Daily Wire host says Trump's economic policies will “cause some tension, some pain”
Michael Knowles: Trump “ran on necessarily raising the cost of certain goods, imported goods to help rebuild the American industrial base”
Published
Citation
From the March 12, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Trump did not run in 2024 on making the market reach record highs immediately again. That's not what he ran on. He ran on tariffs. He ran on bringing back American industry. He ran on necessarily raising the cost of certain goods, imported goods to help rebuild the American industrial base. He ran against the globalist economic order. OK. He ran with full knowledge and consciousness that that will necessarily cause some economic turmoil in the short term.
But he says it's gonna be worth it in the long term and, even more importantly, we have to do it. If you still believe — don't forget, most American voters voted for Trump. And they voted for Trump as he was promising, as he was declaring that the current economic order doesn't work for America. Offshoring all of our manufacturing damages national security. It's damaged the flyover states, those small American towns that that used to have robust economies. All that stuff's been shipped overseas. It's damaged the American families. It's gutted the American family. It's led to American men to die deaths of despair from suicide and drug addiction. It's flooded our country with cheap imported goods made by slave labor in China, but it has hollowed out American society. And it's left us very vulnerable as we saw during COVID when our supply chains were disrupted and we couldn't get stuff anymore. That's what he ran on.
To undo the economic and political and social damage of the last thirty, forty years is going to cause some tension, some pain. The market might not react all that well to it. Trump campaigned on that. He knows that's what he's signing up for. So my read on the situation is he's not gonna get spooked by a bad headline or two. He's a sophisticated political thinker, no matter what his enemies think. And he knows that in order to be a consequential president for one, to have a serious legacy, and in order to actually fix the problems, not just the symptoms of the problems, but the root economic, political, and social problems, he's got to make big changes, and he's gotta be able to withstand that storm. I think he knows all of that, which frankly should calm the markets because it means that for all of Trump's apparently erratic talk about tariffs — now they're on, now they're off, now we're gonna levy him on this country, now in that country, now forget about this country again. For all of that, Trump has a stable vision here. The broad economic vision has remained the same from his inauguration, before that, from the campaign trail, really going back to his first run for president, and even go back to the '80s when he was complaining about the same kinds of economic problems and social consequences of those problems that he was talking about when he ran for president.