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Oct. 30, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
33:16
Finally! Senate Pushed Back On Trump Tariffs

On Tuesday the US Senate voted to push back on President Trump's 50 percent tariffs on Brazil - a move that caused coffee prices to soar for American consumers. Is the US Legislative Branch starting to wake up to their Constitutional role in government? Also today - you'll never guess which country the US has bombed the most this past year...

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Tariffs and Tarantulas 00:14:38
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Good.
Doing well.
Good.
And I want to start off with something where you can interpret it as a little bit of good news.
It doesn't have a tremendous effect, but maybe it's a baby step in the right direction.
And that has to do with dealing with tariffs.
And we've been talking about it in the market.
The media is talking a lot about all these tariffs we put on Brazil.
We had to punish them because they were ruining us.
And we were buying so much stuff from them.
But we went out of our way to get a declaration of emergency.
And Trump had that.
So he puts on tariff.
But they find out that we have a positive balance.
Brazil should be thinking about putting tariffs on us.
So maybe someday that will happen.
But there was a vote on this, and they couldn't just vote up and down on the tariffs, but they had a vote engineered by a couple of senators, including a relative of mine.
And that was to eliminate the maneuvering they did to give the president emergency power.
We had to stop these Brazilians.
They're outselling us, and they're going to ruin our economy.
So Rand worked on this, and they called the vote to eliminate that authority.
Of course, they've already used the authority and they put on the sanctions, but it's a good step.
It's removed.
They can't do it again on Brazil, I assume.
But it might have an effect on some future ones because maybe a similar vote might come up for Canada.
And if that's the case, that's a much bigger deal.
But the Senate, you know, to block, the Senate votes to block Trump's 50% tariffs on Brazil.
No wonder.
Then they say, why is our coffee costing us so much?
That's right.
They never put it together.
I guess I know the president doesn't drink alcohol.
Maybe he doesn't drink coffee.
Maybe not.
He doesn't know what the price is.
He doesn't go to the store anyway.
But this is something that I think is important because it's a step that the people are getting fed up with this, you know, and they went out of their way.
Yes, it was the Democrats, but the Democrats happen to be more correct on tariffs than they are with the other things that these liberals believe in.
But nevertheless, if you're going to do coalition building, you want to just be in agreement with the issue that you're dealing with right then.
You don't have to make sure each side has 100% agreement.
Usually that ends up with mush.
They've got to get together.
So I think I'd like to think this is a good sign.
There were similar things happening with COVID when there was hints that the people were getting tired of it.
And that blossomed into a real rebellion.
And I think that is good news.
So I'm glad they did that.
I'm glad the vote went that way, even if it was a mixed up deal.
Yeah, let's put that first clip up.
This is a zero heads write-up of it.
And the question, why are we covering this story?
I think there are a couple of reasons why we're covering it, Dr. Paul.
First of all, there's some pushback from the Senate finally on some of President Trump's moves.
And there's on a substantive matter, which is tariffs.
The second is this good policy because we believe tariffs are bad.
They're taxes on the American people.
We don't need any more taxes.
They're a hidden form of inflation.
And three, because Congress does have a role in this.
And so anytime you see Congress reasserting its constitutional role, it's a good thing for America.
So here's what happened.
It was with GOP help Senate vote votes to block Trump's 50% tariffs on Brazil.
Now, before we go further into it, this is not going to take effect because the House most likely will not uphold the Senate vote.
But Hedge Rights, with the support of a handful of Republican senators led by outspoken constitutionalist Rand Paul, the Senate on Tuesday passed a measure to nullify the 50% tariffs that Trump imposed on Brazil.
And this is an interesting maneuver.
You outlined it a second ago, but what they had to do is they had to terminate Trump's declaration of national emergency on July 30th.
And that's what he used to supersede what constitutionally is the role of Congress, the tariff authority that they should have had.
So what does he do?
He goes around it by saying, no, no, it's going to be a national emergency.
I don't know, probably nobody knows why Brazil is a national emergency, but that's what he had to do.
