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April 9, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
27:43
BREAKING NEWS: Trump’s Global Anti-China Play
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Hey everybody, breaking news.
President Donald Trump with a 90-day pause on all tariffs, except China.
We are narrowing the focus on China.
we explain exactly what that means throughout this entire episode text this episode to your friends for breaking news and analysis live here on the charlie kirk show become a member today members.charliekirk.com and again text this episode to your friends and give
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Charlie Kirk here, back in the chair.
Thank you, Producer Andrew, for filling in.
It has been an eventful couple days.
We've had three campus events in the last two days.
So great to be back in the chair here.
We have some super breaking news here.
90-day pause on tariffs for every nation except China.
It's exactly where we want to be.
We want to be narrowing our focus on the Chinese Communist Party.
Now China stands alone.
Exactly right.
We want to unite the entire world against the Chinese Communist Party.
And we hold a lot of other little tricks up our sleeve.
90-day pause.
The market is going parabolic right now.
It is up 2,300.
The Dow is up 2,300 points, nearly 6% in a matter of minutes.
It's just straight up.
What President Trump is doing is bringing the entire world...
We need to bring Canada, we need to bring...
The CCP is the problem.
The CCP is the enemy.
Unite the entire free world as a coalition.
We could deal with these trade partners.
By the way, as Treasury Secretary Besant clearly said, he's sitting down with Vietnam this afternoon.
I expect a really good deal of Vietnam saying they're going to buy more LNG or they're going to buy more of our cattle or exported beef, I should say.
President Trump has been calm and cool and China retaliated.
They made a bad move.
He goaded and baited the CCP.
This was the plan all along.
Trump goaded China into showing their cards.
Might I say it's rather brilliant.
And I know some people are still down on the market, but the market's now up 2,200 points.
I bet it's going to recover all of it.
Plus you've got tax cuts, got drill, baby drill, no tax and overtime, no tax on tips.
We bought.
They got nowhere to go.
You got Japan and South Korea flying into America to go make deals.
So what now President Trump has done, he says, okay, here are the tariffs.
I mean business.
We'll do a 90-day pause to negotiate except on China.
China's surrounded.
Where's China going to turn?
The South Koreans and the Japanese and the Vietnamese are not going to pick up the calls from China.
Where's China going to turn?
They're going to return to Namibia?
Or the Central African Republic?
One of their small little...
Colonies in Africa?
Understand this.
This is great leverage now going into the Iranian negotiations as well.
The timing when it comes to Iran is perfect.
And now Russia is still trying to cozy up to the United States regarding Ukraine and President Trump, brilliant dealmaker, brilliant, not putting any extra sanctions or tariffs on Russia, saying, that's a carve-out, we've got to work on this diplomatically.
So Russia is very careful right now.
Russia says, oh boy, we don't want to rush into China.
So Russia's saying, I don't know.
He's uniting the world against the true enemy.
Exactly what our foreign policy position should have been all about.
We subsidized the rise of the Red Menace.
You see, everyone thinks that Trump was a madman and all this.
Turns out that this was chess moves and not checkers.
The entire world has been scrambling.
All it took was one week of courage.
And now the markets are up so high, people are scrambling to buy stuff 5%, 6%.
Look, markets go up and markets go down.
Very rarely, and Blake would agree, do you see a parabolic increase on the NASDAQ of 9% in a moment of five minutes.
Understand, this is a game of brinksmanship.
Now, what cars do the Chinese Communist Party have?
Every day that that 104% tariff remains on China, every single day that it remains, their market is going to collapse.
They need us way more than we need them.
And look, China still has treasury bills.
Besant had the perfect answer, by the way, on bonds.
We had a great year.
We had a great 10-year auction.
Phenomenal. If we can sustain the dumping of American treasury bills by the Chinese Communist Party, they want to try to push up our 10-year note.
That's what they're trying to do.
They're going to try to keep on dumping bonds as leverage.
If we can sustain that, I'm telling you right now, it's theoretical.
I don't want to say it's likely.
No, no,
no. We need to bring in the partners closer to us.
We need to bring in our strategic allies.
This is big league stuff right now.
The Chinese are freaking out.
Anyone that is leveraged, that has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, they are wondering, are these capital markets going to be joined out?
Are they going to get choked out?
