Victor Davis Hanson: Donald Trump’s Tariff Diplomacy Is Working

The Daily Signal Podcast

The Daily Signal

News, Government, Politics, Daily News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Donald Trump is not using tariffs for their historical purpose, which is to protect and promote domestic industry. Instead, Trump, as Victor Davis Hanson argues, is using tariffs to hold countries, like Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and China, accountable. And it’s working. On this edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Hanson dispels the Left’s hysteria over President Trump’s tariff policies: “So, if you take Venezuela and Colombia, he's saying that ‘you people deliberately emptied your jails and you sent them to the United States—sent them being felons—violent felons. And you're not going to do that anymore’ And they said, ‘we're not taking them back’. He said, ‘you're going to take them back, or I'm going to put a tariff’. So, it was a lever of diplomacy, and it worked. They backed down completely.” For Victor’s latest thoughts, go to: https://victorhanson.com/ Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHqkXbgqrDrDVInBMSoGQgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:30.1	Traditionally, a tariff member is a policy that a government uses to pop up an anemic industry,
0:36.3	an industry that can't compete globally or vis-a-vis a trading partner.
0:40.9	And traditional economists say this is terrible. If you don't have free global trade,
0:46.3	then the consumer is paying more for a product that is inefficient because it's shielded from competition.
0:52.3	But is Donald Trump really doing that? What I'm getting at is there are not really tariffs.
0:56.0	So what are they? Well, to answer that question, let's look at the countries he's targeted.
1:01.0	Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal.
1:16.3	I want to talk about tariffs.
1:17.9	If you know everybody's noticed the hysteria that happened the last five or six days
1:21.7	that Donald Trump is going to haphazardly in shotgun fashion level asymmetrical tariffs or blanket tariffs,
1:30.6	the stock market panic.
1:32.5	But my question to all of us is, were they tariffs at all?
1:36.4	Traditionally, a tariff, remember, is a policy that a government uses to pop up an anemic industry,
1:43.4	at least an industry that can't compete globally or versus
1:47.5	vis-a-vis a trading partner. And traditional economists say this is terrible because what happens is
1:54.3	that if you don't have free global trade, then the consumer is paying more for a product that is inefficient
2:03.6	because it's shielded from competition. But is Donald Trump really doing that? Is he saying our
	...

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