Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Donald Trump wanted to “open up China for business.”
Discussing small businesses, host Jake Tapper said, “A lot of them saying, look, I support what President Trump wants to do. I support the idea of wanting to bring manufacturing back to the United States, but it can’t be done in in a month or three months or even a year that there’s just an entire infrastructure in this country that is lacking. They can’t buy what they would love to buy, most of them, as you know, if not all of them are patriotic. They want to buy American goods, but a lot of this stuff just isn’t made in America. I mean, this is we could go into a long history about the hollowing out of the manufacturing base. That is neither the fault of you, me, or President Trump but it did, it does exist, and it will take years to make the manufacturing infrastructure that these small businesses rely on.”
Bessent said, “Well, Jake, I think what we’re going to see, just like we saw with the UK trade deal my sense is it’s what we’ll see with China. We don’t want to decouple with China and President Trump actually wants to open up China for business. So the manufacturing we want to bring back we had. During Covid we realized that we had some very strategic shortfalls, whether it was medicines, semiconductors, steel, the other products. So the long term, the medium term goal is to bring back these strategic industries as quickly as possible. I think we will continue trading with China the in the kinds of products that these small businesses are talking about at lower tariff levels.”
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