Megyn Urges Americans to Give Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Plan a Chance

In a Rose Garden speech billed as both “Liberation Day” and “Make America Wealthy Again,” Donald Trump finally unveiled his global tariff policy on Wednesday.

After weeks of teasing reciprocal tariffs, the president announced a scaled back plan. The United States will impose a baseline 10 percent tariff on all imports with no exceptions. Countries considered the worst offenders – as identified by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers – will be slapped with a rate equivalent to half of what they charge the U.S. 

China, for example, will now face an additional 34 percent tariff in return for the 67 percent duty it imposes on American goods. This brings the total Chinese tariff rate to 54 percent. Trump also announced a 25 percent levy on all foreign-made automobiles, a decision applauded by the United Auto Workers Union. 

The 10 percent tariff is set to take effect on April 6, while the higher levies will be implemented April 9. “It’s our turn to prosper and, in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt,” Trump said Wednesday. “It’ll all happen very quickly.”

U.S. and global stock markets have been volatile in the wake of the news, with the biggest American stock losses coming from car companies and smaller businesses that rely on foreign parts and materials.

Trump’s tariff policies and speculation over them have dominated corporate media headlines for months, and that has also been true in the wake of the formal announcement. On Thursday’s show, Megyn gave her take.

Megyn’s Take

“There are going to be a bunch of tariffs, and pretty much everyone is against it. There is a strain of die hard MAGA that is open-minded to doing something in a different way because while the system has worked well for the top one percent, it hasn’t been working that great for the folks in the Rust Belt.

I, for one, say we give President Trump a chance. There is no way he is going to let a bunch of economic pain rain down on the country for the next three and a half years without doing anything about it. He is talking about short-term pain for long-term gain. 

We got the full announcement last night from Donald Trump about his new tariff plan. It is basically 10 percent across the board for all countries, and higher, on top of that, depending on whether you are tariffing us or if there is some sort of trade deficit between our country and yours – even without tariffs – that we find unfair. 

For example, there are certain regulations in Japan that make it virtually impossible for us to sell certain cars there because we will never pass the regulations. Is that fair? Is it hard to get a Japanese car in America? So, Trump is jacking up tariffs on Japan not necessarily based on their tariffs but based on a trade deficit because of regulations they have put in place that make it impossible for us to compete over there in the way they can here. 

That is what Donald Trump is trying to rectify.

The defenders of the free trade world say, yes, all of that sounds good on paper, the unfairness is a very easy argument to make, but net-net we are still the strongest economy in the world because of our free trade. We actually don’t make a lot of things domestically and won’t start to just because of this plan. They say this is going to cause what is called ‘stagflation,’ where inflation goes up and the economy slows and eventually we could see job losses. They are predicting all doom and gloom. 

Why don’t we give them a chance? Why don’t we see how this changes things? Because over the last 25 years, our manufacturing industry has been gutted. It has been sliced in half. I heard Adam Corolla talking about this the other day, and it was a good point. He said, half of Los Angeles burned and do you know who is out rebuilding it? Men. Men in excavators and dump trucks; men with bulldozers and shovels; brick layers. Men like that – who nobody in the Palisades probably gives two sh-ts about – are going to rebuild the Palisades. That is the truth. 

There are a lot of those guys in this country who have seen what they know how to do best absolutely devastated by a globalist agenda that cares more about free trade than they do about our own American guys. And Trump is of a different ilk. He has never stopped thinking about these guys. Reportedly, he read Rick Santorum’s book on the manufacturing crisis and what we did to our own before he ran for president. It was basically Rick Santorum’s platform when he ran for president and won Iowa in 20212. There are clips of Trump back when he was in his forties talking about how we need tariffs and thinking about the more working class manufacturers of America. 

This is something near and dear to his heart, and we have never, in recent history, given it a good try. I think we need to be patient with the president, who ran very much on this and deserves a shot.”

You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,041 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.