Tariffs are dominating the headlines every day now, so Charlie pauses with a public service announcement: What is a tariff, what can they achieve, and why is Trump so committed to them? Eric Bolling joins to unpack Trump's economic policy and explain why it's exciting for anyone in the middle class. Watch ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We explain how President Trump is fixing 30 years of failure.
Then Eric Bolling joins us to give us economic news and analysis.
Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Stay focused on the big picture, the macro picture.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky.
To have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
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What is a tariff?
We are hearing this word thrown around a lot.
Donald Trump is starting a trade war, is what we are being told.
We are saying that it is making the economy go into a recession.
But what exactly is a tariff?
A tariff is a duty.
It's a tax, in some sense, imposed by, of course, a government on importing or exporting of goods.
It is used as a form of negotiation many times, but as a way to try and bring both parties to the table.
Now, we have tried unfettered free trade over the last 30 or 40 years.
On paper, free trade with every country looks and sounds good.
It looks and sounds good when we are able to say, you know what?
There's no duties.
There's no tariffs.
There's no taxes.
However, America has been largely too focused on the importation of goods into America not being tariffed.
And far too often, we don't even ask the question, What about the products we make in our country that we want to import to other countries?
So the game that was constituted, the deal that was structured, was the following.
It was that we are going to become a purchaser of other countries' goods, and we will become a service economy.
Why do we need to go make stuff with our hands?
We're better than that.
We're just going to go close down all the factories in Allentown.
We're going to go close down the factories in Marshallton, Iowa.
We don't need to be making stuff.
We're more elevated than that.
We will have an information economy.
And we all know how that works.
Those very decisions that were made by the American corporate ruling class led to the rise and the ascension of Donald Trump.
It led to the explosion of the MAGA movement.
Now, we are in a three-dimensional trade war right now.
President Trump is forcing the issue.
President Trump very well could have avoided this.
The American people voted for tariffs, they voted for stricter trade measures, and he very well could have avoided this.
And understand that the menace of the Chinese Communist Party was made possible because of our overindulgence in internationalist trade policies.
Americans like the idea of living in a country that makes things again.
Not only do we want to make America great again, we want to make America make things again.
You are not a country if you import everything made overseas.
You are nothing more than a trading colony.
You're not a country.
President Trump had the Irish Prime Minister.
Now, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but there's actually a very interesting title to the Irish Prime Minister.
Blake can put the name in the chat.
It's like Tegesach or something is the actual term for the Prime Minister of Ireland.
I learned that.
I didn't know that.
But this is President Trump going back and forth with the Irish leader.
Thank you.
The Tayoseach.
Tysak.
Whatever.
President Trump says that he will impose additional tariffs on the EU to respond to their retaliatory tariffs.
The reporter then responds and says, well, what will be the retaliation?
Listen carefully.
This is President Trump in the Oval Office going back and forth with this reporter saying, I don't blame Ireland for what they have done.
I don't blame the Irish government for putting duties on our country.
Play cut 131, please.
Before it arrives on the EU, will you respond to their retaliation?
Of course I'm going to respond.
The problem is our country didn't respond.
Look, the EU was set up in order to take advantage of the United States.
Including Ireland?
Is Ireland taking advantage of the US? Of course they are.
I can't.
You know, I have great respect for Ireland and what they did.
And they should have done just what they did.
But the United States shouldn't have let it happen.
We had stupid leaders.
We had leaders that didn't have a clue.
Or let's say they weren't business people, but they didn't have a clue what was happening.
And all of a sudden, Ireland has, you know, our farmers.
That's him talking to the Tayshia.
By the way, you can see how poorly I pronounced it.
The Tayshia.
The leader of Ireland.
Other countries can tariff the importation of American goods, but we don't tariff the importation of their goods.
Now, on the surface, we thought we were getting the better end of the deal.
We said, oh my goodness, we get all of these cheap products.
We get Mercedes Benzes.
We get Toyotas.
We get Samsungs.
But over time, you can only go to the well so many times.
You can only go to the cheap money spigot so often.
And the more that you start to get high on the unlimited flow of cheap money, the bill comes due.
And the bill has come due, everybody, with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and our inability to make critical manufacturing.
Peter Navarro had an amazing appearance on Jesse Waters, and I want to break this down.
When he started talking about the details of the different tariffs that are put on...
American goods.
Let's play cut 134, please.
Now, there was a reason, Jesse, a reason why tariffs didn't cause a whiff of inflation during the first term.
We did historic tariffs on China.
We had steel and aluminum tariffs.
We had solar.
