MSNBC host Chris Matthews said President Donald Trump is using tariffs to look out for “people that nobody else is looking out for” and argued that tariffs are also very much a “cultural issue” in the Rust Belt.
“This is Pat Buchanan stuff. It’s economic nationalism… It’s the feeling people have that Trump said ‘I’ll be with you.’ This is a cultural issue as much as an economic issue,” Matthews, the Pennsylvania native who always got the interests of working-class voters before he had thoughts of riding MSNBC’s lurch to the left to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in Pennsylvania years ago, informed the Morning Joe elitists Wednesday on MSNBC. “The battle will be won or lost in 2020 in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. It’s not going to be fought in the high-tech areas of California or New York or Massachusetts.”When Trump signed the steel and aluminum tariffs on Thursday, he specifically mentioned that “workers who poured their souls” into building the country had been betrayed and said he was delivering on his campaign promise to have their backs.
“Our factories were left to rot and to rust, all over the place. Thriving communities turned into ghost towns. You guys know that, right? Not any longer. The workers who poured their souls into building this great nation were betrayed,” Trump said. “But that betrayal is now over. I’m delivering on a promise I made during the campaign and I’ve been making it for a good part of my life.”
The Hardball host also pointed out that while while sophisticates in places like New York talk about things like “terms of trade” and “least comparative disadvantage,” China is going into Africa and doing “anything they want with their tremendous trade advantage in the world.”
Thursday on CNN’s “Outfront,” host Erin Burnett acknowledged in the wake of the announcement President Donald Trump would meet with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un that if Trump were to defuse the North Korea nuclear situation, he would go down as a “great president.”
“Just an extraordinary evening and, of course, opening the door to the big question — if President Trump could truly solve this problem, that would be going down as a great president. There is no way around that. That is the reality here.”
Imagine what Trump might accomplish if the left would consider the interests of the American people instead of trying to impeach him 24/7 to salve their electoral butt-hurt.