Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec spoke with Mike Benz and discussed the Trump administration’s approach to economic nationalism, particularly its use of tariffs as a strategic tool to rebuild American industry.
Benz pointed how Trump’s aggressive tariff policies are part of a broader plan to restore US manufacturing and counter the globalist policies that led to economic decline in the American heartland.
“If you are going to get rid of the soft power potential of something like USAID, you're going to need to offset it by some other restructuring that benefits American influence in turn,” Benz explained. “And I think that's the purpose of these tariffs, which is that if companies manufacture within the United States, then they don’t get tariffed sending their goods here because they’re already here.”
Benz emphasized how these policies are reversing decades of offshoring by forcing foreign corporations to build their factories in the US rather than relying on cheap labor abroad.
“This is why I think you see hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in so that if companies, if they have foreign cars, they’re going to manufacture them in Ohio. If they have foreign trinkets or foreign chips, they’ll manufacture them in Arizona,” he said. “This creates jobs for the Americans who live here. This is actually what foreign countries were doing to induce U.S. multinational corporations. This is how you have Microsoft and others who primarily have their advanced workforce in China or in other foreign countries for cheap labor.”
Benz argued that these measures are long overdue, pointing to the decline of American manufacturing since the late 20th century.
“We’re now doing that here. Which is long overdue, frankly, this should have been done 30 years ago,” he continued. “This is the sort of thing that America dominated the 20th century… with its manufacturing miracle in the heartland which was then carved up and became the Rust Belt after all the multinational corporations saw that it was cheaper to go abroad for their labor force and have their commercial business oriented towards the great outside.”
