Vice President JD Vance declared this week that for “the first time in probably 40 years,” the United States has a leader in President Donald Trump, who is reversing the trend of the U.S. serving as a “piggy bank” for the rest of the world.
During an interview on Fox News, Vance spoke about President Trump’s long-promised, sweeping set of baseline tariffs on all trading partners and what he described as “kind reciprocal” tariffs on nations he argued were the worst offenders in trade relations with the U.S.
Below is a transcript of Vance’s remarks with Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones:
Jones: “Let’s talk about some of the issues that matter to the American people. And it’s the President’s new tariff policy. When I think about what he got elected on is bring the cost down for people, but also bring manufacturing back to the country. These are going to kind of hit each other, right? Explain to us how you get manufacturing here, but also get the cost down for the American people.”
Vance: “Well, if you go back a little bit, Lawrence, remember during the first Trump Administration, everybody said that Trump’s tariffs were going to be inflationary back then. What actually happened? We had 1.5 percent inflation. We had the fastest growing economy in a generation. And we had the beginning of a manufacturing renaissance in the United States of America. Then, of course, we had 4 terrible years of the Biden Administration. But I think it’s useful for all of us to step back and ask us, ask ourselves, what has the globalist economy gotten of the United States of America? And the answer is, fundamentally, it’s based on two principles, incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us. To make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. It’s about what’s best for the United States.
That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices. And it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America. For 40 years, we have gone down that pathway. We’ve seen closing factories. We’ve seen rising inflation. We’ve seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now. President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. He promised it. And now he’s delivering. And yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it. But we needed a big change, Lawrence. We cannot keep going down the Joe Biden globalist pathway, where we have $2 trillion of peacetime debt and deficits. We have manufacturing disappearing. That is not working for Americans. We’ve got to take this country in a different direction.”
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“I grew up in a family that often did live paycheck-to-paycheck and we know a lot of Americans are worried. So we are fighting very hard to bring prices down. We’re going to have the biggest deregulation in the history of this country,” Vance said.
“We’re doing a lot of things and already have done a lot of things to lower the cost of energy. You heard the president mention this yesterday. Eggs, when we came in, were at a 10-year high and all of a sudden they’ve dropped 60 percent just in the two months of the Trump Administration. What I’d ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not going to fix things overnight,” he added.
Vance declared, “Joe Biden left us — this is not an exaggeration Lawrence — with the largest peacetime debt and deficit in the history of the United States of America, with sky-high interest rates. You don’t fix that stuff overnight. We know people are struggling. We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it’s not going to happen immediately. But we really do believe that if we pursue the right deregulation, we pursue those energy cost-reducing policies, yes people are going to see it in their pocketbook. They’re also going to benefit from the fact that foreign countries can’t take advantage of us anymore. That means their jobs are going to be more secure.”
