President Donald Trump holds a chart as he delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
"We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit and counting. We've had 90,000 factories close in the last couple of decades," Leavitt told CNN. "Since 1997, Americans have been put out of five million manufacturing jobs. These are not just statistics. These are real American lives that have been impacted. And it's about time we have a president who actually does something about it. This is going to restore more wealth, more jobs, more economic prosperity to our great country."
Leavitt said that the countries targeted by Trump’s reciprocal tariffs have had "70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to."
"They have ripped off American workers. They have taken our jobs overseas," Leavitt said.
She also told CNN that Trump has already launched a "massive deregulatory agenda" that has "saved the American taxpayer millions of dollars." Leavvitt said that the president is "unleashing the might of our American energy industry," arguing that a stifled energy industry drove inflation during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Vice President JD Vance told Fox & Friends on Thursday morning that critics during Trump’s first term warned that tariffs would be inflationary, but instead inflation dipped to 1.5% until the "four terrible years of the Biden administration." Vance said the "globalist economy" has resulted in the United States "incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us."
President Donald Trump signs two executive orders during a Make America Wealthy Again event in the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
On concerns about tariffs potentially driving up costs, Vance said the administration is "fighting very hard to bring prices down" and usher in "the biggest deregulation in the history of this country."
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News that "when tariffs come into place, foreign goods may become a little more expensive, but domestic goods do not."
"For the first time in your lives, you're going to actually think about the Americans who make the products, the Americans who produce these products and work in these factories," he said. "It's time for us to take care of them instead of taking care of the world."
Trump said that his administration secured about $5 trillion of committed investment, which Lutnick told CBS meant "people are going to start building factories right now."
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"That means all that construction work begins now," Lutnick said, vowing that the president's plan would build on the 150,000 jobs already added to the U.S. economy in March. "That starts to employ Americans today. You're going to see plants being built, factories rebuilding. All shifts are going to be running hot across America now. You're going to see employment leaping starting today."
Danielle Wallace is a breaking news and politics reporter at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on X: @danimwallace.
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