Elections Matter 101: Biden Fiddles While Mexico Dumps Steel Into American Markets
Peter Navarro's Taking Back Trump's America Podcast
Danger Will Robinson, danger. The wokeness and ineptness of President Joe Biden is sucking the lifeblood out of the American steel industry threatening our economy and our national security.
Consider that American imports of Mexican steel peaked in 2018 at 3.4 million tons and then dropped down to 3 million tons after President Trump’s bold and necessary steel tariffs were imposed.
Two years after Joe Biden has come into the White House, Mexico is now dumping 4.8 million tons of steel into American markets, devastating our steel industry – steel mill utilization is now down to 74% of total capacity, substantially less than the 80% required just to break even.
In response, a bipartisan gaggle of US senators is calling on the Biden regime and United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai to get off their asses and reimpose the Trump tariffs. Don’t hold your breath; and the problem is not just Biden. It’s also Katherine Tai.
Here, a bit of history is instructive: Instead of appointing Michael Wessel who was a longtime labor leader, the best Democrat for the job, a loyal Biden supporter, and absolutely nails when it comes down to cracking down on trade cheating as well as communist China, Wessel, who by an accident of birth was burdened with being both white and male, lost out when Biden appointed the female Chinese-American Katherine Tai.
As a result of yet another example of such Biden Wokeness, the USTR’s office has now reverted from the hardline days of Trump and his USTR Robert E. Lighthizer to once again be a rubberstamp for the globalist and Washington elites.
This absolutely sucks for black, brown, and blue-collar Americans who bear the brunt of unfair trade. And how many times will we have to say that elections have consequences; and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.
To get the complete picture, jump into the time machine with me now and let me take you back to the Trump White House and the original deliberations over the imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs. This is something President Trump promised to do as a candidate back in 2016; but it would take me – and yes it boiled down to me with an assist from Wilbur Ross – to finally get the steel tariffs to the finish line in March 2018.
The tragedy here is that I had the executive orders ready to go to implement the steel and aluminum tariffs literally on the first day of the administration. But I quickly ran into the buzz saw of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn – two of the biggest Wall Street a-holes and globalists you could ever meet.
From January 2017, Inauguration Day, to the signing of the steel tariffs on March 8, 2018, I would go Mano a Mano with Cohn and Mnuchin, who would relentlessly badger President Trump not to implement the tariffs. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was all for the tariffs but he was surprisingly meek when it came to standing up to Cohn and Mnuchin.
At any rate, in what would be one of the funnest and funniest 24 hours of my White House days, Wilbur finally got the stones to stand up to Mnuchin and Cohn after President Trump berated him for delaying steel tariffs and so Wilbur and I hatched a plan that would bring a group of steel executives right to the Oval Office to let the president know how much they supported the tariffs.
Yes, Wilbur and I did it in secret without bringing in anybody else in the West Wing for the simple reason that everybody else in the West Wing, from Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn to the Staff Secretary Rob Porter, White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn, and, of course, Chief of Staff and Chief Bully John Kelly – were all part of the globalist opposition to the tariffs.
Of course, at that meeting in the Oval, the Boss gave the green light for the tariffs and that was the best part. Yet, the second best part was that Gary Cohn decided to resign in a huff just days later over our failure to respect “process” in the matter.
Cohn’s complaint over process gave me one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever had because all Cohn and his other globalist buddies in the West Wing did was use bad process to stymie everything President Trump wanted to do on trade. As I write about in my Taking Back Trump’s America book, Bad Personnel like Cohn, Mnuchin, and Kelly always results in Bad Policy which in turn results in Bad Politics for the president.
At any rate, talk about hitting two birds with one stone – tariffs AND the resignation of Gary Cohn. Now that was a lovely week.
Suffice it to say now that if Donald Trump were in the White House, our steel industry would be prospering. Memo to Joe Biden: We need the steel industry not just to provide high paying manufacturing jobs. We also need a vibrant steel industry for national security reasons.
Remember here that ultimately we beat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II not just with our brave military but also with our Arsenal of Democracy factories that churned out the tanks, planes, ships, and armaments we needed to win – all with Made in the USA steel.
I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to get Donald Trump back in the White House and see him reimpose stiff tariffs on the foreign dumpers and cheaters like Mexico and Communist China and Turkey and Europe. And that’s it for today’s edition of the Taking Back Trump’s America podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast and write review as it helps get the word out. Peter Navarro. Out – with these words for our sponsors.
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Sure do miss sound minds like yours in our government.