If you go to the next one now, you can see who voted with the Democrats, and there's going to be some heat on this.
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, a surprising one, and he made a couple of good statements.
Believe it or not, a couple of good statements about free trade.
Tom Tillis and Rand Paul, and they made the vote to get this going.
Now, there's going to be a lot of pressure on Senator Paul for doing this and for opposing trade and the tariffs.
And he's done it consistently, and he's giving the right message.
And he's doing it on a principled philosophical basis.
I do have a clip showing Senator Paul in a recent interview where he talks about what it's like and what's happening behind the scenes.
And you'll recognize some of this.
Grab that earpiece.
You'll recognize some of what he's saying from your time there, Dr. Paul.
The disconnect between what members and senators say in the open and what they say in private.
Let's listen to a couple seconds of this one here.
There are probably eight farm states.
Maybe there are 10 farm states.
That means there's 20 senators who have always believed in free trade, and they're all grumbling and they're all like, China's not buying any of our soybean this year.
The tariff war with China has led to this, and they don't have the guts because it's their president.
And frankly, they're afraid.
They're afraid that he will do to them what he's trying to do to me.
That's too bad.
Because it'd be a little easier on me if I weren't the only target if there were other people willing to stand up and oppose bad policy.
That's interesting.
They know that it's bad policy, but they're too afraid of standing up to their president on the principle that this is a bad policy.
And it's hurting our states.
It's hurting our people.
That says a lot about the people that are elected to represent us.
I hope a few of those people who are on the receiving end of those comments lose a night or two of sleep.
Yeah, they should.
They should.
See if they still have a conscience.
But, you know, I was reading the other night a little bit about Bastia, who's one of my favorite writers.
He's the one that wrote the law and said that, you know, any violence against people initiating violence is illegal and immoral.
Most people recognize that.
But Bastiat became famous because he says, those are the rules that we should put on the government.
So, and when I was looking at this, he found as he was closing, it was before the Civil War, he wrote the law, and he stated there's two most important things for civilization to pay attention to.
He says, first, get rid of slavery.
Slavery was still on.
That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good proposal.
But he also then said, don't have tariffs.
And I'm not surprised he was against tariffs, but I'm surprised he put it at the top of his list.
So that to me was very impressive.
And, you know, I was getting to think about, well, that's a pretty good.
He was against slavery and tariffs.
But today, if I had an opportunity, maybe I pulled a list, might give my list.
I think, you know, the tariff is bad.
I'd be in agreement with that and free markets.
And I would also say that slavery is bad.
But who's enslaving us now?
It's the assumption that the government can take all our income, assume it's theirs, and then we have to beg and plead permission and fill out a few forms to allow us to spend our money that we've earned.
So that is one I would add.
And that would mean in order to accomplish getting rid of that type of attack, you'd have to get rid of the fiat, the fiat tax, which is fiat money and a fraudulent there.
And I'll bet you, I guess there's no way of confirming this, but I would suspect that Bastiat would be in agreement with me, modifying his comments about slavery and also the tariffs.
Absolutely.
Let's go to the next clip because what does this mean?
What is it all about?
Whereas the rubber meet the road.
Well, as you say, what's going on with Brazil?
Go to the next one.
Excuse me.
Well, Brazil produces coffee, lots and lots of coffee.
So with President Trump's tariffs, Stephen Moore, you know, Stephen Moore, pardon me, he says coffee prices have surged 22%.
We're taxing the world's best coffee exporters.
Brazil, Colombia, Switzerland, Brazil 50, Colombia, 10, Switzerland, 39.
Economics 101 writes more: tariffs don't punish producers, they punish consumers.
And you can see on that chart to the left that Stephen Moore helpfully put up from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: roasted coffee increased 22%.
Smaller increase in groceries, a decrease in gas prices.
That, folks, that 22%, that's called inflation.
The price is inflated, and it's directly related to Trump's decision to put tariffs on Brazil.
It's a tax.
You know, I assume that a lot of congressmen drink coffee.
But I think there's some way that we should call attention to it.