We had dishwasher.
We had these beautiful tariffs bringing in billions of dollars.
We had price stability and growth.
And I buried the lead, Jesse.
We are going to get...
The best tax cut in history, paid for in large part by tariff revenues from around the world, taken, Jesse, from the people who've been cheating us around the world with higher tariffs and higher non-tariff barriers.
It's a beautiful, bullish scenario.
We're bridging from Bidenomics to the bullishness of Trumponomics.
And what you see in the markets could be best described as a little bit of a...
Expulsion.
I don't want to use too graphic language, but you know it if you get the stomach flu or the norovirus.
Sometimes your body needs to expel some of the bad.
This is going to be a little bit of a transition phase.
I don't like to use the word transitory too much because the other administration butchered it.
Look, President Trump could easily not do this.
Understand the decision in front of President Trump.
President Trump very easily could have said, no tariffs.
Keep the market untouched.
Let the quote-unquote good times roll.
And the American middle class suffers.
You do not have a nation.
You do not have a country.
You do not have a social contract or social compact if you do not have a robust middle class.
A middle class is one that owns property, that pays your taxes, that makes your goods and services.
It is so tempting to be nothing but a service economy, but that has been the 1% that has done so well over the last 40 to 50 years.
Peter Navarro continues.
Play cut 133. We got the 3D, three-dimensional war on inflation, right?
It's drill, baby, drill.
Think about just going from $80 barrel oil down to $50.
Almost solved the whole thing right there.
But then you got deregulation and you got the Doge effect, which...
It's basically taking out waste, fraud and abuse, reducing our government debt.
What does that do?
That reduces, Jesse, mortgage rates and interest rates, which helps stimulate the home market and allows consumers not to have that overhang of debt.
Understand this.
What President Trump is doing, write this down, text to your friends, commit it to memory.
What President Trump is doing is completely reorganizing the philosophical, the political, the geopolitical and the moral posture of the federal government.
Thank you.
Economically.
It's a big deal.
It's going to take a little bit of a process, but coming out of it will become the strongest, most robust, long-lasting American economy in history.
Charlie Kirk here.
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So as I was getting ready, I'm here in D.C., been through the White House doing meetings and all sorts of stuff.
I had Jesse Waters on.
And there was an amazing clip that the Jesse Waters team pulled out that I said, I gotta play this on the show.
If you want to explain the birth, the foundation, the catalyst of the MAGA movement, this clip summarizes better than almost any.
This sort of behavior is the genesis of the populist movement.
To put this in perspective, this clip happened before I was born.
This is from November of 1992. I was born in October of 1993. Before I was even boring.
This is a reporter that went to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and was summarizing what we were just describing.
So basically here's what happened.
A bunch of smart guys like Mitt Romney and the consultant class, the ruling class, they all got their practitioner master's degrees from Harvard.
And what they were told is the most important thing is maximizing profit.
They were told the most important thing was maximizing the dollar.
You see, but that's not the only political question.
That's the only economic question, but when the political question, you must balance human happiness, community, family, crime, displacement.
But if you only ask the economic maximalization question, especially those that have no interest in the well-being of the body politic of the nation, or in the citizenry, you get decisions like this.
So you go to a place like Harvard and you get a master's degree from the Harvard Business School.
And the Harvard Business School will tell you it makes sense to shut down the mill.
Because they're unionized.
It takes too long.
They're not as efficient.
So shut down the mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Because let's just say a thing of steel, let's just use round numbers, costs you $100.
And in China, you can get it for $60.
And yes, you've got to ship it, but there'll be no tariff.
That's the key, everybody.
That's the kicker.
If the American government would have said, actually, we're going to put a 10% tariff on, the consultant class like Mitt Romney, And all the Bain Capital cabal, they never would have been able to do this.
This example right here happened tens of thousands of times.
City by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block.
And this eventually led to, first, Ross Perot.
Ross Perot was the first one to run under this energy.
He was the first one to recognize this.
This happened tens of thousands of times of plants closing and there were millions of people who lost their jobs.
So I want you to multiply what you were about to see.
An incredibly powerful piece of tape.
Credit to the Jesse Waters production team for finding it.
Commit this one to memory.
This here is what led us to this moment.
And what President Trump is doing is simply fixing what happened before I was even born.
And now President Trump is getting blamed by that for the media.
He's fixing what happened.
In this tape.
The human tragedy is unfathomable.
It was way too quick of a deindustrialization.
And drugs came in, and opioids came in, and crime came in, unemployment came in, and misery came in, and suicide came in.
