President Donald Trump on Thursday used a medical metaphor to describe the status of his “reciprocal tariffs” plan implemented on what he dubbed “Liberation Day.”
“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” Trump wrote on TRUTH Social. “THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened more than 1,000 points lower on Thursday morning after Trump unveiled his most severe levy of tariffs yet during a White House Rose Garden ceremony a day earlier, but administration officials remained optimistic in early morning TV interviews. They touted an anticipated impact of onshoring U.S. manufacturing and further bolstering American jobs.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN the United States “is no longer going to be cheated by foreign nations around the world,” reiterating that Trump had declared the issue a “national emergency.”
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“We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit and counting. We’ve had 90,000 factories close in the last couple of decades,” Leavitt told CNN. “Since 1997, Americans have been put out of five million manufacturing jobs. These are not just statistics. These are real American lives that have been impacted. And it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it. This is going to restore more wealth, more jobs, more economic prosperity to our great country.”
Leavitt said that the countries targeted by Trump’s reciprocal tariffs have had “70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to.”
“They have ripped off American workers. They have taken our jobs overseas,” Leavitt said.
She also told CNN that Trump has already launched a “massive deregulatory agenda” that has “saved the American taxpayer millions of dollars.” Leavvitt said that the president is “unleashing the might of our American energy industry,” arguing that a stifled energy industry drove inflation during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Vice President JD Vance told Fox & Friends on Thursday morning that critics during Trump’s first term warned that tariffs would be inflationary, but instead inflation dipped to 1.5% until the “four terrible years of the Biden administration.” Vance said the “globalist economy” has resulted in the United States “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,” Vance said. “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.”
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The vice president said the “Joe Biden globalist pathway” has resulted in the U.S. having $2 trillion in peacetime debt and deficits and manufacturing “disappearing,” promising that Trump is taking the country in a different direction.
Addressing criticism from Wall Street following Trump’s “Liberation Day” event in the White House Rose Garden, Vance said, “a lot of people have gotten rich from American jobs moving overseas, but American workers have not gotten rich” and American companies “have not gotten wealthy from the increasing growth of foreign competitors manufacturing overseas.”
“They charge us ridiculous tariffs. They engage in a lot of non-tariff practices like currency manipulation,” Vance said. “That has been awful for Main Street in the United States of America.”
On concerns about tariffs potentially driving up costs, Vance said the administration is “fighting very hard to bring prices down” and usher in “the biggest deregulation in the history of this country.”
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News that “when tariffs come into place, foreign goods may become a little more expensive, but domestic goods do not.”
“For the first time in your lives, you’re going to actually think about the Americans who make the products, the Americans who produce these products and work in these factories,” he said. “It’s time for us to take care of them instead of taking care of the world.”
Trump said that his administration secured about $5 trillion of committed investment, which Lutnick told CBS meant “people are going to start building factories right now.”
“That means all that construction work begins now,” Lutnick said, vowing that the president’s plan would build on the 150,000 jobs already added to the U.S. economy in March. “That starts to employ Americans today. You’re going to see plants being built, factories rebuilding. All shifts are going to be running hot across America now. You’re going to see employment leaping starting today.”
