This is Part 4 of my continuing series where I show you sneak peaks behind the scenes with President Trump’s cabinet and close advisors.

Spoiler alert: Trump’s Second Administration is nothing like his first.  He’s surrounded by the best of the best.  He’s getting great advice, they’re all working together in incredible fashion, and it’s simply full steam ahead with clear vision

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!

Today we go to Tucker Carlson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who literally learned at the feet of George Soros and Stanley Drunkenmiller (two icons in finance), including the one time they all “broke the Bank of England” with a trade.

You might think working with Soros is a bad thing and I wouldn’t disagree, but sometimes it’s very wise to learn from your enemies!  Study their ways and understand how they think.  Then use it against them.

I’ve been blown away by Bessent so far, and I think you’re going to really love this chat with Tucker where they go DEEP into tariffs and how it will soon make America very RICH again!

Watch here:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Tucker Carlson:
Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for joining us. So we’re at the Treasury Department. The president had a press conference yesterday next door in which he announced a whole new tariff regime — global.

He’d been promising to do this, well, for 40 years, really. It came not out of nowhere, but it was clearly his intent all along as stated. But it did rattle people, including some of his supporters.

So I just wanted to ask you, big picture — where do you think this leads?

Scott Bessent:
Tucker, thank you for having me. And as you said, the president’s been talking about this for four decades.

This is transformational for the American economy, for the American worker, and for the new Republican alignment. It’s a combination of old and new ideas.

Some of the old ideas were put away. You know, I always tell everyone — and they don’t want to hear it — the original “Tariff Man” was Alexander Hamilton.

He used tariffs to fund the new nation and to protect American industry. President Trump has added a third leg to the stool: he uses tariffs to negotiate.

But I think this is not unlike — I was a freshman in college when Ronald Reagan came in, in 1980 — a new day in America.

When I talk to people now, and they look back — and I look at the Reagan years so fondly — I remember what it was like. It was choppy.

President Reagan — very choppy — but he stood the course. And look, this is not an invitation, but at one point in the early ’80s, a farmer showed up with a shotgun at the Federal Reserve to kill Paul Volcker for raising rates.

Like I said — that’s not an invitation for anybody for action. But it was a tough time.

And then in 1984, President Reagan won re-election with 49 states. And I think they may have even let Mondale win Minnesota just so it wasn’t a skunk.

Tucker Carlson:
Just to be nice, yeah.

Scott Bessent:
And that’s what President Trump is doing now.

For years, the American worker — middle class — has been eviscerated. American workers have taken it on the chin.

We’re just starting to see some of the research now. We’re seeing research on what’s called the “China shock” from 2004.

It’s just coming out now. And it’s what you know, it’s what I know. But finally academics are saying, “Oh gosh, the American workers never recovered from the China shock.”

What a surprise.

President Trump sensed it 40 years ago. But out on the campaign trail, starting in 2015 up until last year, he has promised the American workers that the old standard of living can come back.

Because what we’ve seen over the past at least 20 years since the China shock — but more like the past 30 — are these massive distributional problems.

Where the coasts have done great, and the middle of the country — they have just seen quality of life and life expectancy decline.

They don’t think their children are going to do better than they are. And a lot of people don’t care.

President Trump cares. This administration cares.

This is the first step towards realigning that. A lot of our trading partners — including some of our allies — have not been good partners.

If tariffs are so bad, why do they have them? That’s my question. Why do they have them, right?

Or if the American consumer is going to pay all the tariff, then why do they care about tariffs? Right — because they’re going to eat them.

So I think this is the beginning of a process.

We’re going to re-industrialize. We have gone to a highly financialized economy.

We have stopped making things — especially a lot of things that are relevant for national security.

I think one of the few good outcomes from COVID was we had a beta test for what maybe a kinetic war with a large adversary could look like.

And it turned out that these highly efficient supply chains were not strategically secure.

We don’t make our own medicines. We don’t make our own semiconductors. We don’t make our own ships anymore.

So if I were to say — was there any good outcome from COVID? It was this: it woke the world up to the supply chain problems.

Economic security is national security. President Trump and I have talked about that a lot.

