explosion under Obamacare is really affecting people who need it most on Medicaid. When President Trump talks about making sure we're not touching Social Security, not making sure we're touching benefits on Medicare or Medicaid, we're all with him in lockstep, but we got to make sure that the able-bodied population that's not working stops draining the system.
If we just went back to pre-pandemic spending—2019 spending levels plus inflation and population growth—that's like a trillion dollar difference than what we're spending right now.
Tariff Strategy and Trade Fairness
Missouri has a lot of once mighty industry and also a fair amount of exporting and international business. Permanent Washington is totally disconnected from what's really happening. The global elites have had their run after World War II. We had all these favorable deals for countries who were trying to get back on their feet—Germany, Japan, all these countries—with the goal of defeating Soviet communism. We won. After the Cold War ended though, we didn't adjust at all.
You can't buy or you don't see an American car in Europe. You don't see an American car in Japan. You don't see an American car in Korea. Yet all of their cars are in our markets because they have erected these barriers over time through tariffs, trade barriers, and in China specifically, stealing our IP. It's been very unfair to us. In blue collar neighborhoods, all those good paying factory jobs went overseas. We got fentanyl in exchange.
America isn't an economic zone. America isn't some strip mall with an airport attached to it. It's a people. It's a place. It's our home. We finally have a president that's willing to stand up and say, "You know what? We've been treated very unfairly. We're going to treat you like you treat us." And now look what's happening. Seventy countries plus have come to the table and said, "We heard what you had to say. We understand the United States of America is 39% of all the consumption in the world. It's 25% of the world's GDP. It's a very important market for us. So we're going to lower our trade barriers so that we can actually have fair trade."
China Versus Everyone Else
There are two different buckets: communist China and everybody else. China is the worst offender. They made a terrible decision in trying to escalate this. They rip off our IP. They steal our jobs. They create trade barriers. They say, "Oh yeah, no, you can't sell your chickens here because you didn't wash them properly, or you can't sell your electronics here because there's this bolt that's out of place." So it's not just the tariffs, it's all the other hidden trade barriers that prevent our goods getting to market.
They export five times more than we export to them. They have a hell of a lot more to lose in this if they continue down this path. The rest of the world is coming to the table, and at the end of the day it's going to lead to greater prosperity for us because we're going to have more markets open. We'll have more revenue coming into this country and we'll bring back industry, those good paying jobs that we had for a very long time that didn't need to go somewhere else.
