White House Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett Clarifies Trump's Tariff Exemptions Under Section 232

2 days ago

During an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, National Economic Council Director, Kevin Hassett spoke about the exemptions under President Trump's tariffs.

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Transcript

00:00White House National Economic Council Director, Kevin Hassett. Kevin, good to see you again.

00:04Hey, Jake. Good to see you.

00:05The White House says everything that happened over the last week and a half went according to plan.

00:10Over the course of just a few days, the global market lost trillions in stock value,

00:13regained some of it, but not all of it.

00:15The strength of the dollar right now is plunging.

00:17Consumer sentiment is worse than at any time during the Great Recession.

00:22Is all of this part of the plan?

00:24Right. In fact, let's talk about what the trade plan is,

00:27because I think that it's very, very important for people to understand

00:30why we're doing what we're doing and how we got to the point where this is the right strategy.

00:35The bottom line is that in the United States, there are these things called 232s.

00:41You've heard people talk about it.

00:42It's a trade action where the government decides that there's something that's a serious threat

00:47to national security if we don't do something about it.

00:50And so an example, just hypothetical, would be suppose that in order to protect ourselves

00:55from an adversary, we had cannons, but we had to buy the cannonballs from them.

01:00Well, then you could put a 232 tariff on the cannonball, and then we'd have to make it here,

01:05and then that would make it so that if we ever did have a situation where we were in conflict,

01:09that we'd have everything we need to protect ourselves.

01:12And so the 232 things were always excluded.

01:15They weren't covered by the new actions that you discussed at the opening.

01:18And so it's not like, so for example, semiconductors are the key important part of a lot of defense

01:25equipment, and there's going to be a semiconductor 232 that studies those things carefully

01:30and decides what has to be onshore in order to protect America.

01:34And so it was always the case in Annex 2 in the Reciprocal Act that semiconductors were going

01:39to not be covered by that action because there's a 232 action that was announced in the executive

01:45order that is going to address it. And so I don't think that anything really should be a surprise

01:51if people stopped and studied, but it seems like a lot of the coverage, people are in a rush to get

01:55the coverage out and didn't really think through the logic of it, which is why we have a longer

01:59form show with you here, right, Jake, where we can talk about what exactly is going on.

02:04And then finally, why is it that people think that there is an emergency about this?

02:07Well, it's because, especially over the last four years, the influence of China

02:13into every little corner of our country has just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.

02:18And so it actually is the case that it's a very uncomfortable amount of Chinese input

02:23in our actual weapons systems, Jake, in our actual weapons systems.

02:26And so President Trump thinks it's urgent that we address these matters.

White House Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett Clarifies Trump's Tariff Exemptions Under Section 232

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