Besson has said, quote, we've had more than 75 countries contact us.
I'd imagine after today there will be more.
It's going to take some time and President Trump wants to be personally involved.
Deal by deal by deal by deal.
Saying that each one will have a bespoke Unique negotiation.
No one-size-fit-all.
It's a line around the block.
It's like landing planes at LaGuardia on a Friday night.
You look up in the sky and you got like 15 planes and you're lining them up.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
One after the other.
Lunch, you got Vietnam.
2 p.m., you got Laos.
4 p.m., you got Cambodia.
6 p.m., you got Madagascar.
For dinner, you got the Japanese.
For breakfast, you got the South Koreans.
You line them all up and you just start breaking out these deals.
You got to buy more of our LNG.
You got to buy more of our manufacturing.
You got to buy more of our exported beef.
You got to buy more of our corn.
You got to buy more of our ag.
Just line it up.
You have your demands.
And these deals will take time to iron out.
But the 90-day pause shows that we mean business.
And I'll tell you, the Chinese Communist Party, where are they turning to right now?
Russia is not returning their calls.
And Iran says, oh my goodness, I don't know.
Because they got to sit down with President Trump this weekend.
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When President Donald Trump was merely a real estate developer, he was facing massive debt in the 1990s.
He found himself owing billions of dollars to banks.
In fact, some of his premier projects, the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel in New York City, and the Trump Castle in Atlantic City, they're almost all going under.
In fact, they were not doing well.
President Trump has gone through some valleys and he's gone through some peaks.
He's gone through some troughs and he has gone through some pinnacles.
This was certainly a valley in the story of...
Donald Trump.
...owed so much money to these banks that seemingly it looked as if Donald Trump had no leverage.
It looked as if Donald Trump did not have any cards.
Donald Trump owed all of these banks money.
It looked as if that the banks held all the cards.
But President Donald Trump flipped the script.
In a historic and legendary moment, President Donald Trump, at the time real estate developer Donald Trump, brought in all the banks to his boardroom.
And he made a counterintuitive, rather bold argument where he said, yes, I owe you a bunch of money.
Billions, in fact.
Taj Mahal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The Trump Plaza had a $407 million loan.
That's back when that was a lot of money.
The Trump Atlantic, Trump Castle in Atlantic City faced declining revenues and had a prepackaged bankruptcy.
All three properties were becoming an albatross on the Trump Organization.
But President Trump, at the time, real estate developer Trump, brought everyone in the room and said, I don't think you banks understand.
You need me a lot more than I need you.
The banks were perplexed by this argument.
In this legendary meeting in Trump Tower, when Donald Trump brought everybody into the room, he said, listen, if I go down, you go down with me.
He flipped the leverage.
Donald Trump made these banks realize, holy Moses.
Donald Trump would be fine in one sense.
He would just file Chapter 11. He would live to see another day.
It would be embarrassing.
But these banks have given out so much money to Donald Trump.
They were so hyper-leveraged to Donald Trump that they needed to make a deal.
That they needed to come to the table.
This same logic that Donald Trump successfully used when he was a real estate developer in the 1990s and got him out of a major, major hole.
This same logic is exactly what Donald Trump is doing on trade.
In particular, his use of tariffs to address the chronic U.S. trade deficit.
If America is the buyer in the global economy, then the world needs our market more than we need their product.
Let me say that again.
If America is the buyer in the global economy, then the world needs our market more.
We need their products.
In Trump's view, we actually hold all the leverage, not in spite of our trade deficit, but because of it.
Similar to his negotiation with all the banks in the early 1990s, tariffs are now a tool to flip the imbalance, forcing trading partners to come to the table, not because they want to, but because they can't afford not to.
Just as he told the banks, you need me, or else you are going to collapse.
President Donald Trump is now saying to all of our trading partners, you need access to our market, so let's negotiate.
Tariffs in this particular framework are not isolationist tantrums, but instead, you could argue, they are strategic instruments designed not to destroy trade.
But to rebalance it on terms that reflect America's centrality to the global economy.
When you are in a trade deficit, it's not good.
You have to import a bunch of stuff.
But the secret hidden power switch behind all of it, the skeletal key is that you actually hold all the cards.
China is applying all of these tariffs on U.S. goods.