Maybe we ought to make sure they're paying fair price, market prices now, because it's the biggest inflationary reception right now.
Prices going up on coffee more than anything else for this week or two.
It'll be something else next week.
But it's not likely to happen.
They don't have to suffer the consequences of it.
And I at one time always argued that when we had a little less sensitivity and sensibleness about dealing with our own personal drug war here, it's still a mess.
And I said, yes, there is a problem, but still, the people don't realize, maybe they do realize, but you can't change it.
And I suggested on a farewell speech that alcohol isn't talked about.
They tried it.
They knew it failed.
And it was a monster.
It was good for the monsters to sell all the alcohol.
And I said, maybe it's because there's a lot of alcohol consumed on the campuses of our U.S. U.S. government.
They're not going to do that.
And yet, right now, other drugs, other than fentanyl, it's this whole thing about they're dying from these war activities.
Oh, they're narco-car terrorists.
You know, they don't even have any evidence, let alone the legality of that.
But they're still using this drug issue to justify all this violence.
And I think that's a real problem.
Well, people might ask, well, what's why Brazil, I mean, as you say, they got a trade surplus.
Why is the president putting these tariffs on Brazil?
Well, if Americans found out, they'd be even more frustrated, probably even more frustrated than Senator Paul is.
Put that next clip up.
And this is from the Hedge article.
It says, Brazil is a notable case because the U.S. already had a trade surplus with the South American country, something that Senator Tillis said figured heavily in his vote.
Here's Senator Tillis.
I've had a big concern with the Brazil one in particular since we have a trade surplus with him.
That's the only one I'm considering.
Now, this is the important part that I underscored.
Why is this happening?
This is from the article.
Trump imposed the sanctions after accusing Brazil of becoming, quote, an international disgrace over its prosecution of former president and Trump ally, Yair Bolsonaro, over an alleged conspiracy to undo the country's 2022 elections.
Quote, it is a witch hunt that should end immediately, Trump wrote in a letter to Brazilian President Lula a few weeks before imposing the sanctions.
So why these sanctions?
Was it an economic imperative?
No.
He had a hissy fit because he didn't like the fact that the current Brazilian government is prosecuting the previous president.
He flipped out and said, okay, I'm going to put a massive tax on the American people because Lula irritated me.
It's very similar to what he did with Canada.
If you remember a few days ago, Canada put up an ad and in the ad, there was President Reagan speaking out against tariffs.
And Trump flipped out.
He said, from now on, we will have no more discussions with Canada on reducing tariffs.
The door is shut.
Take a hike.
He had another hissy fit and caused another huge problem for the American consumer.
You know, if all the American people would look at this, or just a large number of Americans looking at this, this statement that you quoted there and wake them up a little bit, you know, and just ask the question.
Wish You Wouldn't Do That 00:06:25
But this just goes by them.
But the basic question is, where have we gained this ability and responsibility and the moral authority to go in there and start getting involved in that kind of stuff?
You know, and it isn't new.
We've been doing it for a long time.
Matter of fact, we've been in South America for a long time too, doing the same thing.
But then for a good while, we've sort of backed off the minutia.
But the interventionists have gotten tired, or maybe they see that we're running out of money, so they had to come back home and they're not doing it.
But we haven't lightened up on the Middle East or Ukraine or anything else.
And we just had this budget freezing up of the budget.
They're literally doing exactly what I said would be the worst thing to do.
You know, if you're going to cut back, you don't start wanting food for poor people or their medical care.
Yes, it is true.
It's not part of the Constitution.
But I tell you what, politically speaking, it should be a lot easier cutting off the funds to Ukraine and the Middle East is going after food for the poor people and sick people in this country.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, here's an explanation of how it happened.
If you go to the next one, we've talked about it a little bit, but it's worth repeating.
Now, so obviously, Congress, according to the Constitution, has the authority, the legal authority to deal with tariffs and trade and such.
Go back one in such matters.
But there's a go-around, which I mentioned earlier, to unilaterally impose the tariffs without action by Congress.