Playcut 141. For ages, hot molten steel has been the lifeblood of Johnstown, vigorously pumping dollars and jobs through the city's veins.
But now, the pulse of the community is in cardiac arrest.
Bethlehem officials aren't making any more comments than what's contained in this press release.
They're sorry, but it's simply not cost-effective to run the mill any longer.
It does hurt, and there's a dramatic spin-off that's going to come from that, and there's going to be a lot of problems that have to be solved.
In part, Bethlehem cites fierce foreign competition and the national economy for their demise.
For some Bethlehem employees, it's hard to look past the shocking news.
Don't rely on a corporation that don't want you, in a sense.
And they don't care, you know.
You don't need a number.
You know who that guy is right now, 30 years later?
That guy is the guy at the side of the street with the MAGA flag that sits at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for three hours a day.
That guy that just showed on the piece of tape there?
That's the guy that waits six hours to go see President Trump speak at a MAGRO. Now, I'm of course exaggerating.
I don't know who this man is.
I'm saying the archetype of who this person is, that guy, whomever, I don't even know if he's still living, but he's a younger person in this.
Or he might have died of heart disease and a broken heart, divorced and poor, because we decided to ship the factory overseas.
We broke the social compact.
We did that.
And understand, just remember this, it is the experts who did this.
It is the same type of experts that told us six feet to slow the spread, the same types of experts that came in all in the name of an abstraction called free trade, free trade, free trade.
On certain things, of course, if we can have reciprocal free trade, but it was a neoliberal abstraction.
And what did it get us?
Got us communities that look like Gaza and a lot of people suffering and also the rise of the MAGA movement.
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Joining us now is great friend and patriot Eric Bolling, which you can find on Real America's Voice, host of Bolling.
Eric, welcome to the program.
Eric, you've been covering economic news for a while.
You understand the markets.
You understand the ups and the downs.
I want to get into just some of your analysis of where the market is at.
But first, I want to hear your comment, Eric, on what Trump is correcting.
Trump is correcting a 30-40 year error where we allowed the middle class of this country to be hollowed out.
And in came drugs, and in came homelessness and unemployment and misery.
Eric, talk about how President Trump is fixing a multi-decade problem.
Yeah, it's incredible, Charlie, what he's done in, what, 50 days or so.
He's really literally rewriting everything, not just, you know, social structures, but he's also rewriting how things like Wall Street work with the tariff.
He's teaching people, and I'll be perfectly honest with you.
I'm a free market person.
My entirety, I started CNBC 20-something years ago.
I've always been an advocate for the free market.
I don't like government involvement in markets.
They tend to adjust themselves better than government does.
He taught me something this time.
He mentioned something called, you know, we have the Internal Revenue Service, which means we're all paying money, we work hard, we pay our taxes.
That's the internal within the United States.
But these tariffs are external revenue, right?
It's coming from the outside.
And, you know, it really does tell you, well, maybe it's taking some of the burden off us, the people who are paying the vast majority of the four.
$5 trillion budgets that we're putting together.
So he's rewriting all the rules.
What I saw yesterday, actually, when he brought the Teslas out after the market closed, he started around 3.56 or so.
My show starts at 4 o'clock.
He started a couple minutes before.
Elon at 4.05 says, I'm here to double my...
Automobile output to the United States next year.
Wow.
After the market closes.
So what happened earlier in the day, what we didn't realize was the market was down yesterday.
It was down, you know, a good amount of day before yesterday.
It was down a good amount of two and a half, almost 3%.
Tesla was down 17%.
It was five times the market move because there were people attacking Elon Musk and Tesla because of his closeness.
To Trump and Doge.
And so they were punitively damaging, the Wall Street was punitively damaging Elon Musk and Tesla.
After the close, Musk says, we're going to double our output.
And Trump says, I love this car.
I want to buy one of these cars.
I said to the audience, I'm watching this at 408, 409. Tesla's going to open up a lot higher tomorrow today.
And it's going to run.
And it's up $18 a share today.
This is, you don't, here's my point.
You don't mess with Donald Trump.
And Elon Musk, two of the smartest people in the world in markets.
And that means it's not like they're making money for themselves, Charlie.
They have plenty of money.
They're the richest man in the world.
Trump's got $5, $6, $7 billion.
He doesn't need the money.
That's not what this is about.
It's about helping the American people.
It's about helping the middle class.
And it is just fascinating to see because these are all rewriting the way finance works.
We are all going to benefit from it.
Every single American is going to benefit from those two guys right there.
That handshake right there should scare the bejesus out of the liberals because that's going to make America great again and better.
