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We were speaking earlier about tariff's. President Trump, answering a wide range of questions, touched on a lot of issues today during the first official cabinet meeting of his second term. They covered the doge, a minerals deal with Ukraine, and yes, a renewed tariff threat.
Mister President, can you clarify the Canada mex So Co tariffs?
You had put that thirty day pause, but you just referred to a when does it go into event?
April second April, Canada mix core and for everything.
Joining us now for the latest on these upcoming teriffs and a lot more. Is a man who was sitting right behind President Trump as he was conducting that meeting today, Peter Navarro, White House, Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing with us from the North Lawn. It's great to see you, mister Davara. Welcome back with this little bit of confusion about some of the conversation we heard with reporters today, and so we really appreciate your joining us to maybe
clear this up. Are these tariffs still set to take effect next week? Is March fourth the deadline? And what specifically could Canada and Mexico do to keep them from taking effect.
Well, First of all, in order to understand the trajectory of the President's trade policy, I'd urge everyone watching this show, and presumably most are investors, to read the Presidential Memorandum of Day one of this administration, which lays out all the different types of actions as for today, I was sitting, as you said, right behind the President. I thought he was quite clear in what he was going to do.
For me.
I came out here hoping to discuss this week's trade actions kind of in my lane. We did two really important things which for investors really your market moving.
In the sense.
The first was the digital service tax action we took. The President has directed the US Trade Representative to resume action on these digital service taxes and for the benefit of your viewers. A digital service tax is something that was effectively invented in France in twenty nineteen. It's a tax on things like cloud computing, digital advertise, all of that.
But it was done in a way in France which only targeted American companies, specifically the big ones like Amazon, Google, Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft, and essentially the President back in twenty nineteen. Saw immediately that this was both a punishment and a discriminatory way of American companies, but also a tax grab
from the US Treasury. And so the way that works is these digital taxes are put on and they gone revenues that is, reduced profits, probably reduced profits, then reduce it's like stock prices, and then also reduce revenues from the corporate tax. And what about Medico, well with respect to digital service taxes, well, Canada has one, Mexico does.
We're just trying to.
Clear up what we heard today from the President, Peter. I'm sorry, I just we're.
Trying to understand what we're going to be across purposes, because I made it clear that what the President said just go back and play the clip, and he gave you a timeline.
The underlying issue.
There, the underlying the deadline, underlying issues, sir, is that too many Americans anywhere from fifty thousand on the low end of three hundred thousand, which I think is the accurate number for the President die every year from fentanyl that comes in from communist shine and big chemical barrels.
It goes to the drug cartels in Mexico and the Mexican cartels then bring some of that up to Canada and it comes across our border and people either take it in in the fentanyl direct form, where it's laced with other drugs like speed or heroin or whatever, and Americans are dying. So to the extent that that problem is going to be dealt with, I'm not in the center of those negotiations that be done by others in
the administration. I would think as long as we have some progress, uh, then we'll see what we will see.
But it's up to the President.
But the underlying probably the thing is, sir, It's like whenever I talk to people in the news about tariffs, they also want to cut to this chase over here about what's going to happen, or like I was raising inflation, and they never ask why the terriffs. In this case, it is feminel's killing Americans. It's slaughtered.
A good conversation with you, and we understand, but we just want to get some answers for our listeners and viewers about when these might take effect. This isn't about inflation, and it's not about the why. We just want to know.
When asked an answer, I told you you will go listen to what the President had to say. It's contingent on Mexico's cooperation in Canada's cooperation in terms of killing Americans with fentanyl. What I'm trying to share with you, which I think is for the for the longer term more germane, is this copper proclamation we did yesterday and the one earlier in the week on digital service taxes has tremendous importance for people.
We like to talk about that. We would love to talk to you. We would love to talk to people.
I'm trying to ask you about them right now. I like to talk about the copper Executive Order specifically, when we're talking about a commodity like that, do we have the capacity domestically to make up for anything that may be offset by not being able to import or as much If all of this is about trying to protect American commodity production to what degree into how quickly can that be ramped up to make sure that it's still able to meet demand.
So this is never a question of not being able to have enough. It's just a question of what kind of steps we take to protect the domestic copper industry across the smelting and refining process in the mining, so we don't really have to worry about We're not putting up a wall to imports themselves. We're just trying to deal with this central problem now and it's a problem across a lot of commodities we have right now. We have a very large over capacity in copper world raw wide.
That results in significant dumping into the marketplace here in America and thereby suppresses our ability to open new minds, which we have and there's two.
Great ones in Arizona we get developed. One up in.
Alaska we get developed the smelting itself, which we haven't opened any new smelters in a long time, and others are being open around the world, and we're simply not having enough refining capacity. That's what we're trying to establish. And the problem is, if you look at the curves, we got a tremendous surge in demand for copper over the next decade because of the electrification of our economy, in part due to things like AI and so when you charge well.
And that's why I asked you the question about whether shortages could result if you do see that increase in.
Industry pay we'll just pay the terroriffs will be paid. We'll get whatever we need. And in the meantime, as we saw with steel and aluminum, we went from a seventy percent capacity utilization in the first Trump term to eighty in profitability.
We had fifteen billion.
Dollars of new investment, we had new mills built. And then in the four years of Biden, we lost two aluminum foundries and capacity utilization went back down to the low seventies. So what we're trying to do is build a sustainable investment environment for key commodities and products which
are critical to our national security. And by the way, why copper, I mean it seems well, copper is like the second most important thing that Defense Department uses for its weapon systems, and it's also part of everything that's high technology, is part of the electrification of the grid. And we've had a situation where we used to have zero import dependence. We're up to about fifty percent now.
And if you just keep those lines going, that import dependence is going to increase and increase, and we're going to be vulnerable to shocks and geopolitical problems. And President Trump says that's not the world we're going to live in We're going to live in one.
It's a safe, secure, and prosperous.
All right.
Peter Navarro, White House, Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, appreciate the time