Trump is exploiting the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
of 1977, which delegates to the president various economic powers to address, quote, any unusual and extraordinary threat, end quote, coming from a foreign power.
Now, here's what Senator Tim Kaine says in opposition to the president's move.
He says, quote, the prosecution of a friend of the president, how is that an emergency that concerns the United States?
It doesn't, Kane said.
And I am not a fan of Senator Kaine in any way, but he's right in this one.
I mean, this isn't high school.
You don't wake up in the morning and say, this guy irritated me.
He get a tariff.
Oh, Russia, I'm so mad at you.
I'm going to sanction your oil.
You know, there's no sort of rhyme or reason.
Oh, China, we're going to put a million percent tariffs on you.
Oh, well, I had a wonderful meeting with Xi, and I'm not going to do it anymore.
You know, and the markets go like this.
You know, we can understand that, and a lot of people will, except when Trump does this, his popularity goes up.
Now, that's a serious problem in a sense that you have to get people to understand that.
And I always use the example of COVID.
The more information they had and got, the more they woke up to the damaging effect of the government practicing medicine.
And here they're practicing this kind of stuff of personal vindictives.
And the American people, oh, he's a great president.
He's keeping my job going.
I work on jet aircrafts, you know, and building World War II aircrafts still.
You know, who's really to blame for this is the left itself, because when Trump was in power before, they were so crazed with their Trump derangement syndrome that they opposed him for all sorts of things.
The sun came up today.
It's Trump's fault.
Everything, free, everyone gets a pony, Trump's fault.
They weren't principled opponents of dumb things Trump did.
Now, we, on the other hand, we're happy that Trump won.
Speaking for myself at least, we're hoping for some really good things.
But not being deranged when he does something that's harmful, we have an obligation to speak up and say, I wish you wouldn't do that.
I wish you wouldn't have bombed Iran.
I wish you wouldn't have sanctioned Russia.
I wish you would have made my coffee more expensive because I need it in the morning.
You know, that doesn't mean that we have derangement syndrome.
That just means we're paying attention.
Well, we work on that, trying to present the truth as we see it.
And hopefully we're on the right track because I don't believe anybody has perfect knowledge and understanding of truth versus evil.
But I think most people realize which direction you're going in and what you're approaching.
You know, total authoritarianism or total civil liberties.
Yeah.
At least the goals ought to be explicit.
And that's what happens here.
They're mixed up.
But I still remain undaunted that there's no justification for us giving up and say, well, it's too complex.
How are you going to convert the people?
Well, you do it, you know, by small numbers if possible.
Matter of fact, most of the time, the significant changes in attitude come with small people, individuals and small groups of people.
And then a larger group comes along and they follow it, but somebody has to lead.
And right now, The people in Washington who are trying to convert some of these and change some of these attitudes about tariffs and how much we should be doing overseas and the whole interventionism and tangling alliances and all this while ignoring our civil liberties and while ignoring the deficit we face because this is a distraction from the real real problem.
And of course, we are at war, but I think we're more at war.
I worry more about the war against ourselves, the IRS agent and a few others.
That concerns it should concern everybody because the government wields this power.
And the whole purpose of the Constitution was to minimize that and have more confidence and believe that individuals are far more capable of taking care of themselves and their families.
And the evidence is there, except the easy way out is saying, well, I think I can maneuver this and you have to give up a little bit of your liberties in order to get what we need.
And they don't hold and stick to it.
And a little bit of political pressure.
And that's it.
Instead of trying to change the political atmosphere, what they do is, how do I interpret the political attitude?
U.S. Bombings in Somalia 00:02:06
Because my goal is to stay here to save the country with my voting record.
Yeah.
Well, you talk about war.
There's another war that I bet Americans don't realize.
We've been at war for almost 20 years in another country, and you hardly ever read about it.
And, you know, the folks at anti-war.com do write about this.
They're about the only organization that I'm aware of that writes about it consistently.
And that's Somalia.
The U.S. has been bombing Somalia for, you know, almost two decades.
And they did it again.
And this is Dave DeCamp wrote up: U.S. bombed Somalia for three consecutive days.
