Former President Donald Trump has a plan which he thinks will prevent U.S. manufacturers from moving overseas, and he says he can do it without Congress.
Trump’s proposal, which drew swift pushback from Harris-Walz campaign surrogates on Tuesday, could bring a 10% to 20% tariff on goods made in places like Mexico or China and shipped to the U.S.
“Kamala Harris is the candidate of the tax collectors and the Washington bureaucrats. I am the candidate of the American worker — and I always will be,” Trump said in a statement shared by his campaign.
According to the former president, even larger tariffs would be imposed to protect American jobs and the economy, by dissuading manufacturing companies like John Deere from investing in factories overseas, where they generally find cheaper labor.
“As you know, they’ve announced a few days ago that they are going to move a lot of their manufacturing business to Mexico,” Trump told a crowd in Smithton, Pennsylvania.
“I am just notifying John Deere, right now, that if you do that, we are putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States,” the former president declared.
In remarks Tuesday, Trump told a crowd in Savannah, Georgia that if elected, he’d put a 100% tariff on every car coming into the U.S. from Mexico and that the only way to avoid those charges would be for an automaker to build the cars in the U.S.
According to Trump, he can even make such decisions without legislation. The former president said he would rather not go that route, but that he’d “have the right to impose them myself if they don’t.”
“I don’t need Congress, but they will approve it,” he said.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, during a press call organized by the Harris campaign, said that Trump’s plan isn’t really a plan, but is actually just political riffing.
“He says things off the top of his head that tend to often be ridiculous, if not insane,” Cuban said.
“Where it turns into lunacy is when you do across-the-board tariffs. And so to say that we’re going to tariff 10% or 20% or 60% for China or any other company, countries, that’s just inflationary, and that’s just the tax on the American people, that’s a sales tax through and through,” he said.
Cuban especially disagreed with Trump’s direct referencing of John Deere, noting the “historic” American company is the backbone of the U.S. agricultural industry. Cuban openly wondered if Trump had forgotten about the “United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement,” a trade agreement arranged by the former president which allows for companies like the tractor maker to build in Mexico.
According to former Dallas Mavericks owner, another Trump plan — to order a 10% cap on credit card interest — sounds an awful lot like the ideas put forward by left-leaning politicians like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. It even, Cuban says, sounds like the sort of thing a Marxist might consider.
“So now you’ve got Donald Trump getting involved in price caps and price controls to a greater extent than self-described socialist Bernie Sanders. And I think that just says so much about how far, how far Donald has gone to, you know, his socialist and communistic tendencies, right? I know it sounds funny, a little bit out of whack, but it’s true,” Cuban said.
Teamsters National Black Caucus Chair James Curbeam, who also joined the press call, said that Trump’s plan would send “work back to China.”
“Trump would raise the cost of typical middle class families nearly $4,000 a year. $4,000! Most middle class families cannot afford to miss one check, if you look at them raising $4,000 a year, you’re going to have people that’s going to be homeless, and you don’t have to just take it from the economists either. Just use your common sense,” Curbeam said.
Cuban said that Vice President Kamala Harris, in sharp contrast to Trump, does not offer off-the-cuff policy proposals just to please her base, but instead “thinks through her policies.”
“I think she is better for business,” the billionaire investor said. “I want a president that thinks before he or she speaks.”
