President Trump is calling his first 100 days “the most successful in the history of our country.” Meanwhile, consumer anxiety over the economy is growing as the impact of the president’s tariffs is about to hit. When CBN News asked about it in the White House Briefing Room on Tuesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Trust President Trump.”
Trump marked his 100th day in office before a crowd of supporters in the Detroit area, where the auto industry is king, and his 25 percent tariffs on car imports are expected to drive new car prices up by thousands of dollars.
But the president yesterday rolled back tariffs on foreign auto parts used in vehicles assembled in the U.S. “I’m giving them a little bit of a break, right?” Trump told his audience.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran, things got testy when Moran told Trump his 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods were bound to “raise prices on everything.”
Moran: “It will raise prices on everything from electronics to clothing to building houses…”
Trump: “You don’t know that. You don’t know whether or not China’s gonna eat it–“
Moran: “That’s mathematics.”
Trump: “China probably will eat those tariffs. But at 145 percent, they basically can’t do much business with the United States. And they were making from us a trillion dollars a year. They were ripping us off like nobody’s ever ripped us off. And by the way, we have other countries that were just as bad. If you look at the European Union, it was terrible what they’ve done to us. Every country, almost every country in the world was ripping us off.”
Moran: “Hard times are ahead?”
Trump: “I don’t think so. I think great times are ahead.”
Yet Trump’s tariffs have caused confidence in the economy to drop to the lowest level since the early days of the COVID pandemic, according to a poll from the global business organization The Conference Board.
At Tuesday’s press briefing, CBN News White House correspondent Kelly Wright asked about that uncertainty, saying: “What is your message to the American people, in terms of letting them get through this disturbance and the outcome being greater and a greater good for the American worker, the American people, the American families?”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded, “I would say, ‘trust in President Trump.’ There was a reason he was reelected to this office, because of the historic success of his economic formula in the first term, and as I laid out at the beginning of the briefing and as the (Treasury) Secretary has talked about and the president talks about every day, there’s a proven formula that works: massive deregulation, energy independence, and tax cuts, which are coming.”
Treasury Secretary Bessent, also at the briefing, added, “The tax (cut) bill is moving forward. It is going to give permanence to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which will, back the question on certainty, it will give American business certainty, it will give American people certainty.”
On Tuesday, Trump called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos over reports that the website Amazon Haul was considering displaying the cost of tariffs at the bottom of each product. Amazon later said that it was never approved and is not going to happen.
