Victor Davis Hanson Says There’s A Better Way For Trump To Talk About Tariffs

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson told SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly on Monday that he believes there’s a more strategic way for President Donald Trump to tell voters about tariffs.

On April 2, Trump announced a list of about 60 countries the U.S. would impose reciprocal tariffs against. The stock market took a nosedive for two days before it closed Friday. On “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Hanson advised the president to take a “tragic tone” and tell voters that his decisions are for “the good of the country.”

“I would only suggest to them that he have a tragic tone. Instead of saying, ‘Beautiful tariffs’ and ‘We’re gonna make them pay’ or ‘Europe has been ripping us off or repertory,’ he should say, ‘You know, I didn’t want to do this, but we’ve had 50 years of this, and nobody brought anybody’s attention to it,” Hanson said. “‘The offshoring, the outsourcing that has destroyed the industrial base of this country. I don’t like cutting federal workers, but who had ever cared about the 37 trillion-dollar debt?’

“‘Who cares about the 3 billion dollars in interest per day? I was tasked to do this in a way that nobody else has addressed it. I don’t like doing it, but I’m gonna do it for the good of the country, even though I’m gonna be hated for doing it,’” Hanson added.

Arguments over Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” began after the announcement of the tariffs, with political pundits and lawmakers debating the implications of the president’s decision. With a baseline of 10% against the estimated 60 countries, some, like China, are facing higher tariffs due to their own tariffs against the U.S. (RELATED: ‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy)

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Hanson went on to detail how Trump could have Americans “back him the whole way” if he simplified his discussions about tariffs to only talking about “do unto others as they do to us.”

“He’s got to cease all the talk about repertory tariffs where he says, ‘Well, we’re gonna make them pay for all the stuff they did in the past’ or ‘They manipulate the currency,’ true. ‘They use health and safety gimmicks to forbid import,’ true,” Hanson said. “But, for right now, at this moment, he’s got to talk about reciprocity.”

“The American people will back him the whole way if he just says, ‘I would like zero tariffs with partners, and barring that I want our tariffs to be what their tariffs are’ and just stop all the talk about ‘We’re gonna have a 10% on everybody, regardless.’ So we’re gonna tariff Australia, even though they have a trade deficit with us,” Hanson said. “He can get in in the second round to the currency manipulation, the VAT tax, the scams that countries use to say your products aren’t clean enough, or they may have disease, all of that. But for right now the American people just want to be, ‘Do unto others as they do to us,’ and they will back him to the end of the earth.”

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told the host that 50 countries “have come to the table” since the implementation of the tariffs. Rollins additionally said countries are now “willing and desperate” to negotiate with the administration, before highlighting that the U.S. is the “economic engine of the world.”

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