During an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett spoke about the exemptions under President Trump's tariffs.
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00:00White House National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett. Kevin, good to see you again.
00:04So the White House says everything that happened over the last week and a half went according to plan.
00:10Over the course of just a few days, the global market lost trillions in stock value,
00:13regained some of it, but not all of it. The strength of the dollar right now is plunging.
00:17Consumer sentiment is worse than at any time during the Great Recession. Is all of this part of the plan?
00:24Right. In fact, let's talk about what the trade plan is, because I think that it's very,
00:28very important for people to understand why we're doing what we're doing and how we got to the point
00:33where this is the right strategy. The bottom line is that in the United States, there are these things
00:39called 232s. You've heard people talk about it. It's a trade action where the government decides
00:45that there's something that's a serious threat to national security if we don't do something about
00:49it. And so an example, just hypothetical, would be supposed that in order to protect ourselves from
00:55an adversary, we had cannons, but we had to buy the cannonballs from them. Well, then you could put
01:00a 232 tariff on the cannonball and then we'd have to make it here. And then that would make it so that
01:06if we ever did have a situation where we're in conflict, that we'd had everything we need to
01:11protect ourselves. And so the 232 things were always excluded. They weren't covered by the new actions
01:17that you discussed at the opening. And so it's not like, so for example, semiconductors are the key
01:22important part of a lot of defense equipment. And there's going to be a semiconductor 232
01:28that studies those things carefully and decides what it has to, what has to be onshore in order
01:33to protect America. And so it was always the case in annex two in the reciprocal act that
01:38semiconductors were going to not be covered by that action because there's a 232 action that was
01:43announced in the executive order that is going to address it. And so I don't think that anything
01:50really should be a surprise if people stopped and studied, but it seems like a lot of the coverage,
01:55people are in a rush to get the coverage out and didn't really think through the logic of it,
01:58which is why we have a longer form show with you here, right, Jake, where we can talk about what
02:02exactly is going on. And then finally, why is it that people think that there is an emergency about
02:07this? Well, it's because especially over the last four years, the influence of China into every
02:14little corner of our country has just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it actually is the
02:19case that it's a very uncomfortable amount of Chinese input in our actual weapons systems,
02:25Jake, in our actual weapons systems. And so President Trump thinks it's urgent that we address these
02:29matters.