Thom Tillis: Americans Need 'Certainty' Surrounding Trump's Tariffs 'Sooner Rather Than Later'

6 days ago

During remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) spoke about President Trump's tariffs.

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Transcript

00:00Mr. President, this morning we had a finance committee meeting, and Ambassador Greer was

00:08there, a U.S. trade representative, who I voted for and I have a lot of confidence in.

00:14I asked him a line of questions, and then I saw the president getting lazy, so I felt

00:18like instead of having to talk to a lot, not the president, the press, the press getting

00:24lazy, please correct that, and not reporting what I said.

00:29Here's what I said.

00:30I was a partner at Pricewaterhouse for most of my career.

00:33I've advised big clients on big projects.

00:37What I was asking the ambassador today was a simple question in policy, or I should say

00:45in business, that didn't resonate with people in journalism who's apparently never worked

00:49a day in business.

00:50We used to have this concept of one throat to choke, right?

00:53When somebody makes a business decision for a major enterprise, there's always one person.

01:00It's not the president.

01:01It's not the vice president.

01:02They're in elected positions, and they have to rely on experts.

01:05All I was saying there is I support what's going on right now with trade.

01:09As uncertain as it may seem now, I think the president is right in challenging other nations

01:17who have for decades abused their relationship with the United States to press.

01:23I think he should.

01:24Whether or not I would do it a la prima, as I described, that's all at once, or whether

01:29or not I've picked out the top quartile of the worst offenders, work on them, and then

01:34kind of work down the list is a subject of debate.

01:36But the point that I was making is that someone in the administration, I assume, when they

01:43decided to do broad-based tariffs against dozens and dozens of countries, that they gamed out

01:49the second and third order effects of that decision.

01:53I'm assuming that anybody with a modicum of business experience would have understood that

01:58the markets were going to react the way they did.

02:00And that's okay.

02:01Markets go up and down.

02:02Markets reacting the way they have over the past few days over the long term is a problem.

02:09And so my request, just to make it clear, when I said one throat to choke, it's just

02:14like in jest, who is it that I'm either going to put on a pedestal and show up at the ticker

02:19tape parades when all this stuff works out well, or I'm going to hold them accountable for

02:23not thinking through some of the second and third order effects.

02:26That's what business people do.

02:28That's what I did the majority of my career.

02:30And presumably, with the very successful business people consulting President Trump, they've

02:35thought it through.

02:36We need to know that because the American people are wondering, I've got farmers where

02:41the Congress has failed to pass a farm bill for a few years now.

02:45So I've got farmers living harvest to harvest.

02:48And now we're being told that there may be some non-tariff trade barriers shutting down

02:53markets.

02:53So I'll hear from my pork farmers, I'll hear from soybean farmers, I'll hear from cotton

02:58farmers, I'll hear from people that grow about 80 different commodities at scale.

03:03We're the number one pork states, one of the number one chicken states.

03:06They need certainty.

03:08I'm willing to have some of this happen, but at some point we have to settle it down and

03:12sooner rather than later.

03:13The only other thing I said that I think bears repeating is that business people do think

03:19in long terms.

03:20Most of the business cases I built for clients were five-year, 10-year, 15-year sort of horizons.

03:25You don't have that luxury in business.

03:28You get the country on the right track or the wrong track and you suffer the political

03:32consequences or the benefit every two years.

03:35So anybody that tells me this trade stuff is going to be tumultuous for a couple of years

03:41do not understand American democracy.

03:44Americans give you about 14 months after the January when you get sworn in to demonstrate

03:50that you're putting the country on the right track.

03:53And if you do, you get rewarded in the ballot box.

03:56And if you don't, you get sent home.

03:58And so the only thing that I was trying to communicate today is I hope and I believe that there are

04:08people in the White House who are protecting the president by looking around corners and

04:13implementing policies that are going to benefit the American people.

04:16If they did, then this should work out really well.

04:20If they didn't, they should be that throat.

04:23Thank you, Mr. President.

Thom Tillis: Americans Need 'Certainty' Surrounding Trump's Tariffs 'Sooner Rather Than Later'

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