Pence Group Discusses Trump’s Tariff Plan

By
Rachel Stevenson
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Well, well, well — what do we have here? Mike Pence’s think tank has finally found its voice… and chose to use it to take a swing at Donald Trump’s new tariff plan. That’s right — Advancing American Freedom, the organization literally founded to cheerlead the policies of the Trump-Pence administration, decided to go rogue and denounce Trump’s proposed “Liberation Day” tariffs. You know, because nothing says “principled conservatism” like biting the hand that fed you.

In a post on X (because apparently, we’re still calling it that) and a formal letter to Congress, AAF declared that Trump’s tariff proposal is “essentially a tax on American consumers and businesses.” Now, let’s pause here and consider the irony: this organization was built on the legacy of the very administration that used tariffs as a cornerstone of its America First trade agenda. But now that Trump’s back in charge and actually trying to do something bold — like force foreign governments to play fair — suddenly the free trade alarm bells are going off in Pence-land.

According to AAF’s general counsel Marc Wheat, the answer to Trump’s plan is to pass Senator Mike Lee’s Article One Act — because of course, what America really needs right now is a congressional bottleneck on executive decisions during national emergencies. You can almost hear the excitement at the Heritage Foundation cocktail hour. While the rest of us are trying to fix a broken trade system that’s shipped our jobs overseas and let our adversaries dump cheap junk into the U.S. economy, they’re busy clutching their pearls over the Founding Fathers’ fears of tariff abuse. Give me a break.

Meanwhile, President Trump, never one to miss a branding opportunity, is rolling out “Liberation Day” like it’s the economic D-Day. And frankly, why not? It’s long past time someone had the guts to call out what’s really going on: America has been getting fleeced on trade for decades. The same geniuses now whining about consumer price hikes are the ones who sat back and watched China build entire megacities off our manufacturing base while Detroit and Pittsburgh turned into ghost towns.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid it out perfectly: we’ve had the most open economy in the world, and in return, we’ve gotten stiffed. Foreign markets are closed, their tariffs are high, and they laugh all the way to the bank while we “buy American” stickers made in Taiwan. Enough is enough. Trump’s proposal to level the playing field with reciprocal tariffs isn’t some radical socialist plot — it’s common sense. If you want to sell your goods here, then our workers should have the same shot in your markets. That’s not protectionism, that’s patriotism.

But here come the establishment types, clutching their laminated copies of The Federalist Papers, warning that tariffs might upset the delicate balance of global economic interdependence. You know what else upsets that balance? A $1 trillion trade deficit. Or how about when your middle class can’t afford to buy the cheap imported goods anyway because they don’t have jobs?

What a hypocrite:

Trump’s plan isn’t perfect, but at least it shows he’s willing to fight for American workers instead of hiding behind white papers and Capitol Hill proceduralism. Pence’s crew can quote Madison all day long, but the people out of work in Ohio and Michigan care a whole lot more about whether a Chinese company is undercutting their job than they do about congressional oversight on executive declarations.

So yes, let’s have “Liberation Day.” Let’s start liberating American industry from the chokehold of globalist trade deals and foreign manipulation. And if some D.C. think tank staffers want to cry into their monogrammed handkerchiefs over it, so be it. The rest of us will be too busy building things again.

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