The David Knight Show - Tariff Tyranny: Trump’s One-Man Wrecking Crew on America’s Economy

Sept. 25, 2025 - The David Knight Show

21:18

Tariff Tyranny: Trump’s One-Man Wrecking Crew on America’s Economy

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	Tariffs are torching the U.S. container imports, says an analyst that freight waves.
	China tariffs are driving sharp decline in inbound trade.
	And we're seeing a tremendous plunge, which has only happened two times in the past 60 years.
	One time was during the Great Recession, the pump and dump housing crisis.
	The second time was during Trump's lockdown, five years ago.
	He appears to be the guy that they go to to create chaos and to lock down our infrastructure.
	Inbound volume through the top ten U.S. ports in August finished 0.1% ahead of the same month in 2024.
	But that happened primarily because the first week or so of August.
	People had rushed and accelerated their shipments before the August 7th deadline of the renewal of the reciprocal tariffs.
	They wanted to get these goods in before that uh came up.
	And uh it was also happening in July.
	July's volume was 3.2% ahead, trying to get the shipments in earlier.
	Now what is happening is um Trump in August announced yet another 90-day pause.
	Another taco, Trump always chickening out, and the chaotic China trade war.
	And as I said before, I don't think taxes of any sort are good.
	I think these things are done in arbitrary, capricious way, though the worst thing about it is the arbitrary and capricious way where they're on, they're off, the rates change constantly.
	He can't make up his mind because there is no plan.
	He's simply reacting to things.
	One day he's angry with the leader of a particular country and he jacks the prices of the tariffs up by another 50 additional 50% or something.
	It's insane.
	And it's that kind of uh temperamental chaos that is causing so much destruction, even more destructive than the taxes themselves.
	Uh front loading by anxious shippers during the previous tariff break soaked up most eastbound volume moving in the peak season, while economic uncertainty and tariff stoked inflation has undercut demand as shown by weaker container rates on the eastbound Trans-Pacific.
	Without a spike from front loading, the U.S. would have seen a drop in year-to-year volume in July, at least as high as the Far East's positive number.
	So China is shifting to other people.
	The U.S. is a less relevant player in world trade today than it was prior to these various tariff initiatives, and will become more so as announced plans are implemented, uh, said uh the person who um has an organization that tracks us.
	His name is McCowan.
	A revised forecast by the National Retail Federation shows import volumes falling 3.4% for the year.
	That translates into remaining four months of 2025 being down by 15.7% compared to the same four months in 2024.
	So they're looking for it to really crash in the last four months, and this is the build-up to Christmas.
	What does that tell us about the economy?
	And what's it tell us about uh supply and prices, what's going to happen to them?
	If and when those tariffs are implemented, because nobody knows what he's going to do.
	This is why it is so devastating, especially to small businesses.
	They don't have the capital to be able to weather this kind of engineered chaos by Trump yet again.
	But of course, as Trump said in 2020, the small businesses are not essential.
	You shut down.
	Walmart's going to stay open, but you shut down.
	That infuriates me.
	As I said, I had a personal experience of that After a storm with our businesses And I can't explain how mad that may be Alright A year-to-year decline in inbound volume is a rarity in the more than six decades of container shipment, as I said before, this is McCowan, uh, matched only by drops during the 2009 financial crisis and the pandemic.
	Both of these things engineered and unnecessary.
	Trump is a one-man dictator, a one-man wrecking crew, whether you're talking about his lockdowns of 2020 or his tariffs of 2025.
	And he's also going to expand the tariff powers.
	He wants a uh it's not enough that Trump can just sat there with his pen and a whim and add them here and there.
	Now he wants to encourage American producers to add products and things to the list.
	Uh this is coming from the Commerce Secretary.
	The Trump administration wants to expand U.S. tariff authority, proposing new rules on imported auto parts and metals, and implementing a fresh tariff framework with Japan.
	You see, this will never end.
	This has been going on now for what, nine months?
