Benny Johnson on Trump's tariffs crashing markets: “Nobody ever had their net worth carved onto their tombstone. Doesn't even matter when you're on your deathbed. Who cares?”
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From the April 4, 2025, edition of The Benny Show
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): Let them cook, man. Let them cook. I see these black pillars on my timeline. I'm like, “Oh, I lost a little bit of money in the stock market.” First off, you lost no money. It's just numbers on a balance sheet. It's not real unless you panic sell. It's not real unless you don't believe in what you actually invested in in the first place.
And if you're investing in American companies and you're investing in companies that make this country great and that hold up this country, well then, yeah. I mean, listen, when you print a bunch of fake money, maybe that's going to inflate the stock market a little bit, and maybe we're going to see a little bit of a return to normalcy.
We already showed you the stock market chart. Please don't freak out on these things. But more importantly, like, can we please, like, establish -- and I'll tell you, if you want to come for me in the comment sections, don't care. Losing money costs you nothing. This is just the reality of life. You're going to like -- were you young, young and dumb? How much money did you lose? Everyone loses money. Everyone loses money. It costs you nothing. In fact, it builds quite a bit of character. In fact, you learn a lot of lessons actually by losing money. Losing your character costs you everything. Losing your country, loses you everything.
There are things you can't get back. You can -- the government can print more money and it will. Sadly, that's just the reality. It's fugayzi, it’s fugazi. It's just so there's a boom and a bust every ten years, and it's just been that way since the invention of modern markets in the 1600s. The Dutch crash of 1649. You ever heard of it? It's just the way that it works. It's the way that, like, monetary policy has always worked. There's going to be ups and downs, especially as things especially as the table gets reset.
If you lose the character of your country, if your town gets hollowed out -- give me that photo of that town, man. Give me the photo -- give me the photo of that town in West Virginia. If your town gets hollowed out and your entire neighborhood gets addicted to opioids and your steel mill shuts down, and your farmers can't grow crops, and there's no more cattle ranchers, there's no more cowboys, there's no more fishers, there's no more workers, and we are completely and totally dependent upon slave labor peasants across Asia to make every good and service and pharmaceutical, then you've actually lost your country, and then we are the slaves.
There you go. This is West Virginia. And it's so sad that this was a factory that provided thousands of honest, good hearted, steelworking jobs for our fellow countrymen. And it was ripped. The guts of it got ripped out and shipped by people like Mitch McConnell so that they can make a couple extra points in their portfolio to get stock swaps with Pan-Asian countries. And they sold out their countrymen, and I call that traitorism, actually. I think that's the definition of a traitor.
You can lose money. You can lose points in your portfolio. It costs you absolutely nothing. You won't miss them when you're dead. Nobody ever had their net worth carved onto their tombstone. Doesn't even matter when you're on your deathbed. Who cares? It's just digits on a -- it's just digits on a ledger. What will matter is, did you preserve your nation for your children? Did you view your country as something more than just an economic zone and tax cattle and slaves to China? Put that up, President Trump, no crying in the casino. Is it really? I don't care. It's too good.
Final point I'll make on this is, who's the slave and who's the master? You know, if you were pharmaceutical and automobile and phone, all the wires in your home, every electronic in your home, everything that you use in your life is wholly and totally built by a foreign power that hates you, then you are the slave. You've always thought of America as the master of the world or as like an empire. It's not. Not if we are totally dependent and on our knees before these third world goblin dictatorships. So it's time for a total reset. It's time for them to know who's boss and it's time for us to be the master once again. That's the point of this country actually, to be the master of our own destinies.