So this is a national security issue that we’re seeing here, but it’s also an economic security issue.

And it’s to — I don’t want to say “redistribute” — but it is to give working Americans real wage gains and enhance their lives.

And I’ve said out on the campaign trail — one of my most frequent mottos was: Wall Street’s done great.

It can continue doing well. But it’s Main Street’s turn. It’s Main Street’s turn.

And that’s what we saw yesterday. It’s Main Street’s turn.

Over the course of my life — 55 years — Wall Street really has been the commonly recognized measure of economic health.

Like, how’s the Dow doing? We’ve got entire TV channels devoted to tracking its progress — which has mostly been up during the course of my life.

So, you know, the average equity index falls, if the stock market falls, that’s seen by a lot of people as a measure that the economy itself is in decline.

Do you think that’s a fair measure?

Tucker Carlson:
The market goes up and down.

Scott Bessent:
Warren Buffett has a saying: “In the short run, the market’s a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine.”

And in the long run, it’s going to weigh: do we have good policies?

In my former business, I commented on market structure, market ups and downs a lot. I’m trying not to do that.

But for everyone who thinks that these market declines are all based on the president’s economic policies — I can tell you this market decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of Deep Seek.

So the so-called “MAG-7” — the tech stocks — had been doing very well for about 18 months, leading the market.

And I think there was kind of a real dose of reality in what was going on in AI. I think the U.S. is going to remain the leader in AI, but the AI-related stocks started coming down.

So if I were to analyze in my old hat — and this is the only time I’m going to talk about it in that way — what’s happening with the market, I’d say it’s more a MAG-7 problem than a MAGA problem.

So it’s deeper. Actually, the markets — you’re saying in this specific case with tech stocks — are taking a real measure of the value of companies relative to foreign companies.

It’s sad, but if we look at the equal-weighted S&P, even after today’s move, it’s down 4% on the year.

On a long-term chart, you wouldn’t even notice that.

And I think the most important thing that we can do — that I can do as the Treasury Secretary, that President Trump wants to do — is put in sound fundamentals for the underlying economy.

If the underlying economy is good, if taxes are stable, if businesses have predictability, if we have cheap and plentiful energy, if we deregulate, if they treat our workforce well — then we’re going to have a great stock market.

Tucker Carlson:
Will Americans see substantial tax cuts because of tariffs?

Scott Bessent:
The president suggested in describing his plan for tariffs — he said, look, you could conceivably fund a lot of government with tariffs.

That would suggest that taxpayers fund less of the burden. So do you expect that these will be accompanied by a congressionally approved tax cut for the middle class?

I just want to go back for a moment. One of the things the tariffs are doing is we’re pushing back against other economic systems.

The Chinese have a very different economic system. They have low costs — some would call it literally slave labor.

They subsidize industry with subsidized loans. They have a lot of non-tariff barriers. Your show can’t be shown there.

So we’re pushing back against that. And with the tariff income, it can be substantial.

If we think in a classical model of tariff income, a 10% tariff would result in currency appreciation absorbing about 40% of that — so 4%.

Then the producer in the other country would eat about 4%. And the U.S. consumer might have a one-time price adjustment of 2%.

So in a 10% tariff, maybe the consumer pays 2%.

There’s a study out recently from a group at MIT that shows that with President Trump’s first China tariffs — which were approximately 20% — the price level went up 0.7.

So to answer your question — if we could put on a 20% tariff and have the foreigners pay that, and use that money to bring down our government deficit and keep taxes low here — that’s a very unique formula that hasn’t been tried in this country for a long time.

Tucker Carlson:
But it would require congressional participation to get there — to move tax rates, of course. They’re set by the Congress.

Scott Bessent:
What we’re going to have now — we are in this very odd, what I would call “betwixt and between” — between the tariff income and what Doge is doing in terms of cutting government expenses.

So CBO scoring — and for 35 years, I was on the other side of the wall — I would always say, “Oh well, CBO says this.”

And I didn’t really realize that a CBO score is a lot like Enron accounting. It’s not real.

And when you actually look at the real story —

Tucker Carlson:
But you assumed it was on the outside?