So, Eric, I want you to just speak some stability.
There are people in our audience that have a lot of their retirement, their 401k, their nest egg, and they're seeing a little bit of red on their iPhone.
They're seeing a little bit of red on their TV screen.
They're not used to that always with President Trump.
And they're not necessarily overly concerned, but you can start to hear the little voice in the back of the head.
Should I sell, sell, sell?
I know you're not doing investment advice, nor do I want you to.
But I want you to give your career perspective on this, Eric.
The ups and the downs.
The need to look at the macro picture.
Some historical perspective.
Eric Bolling.
I give you very much.
So historically, if you buy and hold, you've done amazing.
You've literally, you've never, sure there are some bumps in the road, some recessions, 2007 hurt, but if you stuck it out, you're way better.
We're triple, four times the level on all these indices that we were in 2007. Here's the thing that is really, really telling on all of this.
Trump gets inflation down, period.
He does.
Last time he was president, I started my career in the oil business.
I was an oil trader for, you know, 15 years.
Never once in my life have I ever seen what Trump did in 2018. He had oil prices negative.
It went to zero, and there was so much oil in America, it went negative because...
People were looking for places to put the oil.
They didn't have it.
There was so much oil and gas prices were $1.49, $1.89.
I've never seen that in my entire life.
He's going to do it again.
Drill Baby Drill was one of his platform, one of the legs of the platform that he sold the American people on himself.
He will do it.
He'll get oil prices down.
When oil prices go down, everything goes down.
Everything goes down.
Not just food, not just energy.
Everything is made with an oil kind of DNA in it.
Toilet paper has an oil aspect of toilet paper to the manufacturing process.
A tomato in California has an oil price to it because you have to ship the tomato from California to New York or wherever.
Everything's hinged and dependent on the price of oil.
Trump knows to get oil prices down.
Inflation goes down.
We just saw egg prices that have gone up for the past four years actually slam down to the price that when Trump took over six weeks ago, seven weeks ago, and it will continue to go lower.
There it is.
There's the egg price chart right there.
Great job, producers.
And this is a month and two weeks into this.
It will continue.
Prices are going to come down.
That's more money.
That's more everything for the family budget.
Be patient.
Yes, he's right.
There's some red on some Wall Street stock indices.
But over the long run, when prices come down and you have employment, we're still fully employed.
The employment number came down.
We are completely fully employed as an economy.
When you have strong employment and lower prices, that's fuel for much better things to come.
And Eric, we're also seeing for the first time in 15 months more native-born Americans getting jobs than foreign-born Americans.
We are seeing prices go down.
The inflation report was very, very good.
We just showed the egg prices going down and the price of oil is also going down.
I think it's right near $65 a barrel right now.
And speak to the geopolitics.
Speak to the geopolitical.
As President Trump ends the Russian-Ukrainian war, as he makes the Middle East tensions go down, and that directly, without any other executive action, could actually bring down the price of oil.
Eric, do you agree with that?
Charlie, you're nailing it, because I believe the price of oil will turn everything better for America.
If the tension in the Middle East...
If Saudi Arabia is all of a sudden okay and everything's fine, Iran calms down because Russia says, calm down.
We have a peace deal going on.
You don't screw the peace deal up.
We can now, again, access Russian oil.
Russian is like the fourth largest oil producer in the world.
We're the largest.
Saudi Arabia is the second.
If we all start...
I mean, again, when we fully output, when we fully explore all of our oil, we're the top producer in the world.
So if we have the U.S., we're friendly with Canada.
Mexico is a major producer.
We're friendly with Saudi Arabia.
We can, again, tap into the Russian oil market, because right now we're not, because they're in war.
This brings oil prices down.
When oil prices go down, everything is better geopolitically.
Everywhere.
And we...
Are far more prosperous.
We are very, very dependent on the price of oil.
Crude oil is our lifeblood.
It's literally the blood that runs through the veins of our economy.
And Trump knows this.
He's always known.
Charlie, I started at Fox in, I think, 2007. And I used to do these every Monday morning on Fox and Friends.
I would host Donald Trump on a phone call.
And we talked oil.
And from that day, I realized, he realized how important a lower oil price is.
For the economy and for America.
Joe Biden bought oil at $120 a barrel.
He bought oil.
He released it in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
And then to replace it, he paid $120 a barrel for oil.
Trump knows better.
I can't tell you how confident and excited I am to see what the next four years are going to be with Trump.
Drill, baby, drill.
And let this economy just go.
Unleash it.
Just let it be.