	And they're still messing with it.
	They're still shifting things around.
	And nobody can plan anything.
	Chaos that will kill the economy, especially the small non-essential businesses, according to Trump.
	But I think when you look at this and the uh the attack on cars, this is Trump's uh contribution to making sure that we have no cars whatsoever.
	Make it impossible.
	You know, regulation expenses, tariffs, taxes, all this.
	The Department of Commerce, maybe they should call it the Department of No Commerce.
	Uh this is this is from Lutnik, who wants to crash the economy as part of the Great Reset pump and dump, and then have everybody buy stable coins, then he wants to be able to uh grab all the natural resources.
	I think this is what's going on with the Technocrats and Trump administration.
	Anyway, the Department of No Commerce released an interim interim final re rule creating a new inclusion process for the imports of cars and auto parts under Section 232.
	The rule would let U.S. producers petition for additional imported components to face the existing 25% tariffs.
	The Department of No Commerce is also accepting inclusion requests for steel and aluminum downstream products through September 29.
	After each window closes, the Department of No Commerce will accept public comments for two weeks.
	See, this is how things are done in post-constitutional America.
	We don't follow laws anymore.
	We certainly don't follow the Constitution, and we have no debate.
	You know, it used to be that you would have a debate.
	Your elected representatives would pass a law after that public debate.
	But now you have edicts from the bureaucracy, like the Department of No Commerce.
	And uh they will uh come up with uh rules rather than laws, and then that will be followed by a short period of comments, which they are free to completely ignore.
	You know, if you want to talk about America first, you need to bring back the American constitution first.
	What'd you say, Lance?
	And this is the process of uh, you know, corporations cutting off the ladder below them so that they can't have competition.
	This is that made automated.
	Here's a government system so that you can do that by yourselves.
	You don't need to lobby and bribe people anymore.
	You can do it directly.
	You can just work directly with a bureaucracy and you don't have to uh you know it's surprising that the politicians are letting themselves be cut out of this lucrative loop that they've created.
	Yeah, I mean, this way uh if they've got some manufacturing process for something that they've developed in-house so that only they can produce this, then they can get tariffs put on it for manufacturers for everyone else that uses that product made in China.
	Yeah, we've always seen, you know, when you look at local businesses, the easiest way to see this is a restaurant business, right?
	They will go to the uh local people or the state government and they say, you know, we need to have these uh extreme rules, and it's just there to keep people from opening up a new restaurant.
	The people who are already open are not affected by this.
	And that's the way they keep their competition out.
	A coalition of more than 40 business associations, not 40 businesses, but business associations, have raised concern about the expanded inclusion process.
	They said the sudden expansion of tariffs with limited industry consultation increases cost by generating significant compliance burdens for businesses of all size, including those that do not purchase or produce steel and aluminum products.
	They pointed out that manufacturers Account for more than half of all U.S. imports.
	Think about that.
	You know, you're going to this is going to really harm American manufacturing because in so many cases.
	You can't find somebody that makes the components that you need if you want to make something in the USA.
	One of you guys was talking, was it you, Lance or was it you, Travis?
	We're talking about the guy that was that uh a um GoFundMe project, and he wanted to make uh whatever it was he's making completely in America.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, there was a basically just had to give up because he couldn't find some of the things that he needed.
	Yeah, it was a YouTuber, uh smarter every day, who was trying to make just a grill scrubber here in the U.S. out of entirely U.S. sourced parts.
	And uh there were two parts that he just couldn't get in quantity.
	It was uh one was a specialty part, but the other I think was just a bolt.
	And uh he had a lot of trouble finding any manufacturer that made it at all at McCwanti as he wanted uh, especially not at a reasonable price.
	So he just had to scrub the grill scrubber uh project that was gonna be made in the U.S. entirely.
	He he's basically found other people and said, we found a few of them available at such and such a place, and uh maybe you'll get one that is 100% made in America, but I can't promise it'll be 100% made in America.
