BURSTTreasury Secretary Scott Bessent said President Trump’s tariffs should boost American manufacturing over the “next couple of years.”
"We're seeing these very large commitments both from governments and from corporates,” Bessent said Thursday while on MSNBC's "Morning Joe,” adding later that “we've got trillions and trillions of manufacturing that's going to come back, and we're going to see that in the next couple of years."
Trump’s latest tariffs formally kicked in Thursday, impacting shipments of goods from both trading allies and adversaries.
“IT’S MIDNIGHT!!! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TARIFFS ARE NOW FLOWING INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,” Trump wrote just before midnight on Truth Social.
Some countries will face steep tariff rates, including Syria (41 percent), Laos (40 percent) and Switzerland (39 percent). Thailand and Indonesia were dealt a 19 percent tariff, while South Korea, Japan and the European Union will grapple with a 15 percent rate.
The president also said, “THE ONLY THING THAT CAN STOP AMERICA’S GREATNESS WOULD BE A RADICAL LEFT COURT THAT WANTS TO SEE OUR COUNTRY FAIL.”
Bessent, one of Trump’s main trade negotiators, said inflation has been on a downturn.
“So overall, inflation is down, and what we're seeing is the manufacturers overseas are absorbing some of that, retailers are absorbing some of that, and part of our plan is to have real income growth for working class Americans,” he said.
The Treasury Department chief said that during Trump’s first White House term, hourly workers did “much better” than supervisory workers, and the same might occur again.
“We saw the bottom 50 percent of households in terms of assets, their asset growth outperformed the top 10 percent so I would expect we'd see that again,” he said.