The U.S. has launched three more airstrikes in Somalia over three consecutive days.
It launched an airstrike on the 26th that targeted al-Shabaab, about 25 miles north of the port city, what have you.
It was a precision airstrike.
Now go to the next one.
Trump is setting records all over the place.
The U.S. has dramatically increased its airstrikes in Somalia this year.
And the latest three strikes bring the total number of U.S. bombings in the country this year to 89.
The Trump administration has shattered the previous annual record for U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, which President Trump set at 63 back in 2019.
By contrast, Biden launched a total of 51 airstrikes in Somalia, and Obama launched 48.
The U.S. has been fighting against al-Shabaab since the group first emerged in 2007, a year after the U.S. backed an Ethiopian invasion that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power.
And basically, in this couple of paragraphs, Dr. Paul, you have everything that you need to know.
And it reminds you a lot about 2014 in Ukraine.
The U.S. backed a coup, an external invasion of Somalia almost 20 years ago, and the resulting unrest has sucked us into 20 years of consecutive bombing of the country.
20-year war.
It's outrageous.
Growing Resistance to Bombing 00:05:17
You know, it just seems that they never learn because they're motivated by other than trying to seek the truth or trying to.
See, one of the things that annoyed me the most in Washington was not only the ignoring of, but the terrible respect that they really have for the preciseness of the Constitution.
They think that is just a horrible thing to do.
And just look at the people who are resisting some of this bombing and stuff now, what they have to put up with the criticism.
And it's all emotionally driven.
And that is not going to change.
It's an attitude.
And we've been warned about it.
It's historic.
It's part of human nature.
But that doesn't mean that we can't have a better system of government because we have had and we've been blessed.
And yet it looks to me like not only have we had some natural blessings that for a long time, the prevailing attitude was people were responsible for themselves.
There's still a lot of good people doing that.
Matter of fact, I think those numbers are growing.
But that is what has to be done.
So people who get discouraged, you know, it's a losing game.
You just can't switch them.
We elect people the best we can and they don't do what they tell us.
And yet I sometimes, matter of fact, not sometimes, most of the time, you know, don't concentrate that much.
You have to know what's going on in Washington because ultimately that's the end game.
But that's not where the action is.
The action is prevailing attitudes and getting people to understand the people who are telling the truth and to let their audience grow.
And I think that audience is growing.
Just think, you know, I was looking at some of the things about when Austrian economics was designed.
And that was just less than 100 years ago that they even had some of this understanding.
So I think that's what our goal has to be, Daniel, is to promote that system.
And Mises advised that, you know, sometimes these things are complex, but our job is to, he used the word, the ideas have to be made malleable for the common person.
It is true.
Nobody's going to sit down here and go through human action and all these other things that a lot of us enjoy doing.
But I think that's where the action is.
And I think that's where it's been ruined.
It has been ruined for our education system.
One of the best things that Trump has done, he has emphasized, you know, denationalizing education.
We haven't seen it yet, but I think he spoke.
Let's hope that's true because at least if the educational system was local, state-run, and just cut off all that federal aid, I think the states would save a lot of money and the quality of education would improve dramatically.
The thing about these strikes on Somalia is, and what we would ask ourselves is why?
Why are we doing it?
I mean, I'm really not interested in the different factions that run Somalia.
Unlike some people that are interested in foreign affairs, I find it pretty uninteresting.
I'm interested from a U.S. perspective.
Why are we doing what we're doing and how we convince them to stop doing it?
So if you go to the next one, I found this, I just picked this up.
I was looking at it, trying to figure out why in short order.
This is a piece from Al Jazeera.
Under Trump, U.S. strikes on Somalia have doubled since last year.
Why?
No, it's a long article that goes into the factions.
I'm not interested, but I did find an interesting paragraph, Dr. Paul, to explain Trump's rationale for continuing in a record pace of bombing this country.
Go to the next one.
Ending the U.S. forever wars was a major slogan of Trump's 24 election campaign, during which he and many of his supporters spoke out against American resources and lives being put into waste conflicts across the globe.