	We may have to buy this minor part somewhere else.
	Well, that's what these policies are doing.
	They absolutely don't care.
	And he needs to go back, and I said this when he shut down the economy and uh decided he's gonna centrally plan that only Walmart could stay open and things like that.
	I said he needs to go back and read Leonard Reed's uh iPencil, where the market puts together all these things and all these different components.
	You got rubber from this country over here, and you got graphite from that country over there, you got wood from Canada, maybe all these different things came together.
	And uh without uh the government's help, without the central planning of government, the free market put all this together, and they pulled all these components from all over the world in order to manufacture pencil.
	Well, we're not even going to be able to manufacture that if you've got uh Trump and Lutnik and uh Peter Navarra have their way.
	Uh the harm to U.S. employment among downstream producers of items now covered will ultimately be significant, including with respect to those that are key to powering critical industries and the broader U.S. economy.
	You know, when you go back and you look at the rare earth minerals, for example, uh I interviewed a guy with U.S. rare minerals, and uh they were trying to put together to develop it here in the United States.
	They said we have plenty of the they're not rare.
	It's just uh the refinement of them is rare.
	We have the materials there, but we've got to build the refining uh procedures to extract it from what we're already mining.
	But he said that'll take five years, even if we throw a lot of money at it.
	What Trump is doing is he's just shutting everything down, and there is no opportunity, not waiting for the any kind of a transition, not allowing companies to continue to be able to make products downstream using rare minerals.
	No, he's just gonna cut off the supply, just like that.
	It's boneheaded stupid.
	It's so stupid that it has to be intentional.
	That's my that's my belief.
	Not even Trump is that stupid.
	And he did the same thing in 2025, if you remember, with the lockdown, you had farmers who were destroying food on their farm because they couldn't get it to market.
	Because their customers had been large industrial uh suppliers, people that with toilet paper, let's say, creating these gigantic rolls of toilet paper that they use in uh business facilities.
	Uh I told the story at the time when we came back from China with uh our daughter, she was not used to having toilet paper in China.
	And uh Karen had uh gotten her uh acclimated to it, and um the only word she knew was mama, and so she went they went to the restroom in uh New York airport, and she sees those giant rolls of toilet paper that are like two feet in diameter or whatever, she grabs it and she comes out, Mama, Mama, like look what I found.
	We're fixed for life.
	We don't have to go to Costco ever again.
	Uh anyway.
	The import tariffs on some of the largest trade partners are things like 50% to Brazil because we don't like what they're doing to bowls and arrow, Bolsonaro, bows and arrows.
	Uh 50% to India, uh because we don't like them either.
	China is only 30%.
	I say only 30%.
	Remember when it was like a hundred and uh it was over a hundred percent, it was a hundred and forty-five percent or something like that.
	And he was talking about two hundred percent.
	Yeah, it's just all over the place.
	It's just all over the place.
	So now it's back down to thirty percent.
	Uh when you look at Mexico and Canada, they used to be our trading partners, and Trump gave them this special deal at the uh end of his first term.
	Now he wants uh 25% on Mexico and 35% on Canada.
	We don't like them.
	Uh you know, they've got these hockey teams, and we we don't like Canada.
	So we've got to punish them 35%.
	Uh Japan and South Korea uh are at 15%.
	Now the question is, will Trump's power to tax, therefore his power to destroy, be upheld by the Supreme Court?
	Well, reason talks about the issues, the legal issues behind this, because it is coming up to be reserved to be looked at by the Supreme Court.
	I mean, he's been creating this trade chaos now for eight or nine months, and they're finally going to review it.
	On November the 5th, which will be like uh uh ten months, I guess, since he became president, not quite, uh the Supreme Court will hear hear oral arguments, the cases arising from Trump's unilateral scheme to impose tariffs.
	The uh matters have been consolidated by the Supreme Court into a single case for the purposes of briefing and arguments.
	The Supreme Court will probably turn on the application of an important legal principle known as the major questions doctrine.
