White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Sunday that President Trump’s recent steps on tariffs are preventing China from achieving “complete economic domination” on the world stage.
“History will record that the actions President Trump has taken in recent days were the beginning of saving the West from complete economic domination by another power,” Miller said in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” referring to China.
Miller said it’s “shameful” that the United States has allowed “core elements” of the country’s critical supply chains to be based in China, saying “to give China the ability to exert that kind of control over the rest of the world through these illicit means? That’s unthinkable.”
Earlier this month, the White House announced a 10 percent baseline tariff on foreign imports, as well as steeper “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of other countries, including many key trading partners. Trump later announced the steeper tariffs would be reduced to 10 percent for 90 days on imports from all nations, except China.
Trump has ratcheted up reciprocal tariffs on China to 125 percent on top of 20 percent levies, leading to a proportionate response from Beijing. That has escalated fears of a massive trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
Miller, in the interview, touted Trump’s approach to tariffs, saying the Trump administration is spotlighting “how China has distorted the entire global trading system through decades of intellectual property theft, trademark theft, copyright theft, industrial espionage, currency manipulation, illegal subsidization of critical industries, targeted dumping to destroy core manufacturing capacity in other countries, so that they cannot protect and defend themselves in a time of national emergency.”
“These are state-led policies from China that require redress. And the only scandal is that it took so long for us to finally have a president in Donald Trump who will protect and defend America from these abuses, while every other president, Democrat and Republican, allowed China to plunder us to a degree that was so savage and so total, it honestly eclipses the imagination,” Miller added.