Scott Bessent:
Sure. Well, they’re experts. It’s the Congressional Budget Office.

It’s the congressional budget office. And they’re well-intentioned people. They just have nonsensical rules.

Think about this — all the scoring’s done over a 10-year window. So they just assume 1.7 or 1.8% economic growth over 10 years — and that never moves.

Whether you raise taxes or cut taxes — doesn’t move.

So during the campaign, when Vice President Harris was announcing all these big tax increases she wanted to do and things like that — the CBO was scoring her very well.

And President Trump wants to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent.

That was kind of a blowout number, because obviously growth’s going to go up a lot when you cut taxes.

So that was a long way of saying — we will not get credit for the tariffs in any bill, because Congress is not going to legislate it.

The president is doing it with executive authority, but the money will be coming in.

We’ve already taken in several hundred million dollars on the China tariffs from his first term.

We’ve taken in about $35 billion a year just on the old tariffs — not the new ones.

So in the CBO window, that’s about $350 billion — which pays for a lot of the president’s promises:

No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no taxes on overtime, making interest deductibility on autos made in the U.S.

And think what the president is doing here — he is backing into an affordability solution for the bottom 50% of wage earners.

Because they’re the ones who will benefit from all four of those programs.

Tucker Carlson:
So looking out, say, a year from now — beginning of next April — how much money will America make through tariffs?

Scott Bessent:
Do you have any sense of how much the U.S. government anticipates bringing in from the tariffs announced yesterday?

It’s going to be a moving target. But could it be anywhere from $300 billion to $600 billion a year? Sure.

Tucker Carlson:
Okay, so that’s meaningful revenue.

Scott Bessent:
Very meaningful.

But what will happen with tariffs over time — the ultimate goal of the tariffs, and the president says it all the time — bring your factory here.

That’s the best solution toward getting away from a tariff wall. Move your factory from China, from Mexico, from Vietnam — bring it here.

So what will happen over time: we’ll have substantial tariff income in the beginning.

Manufacturers will build their factories here. The tariffs will drop.

But the revenue from the factories — from income taxes, from all the new jobs — will go up.

So we’ll be taking it in domestically as the tariffs drop.

And why are the tariffs dropping? Because we’re making it here, and our trade deficit is dropping.

Tucker Carlson:
So you’ve obviously thought this through. You think that the United States has the necessary labor force for this transition?

Scott Bessent:
I think we do. I think with AI, with automation — so many of these factories are going to be new, they’re going to be smart factories.

And I think we’ve got all the labor force we need.

And what we are doing on the other side — one of the reasons, other than my support for President Trump, that I came out from behind my desk — and I had a pretty good life —

I wanted to come out and really tell people that I was worried about an impending financial calamity, given the high levels of government spending that were leading to high levels of government debt.

So what we are doing — on one side, the president is reordering trade.

On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.

And then on the other side, that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing.

We’re going to relever the private sector.

The private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years.

And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again, because it’s been hemmed down by excessive regulation, and it’s been crowded out by the government.

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Tucker Carlson:
Do you ever think — since your job is to forecast the effects of these policies that you have — we’ve got probably one out of six people in this country here illegally, maybe 50 million illegal aliens.

And the president said he wants to deport them. Then you have AI — and the projections there are massive labor market disruption, fewer people needed.

You alluded to that a minute ago. Then you have the tariffs.

And we can guess at their effect, but we don’t really know because we’ve never done it.

And then you have the reaction from the rest of the world to those tariffs.

Like, there are so many huge factors that are effectively unknown — that are black boxes, really.

Do you ever think like, wow, it’s kind of hard to know what’s going to happen?

Scott Bessent:
Look, it is. And I always think that you can never be 100% sure.

But you can stay within sight of guardrails and keep moving forward.

I can’t remember — one of the Sunday morning shows I was on a couple weeks ago — the commentator asked me, “Can you guarantee me there won’t be a recession?”

And I said, “I can’t guarantee you anything.” There’s nothing that tells me there should be one.

So I believe that this is going to work — just like President Reagan believed that supply-side economics was going to.