	That doctrine says that when, and of course, major questions doctrine is not something from the Constitution, it's something invented by the Supreme Court.
	The law is clear.
	They're not going to decide this based on the law, they're going to decide this based on interpretation of their previous opinions.
	This is how bad things have gotten.
	The major questions doctrine says that when the executive branch seeks to wield significant regulatory power, it must first point to an unambiguous delegation of such power by Congress to the executive.
	Well, uh, how about if they took take a look at uh, you know, this is being delegated supposedly by the case of emergencies.
	How about we define what a real emergency is?
	I mean, we know what it means in English, but evidently Trump doesn't speak English, or at least he doesn't care any more about the dictionary than he does about the Constitution, where the things are defined.
	Uh so this is um really Trump's patented fraud of declaring an emergency uh unilaterally and then saying, well, since I said it's an emergency, now I get to do whatever I wish.
	And so they said it'll take a look at the Emergency Economic Powers Act, uh, the International Emergency Economics Powers Act, that grants him virtually unlimited power to impose tariffs.
	If the Supreme Court concludes that AIPA's text, which does not mention tariffs, fails to provide clear authorization for Congress, then Trump's tariffs must be ruled illegal under the major questions doctrine.
	The Trump administration seems worried about that outcome, because they got a leg to stand on.
	This is as ridiculous as Trump's lawsuits against the press, especially the one that just got thrown out against the New York Times.
	So worried, in fact, that its brief attempts to rewrite the major questions doctrine in a way that shields the president from ever facing any of the negative judicial consequences.
	The text is an issue because that doctrine addresses the particular and recurring problem of agencies, asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.
	The argument goes that uh from the White House says, well, Trump is not an agency.
	In other words, the major questions thing was was brought up and said we don't want these bureaucracies creating their own policy when they weren't given that kind of power by Congress.
	And so the uh response from the White House, the Trump administration, well, uh Trump is not an agency.
	I think he is an agent for somebody.
	Uh he's an undercover agent of chaos.
	Uh Congress is far more likely to grant consequential power to the president than it is to grant such power to an agency, as a matter of course, they say.
	But reason says, remember what type of agencies we're talking about here.
	We're talking about executive agencies.
	All of these agencies are under the executive branch.
	The president is head of the executive branch.
	The agencies are part of the executive branch.
	You know, the buck stops with him even though MAGA doesn't want to say that.
	Under the Trump administration's own preferred theory of the unitary executive, the personnel of all such agencies are entirely subservient to the president.
	Even though MAGA doesn't understand that and they don't understand how the federal government gets its way by bribing and blackmailing people with money.
	The distinction makes no sense they said the Supreme Court drew no such distinction between the presidency and agency when it relied on the major questions doctrine to decide Joe Biden's student debt cancellation plan.
	They declared it to be unlawful because it was an example they said of the executive seizing the power of the legislature.
	That's precisely what's happening here.
	Do you see how similar Biden and Trump are?
	You know they're they're both of them want to act as dictators and they don't care a whit about the Constitution.
	One of them wants to act as a dictator to buy votes from students by canceling their student loans.
	The other one wants to curry favor with his technocratic donors by using tariffs.
	So Trump's distorted theory Biden should have won that case because Biden was supposedly not an agency.
	So the Supreme Court properly scrutinized Biden then should similarly scrutinize Trump now the whole point of the major questions doctrine is the enforcement of the separation of powers by ensuring that the executive branch does not exceed the lawful authority granted to it.
	Wouldn't it be interesting if we just held everybody to the Constitution we just read that document wouldn't it be interesting that would take care of the separation of powers I think because that's what's defined there the common man they created common core to dumb down our children.
	They created common past to track and control us their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future they see the common man as simple, unsophisticated ordinary but each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God is what we have in common that is what they want to take away their most powerful weapons are isolation,
	deception, intimidation.
	They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us you'll find at the David Nike Show dot com.

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