Newsflash, we don't import that many goods into China, but we import an enormous amount of goods into America.
So when we apply the tariffs on Chinese goods, it is a 100 to 1 imbalance of the cost associated.
This is Scott Besant, Treasury Secretary, who is employing President Trump's art of the deal.
Understanding and flipping the idea of leverage.
Seemingly, you would think, okay, all these other cards they hold, all the other countries hold the cards because they're in a trade surplus.
No, we actually hold the cards.
Play cut 168.
Maria, I think it's unfortunate that the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system.
They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world, and I can tell you that this escalation is a loser for them.
that they have some very smart, the economists, the academicians, technocrats within their bureaucracy and they would be telling the leadership that we do not have the edge here.
They are the surplus country.
Their exports to the U.S. are five times our exports to China, so they can raise their
So what?
Now, China does hold some cards.
Our trade deficit is remarkable.
critical goods to be able to staff, to be able to have machinery for our military.
Our Tomahawk missiles, our fighter jets, our tanks, they need parts and materials that are made in China.
It's not that China makes our tanks, but they have the thousands of little individual parts that are necessary.
There are minerals in China, and China is a producer
90%?
It's not because they're the only ones who have them.
It's because they're the only ones mining them.
This problem is fixable.
We need to mine our own rare earths and put the environmentalists in a corner and be able to extract our own rare earths.
We have rare earths all over the United States.
We have them in Texas.
We have them in Alaska.
This is the one opportunity we have to use our leverage.
If we allowed this to continue, if we did not strike at this moment, if we did not go into the window as we are seeing, Then China would hold all the cards.
And to go back to the 1990s, when Donald Trump used this mentality, Donald Trump would say, if I go down, we all go down.
China could say in five years or ten years, if we do not interrupt this balance, imbalance, China could say, actually, that's not true.
We're self-sufficient.
Understand, China is in desperate need of energy, big time.
They are in desperate need of continually exporting products.
The Chinese international order.
...is inherently mercantilist.
It is inherently colonial.
We are going to slowly take over third world nations, make a bunch of stuff, and flood the world with our products, and we make stuff.
We are a lot different.
We've embraced the brain economy.
We are consumerist.
We will trade you pieces of paper for stuff.
And the future will belong to the nation that both is able...
To think through problems and have an information economy, but also have an infrastructure economy.
And if we don't fix this, it would be a realignment that would forever put America in a power deficit.
And right now, President Trump and America holds the cards because if we go down, they go down even worse.
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If I were to guess, based on Secretary Besson's comments, and also President Trump's comments, we're going to see a deal struck with Japan and South Korea.
As we should.
The Japanese and the South Koreans are great allies of us.
We do not want to antagonize the Japanese and the South Koreans.
Use tariffs as a negotiation?
Fine. Get more LNG there.
Allow us to sell our pork.
Allow us to sell our ag.
Terrific. Great.
We need to keep on marching and narrowing in.
The emphasis on the Chinese Communist Party.
There are minerals in China that you literally cannot find anywhere else in the world.
Well, that's not true.
They actually extract them.
America can make our parts and mine our minerals.
Our leaders have chosen not to do so.
And that is a theme we've talked about a lot here on this program.
Why did we not have a border under Joe Biden?
It was a choice.
Why did we have hyperinflation?
It was a choice.
Why did we have crime on the streets?
It's a choice.
Why do we have massive homelessness?
It's a choice.
Why are kids failing to be able to read at fifth, sixth, and seventh grade?
It's a choice.
So many of our problems in our country are a consequence of our leaders choosing failure.
Why? Because of ideology or political correctness or they just don't care.
But the solutions are so self-evident.
And the promises that the corporate class and the entrenched political elite told us for the last 40 years, they said that if we trade with China, China would become a democracy.
I would have to say this would be indictment number one.
If I were a prosecutor, Trying to metaphorically indict the free trade absolutists and the zealots.
Charge number one would be that neoliberalism would democratize the totalitarian countries.
I would hear this all the time.
Well, China, they're going to become ambassadors of freedom of speech.
The more we trade with China, the more they're going to liberalize.
It's actually the opposite.
China has become more Orwellian.
They've become more draconian.
They do have some market principles.
They have a stock market, for instance.