And again, with the AI, with this whole AI movement that's going on, we've become the global leader in AI. It's almost, remember back in the 80s when technology exploded for the first time and the internet exploded, we were the leader and then we farmed it out.
We are again becoming the leader in technology.
With our AI companies, Apple, NVIDIA, Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk, really.
Elon's one of the four.
And it all ties together, Eric.
Let's not bury the lead.
Energy is AI. If you do not have the energy to power these data servers and these data farms, your little chat GPT is more energy intense than you realize.
It requires a lot of oil and natural gas to make that hum.
And so when you have Drill Baby Drill and then you have an infrastructure project, boom, you are able to be the AI leader in the world.
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Eric, tell us about your program, H-E-F-Y.
how people can find it, what you guys are covering.
It's been amazing.
I think I've been with Rav and I share a network with you and Bannon and just absolutely loving it.
We're every day live at 4 o'clock and it just so happens somewhere around 4 o'clock or 3.30, President Trump likes to sign some executive orders.
So we usually come in and he's signing orders and he's just playing with the reporters.
It's just really free-flowing.
It's absolutely free-flowing.
Just react to the craziness of the day.
We'll do a guest or two, but it's generally just...
I've been doing this a long time, Charlie, and I bring some of the market stuff to the show as well.
So just really enjoying an hour of television on Rev and Roku and all those.
And then we do the old digital thing, too.
We post it everywhere as well.
Have a great time.
Having a ball.
Rob and Parker do a great job.
We're honored to have you, Eric, as part of the Real America's Voice team.
One last question here, Eric.
What do you want to see out of this congressional bill from an economic standpoint?
I know tax cuts, D-rag, but what is going to have the long-term economic boost for middle-class Americans that you want to see Congress?
Because Trump is signing stuff every day, as you just say during your show, but what the fresh heck is Congress doing?
They've got to get off their tail and start producing here.
Eric?
You know, I'm not a huge fan of continuing resolutions.
I'd rather see real cuts and real cuts to programs, personally.
But, you know, again, I'm a little bit more, maybe more hardcore.
But this is a wonderful moment.
This is a wonderful moment where Congress and the Speaker of the House has got this vote that he...
And he's got it.
And then they send it to the Senate.
And the Senate Democrats are now in the biggest bind of their, probably of their careers, where if they sign it, they've capitulated to Trump and they'll hate themselves for it.
And if they don't sign it, they're going to be responsible for shutting down the government and America will be really ticked off at them.
So I'm loving, I'm actually like making the popcorn to watch how this plays out over the next couple of days and the best part of this.
As Speaker Johnson said, we're done.
Here it is.
Let us know.
And then they're skedaddling out of town.
You know, Charlie, personally, Doge is really, really important.
It's cutting back waste, fraud, and abuse.
I'd like to see the real hardcore spending cuts.
And this may not sit well with a lot of people, a lot of folks, but I'd like to see some defense cuts.
I mean, Pete's doing great.
Heck, Seth, I love him.
But maybe you can come in and, you know, maybe tie some things up.
We're approaching a trillion dollars a year.
A trillion dollars a year.
I mean, the next closest is China at $240 billion.
I mean, do we really need four times China?
Maybe not.
So again, I'm an old school, more hardcore, you know, balanced budget type guy, but...
That may not be realistic, but I really love the politics that's playing out right now because I can't wait to see what Chuck Schumer does.
Here's the crisis, and Eric, you'll love it.
This is the problem, is that a significant percentage of our federal budget, about $600 to $700 billion a year, is spent on, guess what?
Actually, $720 billion a year.
On interest.
On interest.
Servicing the debt.
It's more than the GDP of...
Of almost every country in the world, yeah.
Just the interest, yeah.
$2 billion a day, everybody.
$2 billion a day go towards just servicing the debt.
Can I throw a little thing in this?
Very, very quickly.
So when Trump reduces inflation, when Trump reduces inflation...
This is a good thing because it reduces our cost to carry that debt.
It brings the interest rates down.
You're right, Eric.
And I hope we get some rate cuts throughout this year.
I have no idea if we will or not.
But let's say that we get them.
That's not a license to keep borrowing.
That's the problem.
Is that D.C. is going to say, oh, spending spree can continue.
But where we are at right now, I hope if you want to have one good talking point for your friend or a neighbor, right now we've spent $2 billion a day.
Just on the interest of our debt.
That's 700. To put that differently, we're spending about the same almost on our defense budget as we are in interest payments.
Eric, thanks so much.
Check out bowling every day during the President Trump executive order signing hour.