But what I do know is — the old system wasn’t working.

Tucker Carlson:
I think that’s right.

Scott Bessent:
And if you look at a system that’s not working, you’ve got to be brave to change it.

So what wasn’t working? Would it have been really fun for me to come in and just keep issuing a lot of debt?

And it’s almost like a bodybuilder taking steroids. Outside looks great, you’re muscular — inside, you’re killing your vital organs.

That’s what was going on here. But it would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy — borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs.

There was no controversy when we were doing all that.

But you were going to end up in a calamity.

If you go back and look — you look at the financial crisis in ’07, ’08 — the economy looked great right up until then.

You go back and look at the end of the dot-com bubble, and then the whole credit problem, the fraud at WorldCom, Enron, and other companies — economy looked great, until it didn’t.

And I think one of the things that we won’t get credit for — but that this administration will have done — is avoiding a financial calamity.

Think about it — they’ve done an analysis. One of the reasons 9/11 happened is because the airlines didn’t want to pay for reinforced doors.

They kept pushing back. FAA didn’t push hard enough. And now we’ve got the reinforced doors.

So I look at it like — we’re putting on the reinforced doors before the crash.

Tucker Carlson:
What’s the scramble — the lobbying scramble — by foreign governments going to be like over the next three months?

Because the president said yesterday, you know, we’re putting a universal tariff, one standard, but then of course each country’s adjusted according to a lot of different factors — trade deficit, currency manipulation, and then tariffs.

But you know this is all, as you said, a moving picture. It’s a developing situation.

So like, if I pick a country — you know, Vietnam — I mean, I’m going to really try to bring pressure to bear on this administration to adjust those numbers.

Like, what’s that going to be like?

Scott Bessent:
It’s going to be the president’s decision. And I think his view is: this has been going on for a long time — for friends and foes — and we’re going to see where this plays out.

I think what’s going to be more important than the discussion with countries is the discussion with companies.

So what do companies want to do?

As President Trump said yesterday — best way to get around the tariffs: build your factory here.

Tucker Carlson:
Yeah.

Scott Bessent:
And what can we do here at Treasury to help that?

We’re pushing to get the tax bill done so we can guarantee the low taxes — full depreciation within the first year.

We’re working with Secretaries Burgum and Wright on energy security.

We’re working on getting the regulations down.

President — I don’t know whether he talked about it yesterday or the day before — Taiwan Semi, the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA Commissioner, is working to push through all the permits that they need.

Because we’ve just gone into this regulatory morass where it takes so long to get things done in this country.

So I think what will be more interesting are the individual company announcements more than the country announcements.

You want to sell to Americans? You’ve got to make it in America.

Tucker Carlson:
Sure — or pay the tariff.

So how is China as a nation going to — I mean, this is such a big challenge. It’s directly in their face.

It’s about every country on the globe, but it’s really — more than any other country — about China, I think it’s fair to say.

How are they going to respond? What’s the retaliation look like?

Scott Bessent:
Well, I don’t know if they can retaliate for a couple of reasons.

If you look at the history — and I used to teach economic history — when you look at the history, we are the debtor nation.

We have the trade deficits. The surplus nation is in the weaker position.

Because the Chinese business model — and Tucker, by the way, the Chinese business model and the economy — are the most unbalanced, imbalanced in the history of the modern world.

We’ve never seen anything like this in terms of their export level relative to their GDP, relative to their population.

So I think it is going to be very difficult for them to try to change the model.

They’re in a deflationary recession slash depression right now. They’re trying to export their way out of it.

And we can’t let them do that.

But I think that when you think — the Chinese manufacturing system is like that old Disney movie with the brooms carrying the buckets.

There’s nothing you can do. That’s their business model. It’s not going to stop.

Now, what could happen? If you were to say, “Scott, what’s the dream scenario?”

That somehow there could be a deal where the U.S. and China — we want more manufacturing, which would mean a smaller part of the economy is consumption.

And the Chinese have this imbalanced economy with too much manufacturing. And actually, the Chinese consumers really get the short end of the stick.

So Chinese households — they’re caught in what’s called the middle-income trap.

