WASHINGTON, DC — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained in great detail in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last week President Donald Trump’s vision for tariffs and how the president is using this policy action to encourage and incentivize companies to relocate their manufacturing operations to the United States from other places around the world.
Bessent sat with Breitbart News for a nearly 40-minute-long on-camera long-form exclusive interview at the Treasury Department in the Salmon Chase Suite on Thursday evening. In this third installment from the interview, Trump’s financial guru laid out how, despite foreign governments and various financial elites lambasting Trump’s tariff actions as wild and crazy, there is definitely a method to the president’s moves.
“You could call it a madness, I’ll call it a plan,” Bessent said. “With President Trump, it’s never in a straight line. But look, he harassed and harangued our European allies and everyone said ‘oh you can’t be mean to them,’ but it’s kind of like tough love with a family member when you tell a relative, ‘I’m not supporting you anymore, get off the sofa and get a job.’ But he cajoled and harassed the Europeans, and for the first time in 25 years the Germans are breaking open the piggy bank and they’re taking off the debt break and they’re going to do their fair share of military spending. Five presidents could not get them to do it, and President Trump has done it. It’s the same thing here. With tariffs, the American workers—it started with this China shock in 2004 when working Americans had not seen the real wage increases. They’ve seen good-paying manufacturing jobs disappear. They’ve seen their communities get hit.”
Bessent also directly responded to former Vice President Mike Pence, who attacked him after his New York Economic Club speech where he said cheap goods are not the American dream. Pence is notoriously against using tariffs to achieve American economic objectives.
“I took some flak last week at the Economic Club [of New York] where I said cheap goods are not the American dream,” Bessent said. “Mike Pence came out and said ‘Secretary Bessent doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ I would tell the former vice president that ‘let them eat flat screens is not an economic policy.’ People want to have good jobs, they want to own a home, they want to have dignity, they want to enjoy work, they want their communities to be sound, and we want affordability but bringing in a bunch of baubles and trinkets to satisfy people who are displaced isn’t the American dream.”
Several major companies have already begun efforts to either expand U.S. operations or relocate to the U.S. They include a massive new investment announced last week by GE Aerospace, as well as moves by Japanese beer-maker Asahi, JSW Steel, Honda, Hyundai, LG, Samsung, and Stellantis. Asked about these moves by major companies to invest in the United States in the Trump era, Bessent told Breitbart News that it’s quite clear that any companies that operate in the U.S. can avoid worrying about tariffs altogether.
“This is a slow and inexorable process and there will be no tariffs for the companies that move their manufacturing here. That’s part of it,” Bessent said. “There is a necessary rebalancing here. China is the most imbalanced or unbalanced economy in the history of the world. They have exported deflation, their manufacturing policies have decimated our workers and decimated our communities, and by putting up a tariff wall the manufacturers will bring their production back here or we can collect a substantial amount of revenue for the U.S. government. The initial phase-one tariffs from Trump 1.0, I think, are collecting $30 billion or $40 billion a year, which go to pay for a lot of tax cuts for working Americans.”
Trump on Truth Social last week argued the U.S. does not have free trade anywhere in the world. “The U.S. doesn’t have Free Trade,” the president said. “We have ‘Stupid Trade.’ The Entire World is RIPPING US OFF!!!”
Asked about this comment, and how companies will be incentivized to come back to the U.S., Bessent said what Trump wants is “fair trade,” something that does not currently exist.
“The president wants fair trade,” Bessent said. “I want to go back to your previous question too about manufacturing coming back to the U.S. because we can do it through tariffs but to be truly successful we have got to create the economic environment through permanence in our tax policy—so the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will give the manufacturers certainty—and we want to deregulate. We want to decrease the regulatory burden. And we want cheap energy. So, deregulation, cheap energy, and low taxes should really set the table for a manufacturing renaissance. It’s a multi-year process, but we’re just seeing the beginning of it.”
Asked what kind of revenue he would estimate Trump’s newly created External Revenue Service—which the president announced to collect monies from tariffs worldwide—may bring in, Bessent said it is too early to tell because it is unclear how other countries will respond to Trump balancing the equation to address the unfair treatment of the United States worldwide.
“Back to your question on reciprocal tariffs, we actually don’t know because the reciprocal tariffs could go either way,” Bessent said. “That could consist of we could say to the Europeans that ‘you have a 10 percent tariff on American cars coming into Europe, but we have 2.5 percent tariff on European cars coming into the U.S. We’re either coming up to 10 percent and then we would collect substantial revenues, or you could come down to 2.5 percent, or we could both go to zero. You let us know what you want to do, but it’s path dependent.’ So, there is a chance that we on an annual basis could be collecting several hundred million dollars per year in tariffs, or the trade friction could drop, free trade becomes fair again, and we’ll see which way it goes. But I think either way it goes it’s win-win. Either we collect a substantial amount of revenue, or we get access to these foreign markets that have really not played fairly.”
In addition to the tariffs making it more difficult to manufacture abroad and then ship items into America, rather than just building in America, Bessent detailed how the Trump administration is trying to give several carrots to companies that want to come back. They include tax relief, deregulation, energy improvements, and an “abundant workforce.”
“It’s like I said earlier—it’s the deregulation, it’s the energy, and it’s going to be an abundant workforce as we move from workers in the government sector to the private sector,” Bessent said. “One of the reasons during the past four years that we had negative or stagnant real wage growth was that so many of the jobs created were government jobs and the government does not create real wage growth. Only the private sector creates real wage growth.”
On top of that, Bessent remarked in his New York Economic Club speech about companies being able to write off depreciation on factories they build in America. Asked about this, Bessent said the administration is considering a variety of proposals to help companies write off depreciation of new facilities in the U.S.
“So, two things—in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act we saw that one of the most powerful things to stimulate the economy was 100 percent depreciation of equipment in a factory, in an office, for a company’s fleet,” Bessent said. “What we are considering now is allowing companies to, in the first year, write off 100 percent of their factory. We may do that in a four-year window to encourage the companies to come back faster.”
Overall, though, Bessent said the general sense from the international business community is a massively increased interest in investment in the U.S. since Trump won in November, something he expects to continue.
“Everybody is very constructive and it’s a combination because at Treasury I meet with both companies, sovereign wealth funds, and foreign investors,” Bessent said. “Everybody has told me the foreign investors want to increase their allocation to the U.S. and then the companies all think this is a very dynamic business environment with great opportunity.”
More from Bessent’s Breitbart News exclusive interview is forthcoming.
The post Exclusive — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Details Trump’s Tariff Plans: ‘There Will Be No Tariffs for Companies That Move Their Manufacturing Here’ appeared first on Breitbart.
