Commerce Secretary Lutnick: 'We're very, very focused on America's golden age coming'

Welcome and happy Mother's Day to everybody watching, and a special happy Mother's Day to my beautiful wife.

Well, Secretary Bessent has made it clear one of his objectives is to de-escalate. You know, 145% and 125% are really those are kind of tariffs where you're not trading with each other. So he's there to see if we can reset the conversation, and he's at it right now. So I'm going to leave it to him of how he deals with it. But that's the objective: to de-escalate.

No. No. You know, that's again fake news. I mean, we are focused on Americans, right? President Trump's idea is to bring the golden age back to America, to reshore manufacturing, to build here, to have those people who build here not pay any tariffs. And if you want to build overseas, okay, you'll pay tariffs and you'll be less competitive in America, so build here. I mean, that's the idea. Open your markets if you want to continue to, you know, to not bring things home to America. Open your markets. Let our exporters sell to you. Finally get some fair trade and let's bring lots of manufacturing back to America. But we are not under any circumstances focused on China when we're talking to other countries. When we're talking to China, of course, our trade team is focused on China. But when we talk to other countries, there was no conversation in the UK or India or Japan or any of these other countries about China. Leave China alone. We are trying to grow America.

So you saw on Liberation Day the president put out a whole series of tariff rates, and then the objective is to bring manufacturing back to America and also lower those rates so those countries — each of those countries — can open their markets, make a more fair trading deal with America, allow Americans to export to their country. Finally, in a way you saw in the UK, we opened their market — $5 billion of exports. Many of these countries will, because they have bigger economies, even bigger. And our idea is have the Americans be able to export to those countries, grow America, right? Ranchers, produce, vegetables, machinery, ethanol, things like that — sell to those countries, lower their tariff rate, and then bring manufacturing back to America. So I think we're very, very focused on America's golden age coming. We're going to make trade more fair, and it's going to work brilliantly for Americans. Both if you make it here, there's no tariff, and we can sell much, much more fairly everywhere in the world.