But on February 1st, a mere 10 days after being inaugurated for the second time, President Trump announced that the U.S. had carried out airstrikes targeting senior leadership of ISIL or ISIS in Somalia.
And here's what Trump wrote on X at the time to mark why he decided to start bombing again.
These killers who we found hiding in caves threatened the United States.
And if you read that a couple of times, you won't be able to stop laughing.
These killers hiding in caves are threatening the United States.
That's the justification for continuing to bomb.
this poor war-torn country.
You remember where the leader Iraq was found?
Yeah.
Hiding in a hole.
Hiding in a hole.
And he was going to take over the United States and start bombing New York any minute now.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But though they have to scare people in order to do this, I think that people have to be more cautious on what they're looking at.
The Empire's Justification 00:04:27
But, you know, we've added to our debate list or our information list small yet.
We haven't talked much about it.
We haven't.
But then I got to thinking, and I mulled it over my mind.
I was asking Daniel, I said, how many countries do you think we're in?
I think there are six or eight that we're actually bombing and wars that are going on.
And people, because they're not in the news as much, people want to forget about Ukraine.
They sort of had to forget about Vietnam and Korea and these places.
It just gets too old.
But the Middle East, you can't forget about that because there's a religious connotation there.
And then the Yemen is involved here too.
And that goes on and on.
And in some ways, if you included every place we had CIA agents and our spies, some people put up a tremendous list on that.
There's probably not many places that are free of all our agencies spying on everybody in these other countries.
And that's why we can't have nice things.
And our friend and colleague, Chris Marsini, put something out on X earlier today talking about the cutoff of the SNAP benefits to people.
And a lot of right-wings are applauding it.
And I've seen the abuse of SNAP.
I mean, I've been in the store where these people have got enormous carts of junk food and they're paying for it with our money, whatever.
But Chris made the good point.
Yeah, that's an issue, just like what you said a couple of minutes ago.
That's an issue.
But the real reason we have economic problems is because of our global military empire.
End that now, end it first, and then we'll see what's left.
And I bet we'd find a lot is left.
But I'm going to close out, and this will be the end of my week because Chris will, well, Chris won't be, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
Not my problem, but I want to thank everyone for watching the show.
And I want to ask you to please, as I'm about to do now, hit that thumbs up.
Make sure you pass around and post on your social media today's program and all the programs if you would be so kind to do so.
And we appreciate your support.
We appreciate you watching the program.
And over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Yeah, I want to add a little bit to what you've just said, because the empire is a big deal.
And the excesses, and if we could restrain our leaders from getting involved, it would be a real help because that is demanding tremendous amounts of money.
So the policy is wrong, entangling alliance, bombing people, doing this with all undeclared war and even the tariff wars and all these things going on.
But they run up the bills and spend all this money.
But then it's the way they end up financing.
And you can't tax the people anymore because half the people, I think it's true, they really don't have to pay income tax because everybody's receiving.
But where does the money come?
Well, we just print it.
That's an easier way done.
We've been getting away with it for decades now, and especially as it has accelerated since the last link to gold happened in 1971.
That we're living with that.
So that has to be determined and addressed too, because you have bad policy, whether it's the runaway welfarism here at home, or whether it's the wars that are unnecessary and all the weapons profits are made.
They have to say, that is bad because they're morally doing the wrong thing, and constitutionally they're doing the wrong thing.
But how do you pay for it?
They have to steal the money.
They don't, you know, they have exhausted how much income tax they can make or pay.
So, but what they do is they just print the money, and that is theft, it's fraud, and those kind of societies never last.
And I think what we're witnessing now is the breaking down of that system.
And it's gradual at first, but then the breaking down will accelerate.
And that's when hopefully we have a better understanding of what the solution is.
And some people ask me, what can we do under these circumstances?
Start With the Constitution 00:00:19
Well, if you're confused, and I talk to a lot of young people, start with reading the Constitution because there's a pretty good outline there.
Not perfect, but a lot better outline than the interpretation of the Constitution and the people we have in the Congress.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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