Ben Shapiro says “the underlying health of the Trump economy was good” before the tariffs
Shapiro: “Launching a trade war on the entire world all at once turns out not to be something that helps the American economy. It is not a well thought out policy, and you are seeing that in the markets nearly every day.”
Published
Citation
From the April 22, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Meanwhile, when it comes to the United States, the economy continues to roil and tumble. Yesterday, the stock market had a pretty terrible day. It was down by a thousand points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Gold was up. Bond yields were up, meaning people are moving away from bonds. They're moving toward gold. They're moving away from stocks. All of this demonstrating lack of faith in the underlying health of the American economy. De-dollarization is happening. People are moving away from the dollar in international trade. A huge amount of this is due to the tariff war, of course, that President Trump declared. Since that tariff war was declared, the stock market is down markedly. Over the course of President Trump's presidency, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off somewhere between 13 and 15 points. And something like 11 days in modern history in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dumped a thousand points, four of those have come since President Trump declared his tariff war.
Now as I've said many times, when it comes to tariffs, there are some things that tariffs are good for. So if you want to actually punish a country, say, like China, then a tariff is a useful thing, if well calibrated. If you wanto to protect an industry that is crucial to national security, then tariffs are useful. And you might use it to protect, say, your ship building or your steel industry if you feel that's crucial. And we can have arguments about each of those industries, but that would be the purpose of a tariff. Or you could put a tariff on a country because you're attempting to get that country to lower its own tariffs, to escalate to deescalate. However, launching a trade war on the entire world all at once turns out not to be something that helps the American economy. It is not a well thought out policy, and you are seeing that in the markets nearly every day.
According to the Wall Street Journal, stocks fell with the Dow industrials dropping almost a thousand points and on pace for their worst April since 1932. By the way, for no reason. Again, not for good reason. The underlying health of the Trump economy was good. The attempt to declare a trade war — if you're gonna do so and you're gonna orient against China, as I've laid out, there are smart ways to do it. You have to first do the preconditional work in order to do a successful tariff war on China. You can't just launch the tariffs up to 245% and hope everything's gonna work out OK. Because it turns out you then have to blow holes through the middle of your tariff on things like auto parts or pharmaceuticals or for Apple, which is what President Trump has already done. If you actually want to fight a successful tariff war with China, a few things have to be done before you even start the tariff war with China.
First, you need to sign terrific free trade deals with everybody else in the world in order to orient them toward you and away from China. Two, you actually have to gradually raise the tariffs so as to allow people time to reshore their key industries away from China to Vietnam or to Indonesia or to Malaysia or wherever else they're going to reshore. Three, if you have really crucial industries, you have to take the time and cut the regulations such that those crucial industries have already reshored in the United States before the supply gets cut off from China. Four, you actually have to have rare earth minerals. Right? All the things you need from China need to be sourced elsewhere. So when you cut off China, you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face. And five, you actually have to build up your military sufficient that if China feels boxed in and they go for Taiwan, you can deter them. You can do all that work before you actually launch a well-calibrated trade war with China.
Virtually none of that work was done. It was just sort of dumped out on the table that we're gonna do a giant trade war, and then everything else was backfilled. And the markets are reacting to that. If they thought that this was well thought out — the markets, if people in the investment game thought that all of this was well-calibrated and well-thought out, you wouldn't see the markets moving up and down wildly. The volatility is the indicator.