But it's a bizarre balance of an oligarchy and cronyism that is closest to, honestly, fascism, not private property protected, bottom-up, free market capitalism.
90% of the country are basically slaves to the Chinese Communist Party, effectively.
We know they are not a Western nation.
And there was so much naivete in the early 2000s and the late 1990s, early 2000s.
And we would be led to believe by the experts, yet another failure from the expert class, that the more that we buy our Levi jeans and our iPhones and the toys for our kids and our strollers and our car seats,
From China, the more that we buy the plastic inventory, that all of a sudden China is going to be no different than Columbus, Ohio.
They're going to say, oh, you know, we don't like this communist thing.
We thought that free trade would lead an evangelistic movement amongst the rank and file.
Not only did we underestimate them, but we significantly miscalculated because the blunder of the economic elite is they wanted it to be true more than they had any evidence that it was going to be true because
the money was so tempting and so attractive.
The money flows that people got from unfettered free trade over the last 20 years was so tempting that they concocted appealing and alluring arguments.
We trade pieces of paper.
They make our stuff.
They're going to liberalize.
They're no longer going to be Mao Zedong or Zhao Jinping.
They're going to kind of just make themselves a mini America.
And the opposite happened.
The rise of China has been financed by our trade policies.
Turns out that elites are really good at coming up with rationalizations.
For making a lot of money for themselves.
You ever notice that?
They're really good at creating these abstract, persuasive macro arguments.
Meanwhile, they make more money than ever.
You lose your job and we have a new enemy that we financed.
We made it happen.
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Okay, I want to play some more pieces of tape here and really dive into this.
All eyes are on China.
The entire trade situation ends and begins with China.
The whole conversation.
It is a narrowed zero in focus on the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party.
We created this problem and now it's time for us to fix this problem.
The Chinese Communist Party would not be a Emerging global superpower if it was not for us letting them into the World Trade Organization.
Thank you, Bill Clinton.
For us allowing their superpower status and for us to come under the perplexing fascination that the more plastic that we import into our country, the richer we get.
Paper for plastic.
Paper for plastic.
And they used that money, the Chinese Communist Party used those dollars to build an empire.
Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank has been excellent on this.
He's been terrific.
We should have him on the show.
He's been terrific.
Let's play Cut 170.
104% tariffs in China are not enough.
I'm advocating 400%.
I do business in China.
They don't play by the rules.
They've been in the WTO for decades.
They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades.
They cheat.
They steal.
They steal IP.
I can't litigate in their courts.
They take product, technology, they steal it, they manufacture it, sell it back here.
This is exactly right.
The Chinese Communist Party has forced information sharing agreements.
They have a state-directed industrial policy.
Through the coordinated use of state subsidies and forced technology transfers and intellectual property appropriation, China has fused industrial policy with their national strategy.
There's a program that is called Made in China 2025.
And when you read it, it is not merely economic in its intent.
It's about creating massive instruments of global influence.
All designed to displace Western dominance.
In what?
Advanced manufacturing, robotics, aerospace, and biotech.
So they flood global markets with artificially cheap goods, often produced under terrible environmental and labor standards.
And then China has decimated domestic manufacturing abroad.
It has flood the zone, you buy the stuff, and then all of a sudden you're dependent on them.
It is a long-term enveloping strategy.
Play cut 171.
This is not about tariffs anymore.
Nobody has taken on China yet, not the Europeans, no administration for decades.
I have nothing against the Chinese people.
They brought great literacy, art and tech to the world.
The government cheats and steals.
And finally, an administration, you may not like Trump, you may not like his style or his rhetoric.
Finally, an administration that puts up
The Chinese Communist Party is running out of cards.
There's still a lot they can do.
They hold cards with rare earth minerals.
But when you have a trade deficit with the other country, you actually have more leverage.
The Chinese stock market is down significantly.
Our stock market is up and I can't even keep track.
I don't even want to do the stock market thing.
It's way too frenetic.
It's way too vault.
This is the first time anyone has stood up to the Chinese Communist Party.
Why? Because our elites have made so much money and it is the untouchable third rail.
Well, guess what?
President Donald Trump is a class traitor.
He's a defector from the elites.
Brought to you by the American people.
Commissioned! By the working class to finally stand up to the great menace that we made possible.
And you're seeing it unfold in real time.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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