Could we do something together to say, “Okay, you rebalance — you consume more, manufacture less. We are going to consume less and manufacture more”?

We’ll be military rivals. There’ll still be an economic rivalry.

But we’re going to level the playing field by a lot.

Now, that’s not going to happen tomorrow. That’s not going to happen in a month.

But over the next few years, they may have to come around. Because I think their business model is broken.

I think President Trump’s broken their business model with these tariffs.

Tucker Carlson:
So you’re describing, you know, the famous scenario where — if you take a bank loan, the bank is in charge. They can repossess whatever you borrowed against.

But if you take a big enough loan, you’re kind of in charge of the bank.

Scott Bessent:
Exactly.

And they’ve just got such a big deficit with us — our markets. They can’t survive without it.

Tucker Carlson:
Are you confident that there’s a clear enough channel of communication between the two governments that the details can be worked out and that nothing will go crazy in the meantime?

Scott Bessent:
Well, I think what gives me a lot of confidence is the relationship between President Trump and Chairman Xi.

When you have a direct line of communication at the very top, then I think it’s very difficult for things to go haywire.

Tucker Carlson:
What about the rest of the world?

Scott Bessent:
Look, the Europeans — we look back, and there was a famous meeting where President Trump told the Europeans, “You’re insane for building Nord Stream 2. What are you doing?”

“You already get most of your energy from Russia, and you’re going to double down on it?” And they did.

Tucker Carlson:
And look what happened.

Scott Bessent:
So we blew it up.

Tucker Carlson:
Somebody did.

Scott Bessent:
Somebody.

Tucker Carlson:
Somebody there.

Scott Bessent:
Probably Putin! Some Norwegian fisherman bumped into it, is what I read.

But look — the Europeans go kicking and screaming, but I think they’re going to have to rebalance, too.

Germany has a very imbalanced export economy. And they were on the verge of deindustrialization.

They were the opposite of us — they had expensive energy.

They were depending on Italy and the countries in the south to keep the euro suppressed.

And they were selling into China. And now China is becoming their competitor.

Tucker Carlson:
So you said at the outset — the first example of the analogy that you used was President Reagan’s first term.

Obviously big win in ’80, recession in ’82, wipeout — and then the biggest landslide in history in ’84.

So you’re suggesting — by saying that — the fruits were obvious within the first term, within four years.

Scott Bessent:
They were. Only difference now is — there was a lot of competition back then, but there was a level of civility.

And the real danger here — if there were a midterm loss, and I don’t think there has to be — you know what’s going to happen.

I know what is going to happen — Democratic House is going immediately to impeachment for something.

Tucker Carlson:
Of course.

Scott Bessent:
Like, the lawfare is going to start again.

And I think the American people are going to hate it again.

So — Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome.

But do you think that — and this is really aimed at the people who support President Trump and who agree with you wholeheartedly that the current system was really bad — and like, drive across the country, you’ll see how bad it has been.

Horrible. Lower life expectancy. But the people are hoping that yesterday’s move will lead to a demonstrably brighter future within four years.

Is it your sincere prediction that within four years, we’ll say — actually, that kind of worked?

Scott Bessent:
I believe that it’s going to work. And I know that what we were doing wasn’t working.

So I think we have to try this. And I have a high confidence ratio — it’s going to work.

And I have very high confidence ratios.

The good news is — we have President Trump’s previous term, when everyone said none of this was going to work.

“Oh, the China tariffs are going to do this. They’re going to cause inflation.” They didn’t.

“This is going to be bad for working-class Americans.” Well, guess what?

Working-class Americans — hourly workers — did better than supervisory workers.

The bottom 50% of households — their net worth increased faster than the top 10% of households.

And now if you missed the first three installments, I have those for you here.

Part 1:

If You Have ANY Doubt About ANYTHING In The Trump Administration, Watch This Right Now…

Part 2:

If You Have ANY Doubt About ANYTHING In The Trump Administration, Watch This Right Now (Part 2)…

Part 3:

If You Have ANY Doubt About ANYTHING In The Trump Administration, Watch This Right Now (Part 3)…

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.

View the original article here.

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