The Days of America as the World’s Piggy Bank Are Over

… a reporter said, “Mr. President, you said that this was a positive meeting. But from the outside, it seemed quite contentious. Did you get any indication from your interlocutors that they were gonna make any concessions to you? And I believe that you raised the idea of a tariff-free G7.”

THE PRESIDENT: I did. Oh, I did. No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. Let’s say Canada, the United States pays tremendous tariffs on dairy, as an example, 270%. Nobody knows that. So you go tariff free, you go barrier free, you go subsidy free. That’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of Finance. It’s gotta change. It’s not a question of I hope it changes. It’s gonna change a hundred percent. And tariffs are gonna come way down because people cannot continue to do that. We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing, and that ends.

RUSH: Okay. There it. And that is the point. All these people having a conniption fit, that’s why Trump was elected. The people that voted for him did so knowingly. It really is astounding.

… on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday. Jake Tapper said, “What did Trudeau say that was so offensive? I mean, Trump accused him of lying, so what do you expect Trudeau to do?”

KUDLOW: He says that we are the problem with tariffs. They have enormous tariffs. I mean, they have tariffs on certain dairy and food products of 290, 295 percent. He really kind of stabbed us in the back. He did a great disservice to the whole G7. They were united in the G7. They came together. President Trump was charming, good faith, and they were getting along famously. President Trump actually — and this is music to my ears, Jake — he went through those two days of conference talking about the need for a new free trade system, no tariffs. We were coming together beautifully, okay? And then he goes out there and pulls this amateur political stunt.

RUSH: And next up is Peter Navarro. He is the National Trade Council director for Trump. He was on Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace said, “Is that really how we want to deal with our second biggest trading partner?”

NAVARRO: Chris, there’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. And that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did. As soon as the plane took off from Canadian airspace, Trudeau stuck our president in the back. That will not stand.

Trade imbalances, the trade surplus or the trade deficit, trade deals, this is, for many people, an esoteric type of issue. They don’t really know that much about it, except when it’s explained in a very simple and noncomplex way, like Trump does. But it never approached an issue over which votes turned, or on which votes turned. I mean, it was a trade, trade deals, trade imbalance, pre-Trump. Presidents talked about them, candidates talked about them, but it was never the issue on which an election turned.

But with Trump, the issue has been brought to the forefront. And a lot of people who at points in the past didn’t understand it, didn’t pay much attention to it, have had their eyes opened by all of this. And what people are beginning to realize is that we, the United States, have been literally propping up the entire world by bending over to every single country to give them this cushy deal on trade because we think we are obligated to.

They were obliterated during wartime. They were devastated economically. Their geography was altered. We had a duty to help them rebuild because we were capable, we were big enough, we had the money, we had the economy, we had the growth, we had the productive population. And so it fell to us. And we accepted it as leaders of the free world. But like any other entitlement, after a while people stop appreciating it and start expecting it. And Canada, in many ways, depending on who their leaders are, like this Trudeau kid obviously expect it. Angela Merkel expects it. All the NATO people expect it. The days of appreciation are over.

And Trump has come along and said, “Wait a minute. A thank-you would be nice.

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