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White House Officials Miller and Leavitt Discuss Liberation Day Tariffs with Trade Representative Greer

April 2, 2025 · The White House · 0:20:47

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

The White House released a discussion among senior officials Taylor Budowich, Stephen Miller and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the day of the tariff announcement the President called Liberation Day. Budowich said groups like this meet frequently before announcements to talk through the President’s decision, its purpose and implementation, and to strategize on communicating it; because the media pick and choose facts and narratives, he said, they decided to do it differently this time — taking out the media and showing the American people the conversation directly, as he stated it. The video opens with a montage of President Trump’s past statements on trade, including that he would never apologize for defending America and that his end game is not to have a big deficit, as presented in the upload.

Miller, asked about the President’s historical view of global trade and tariffs, said the day’s announcement is the most significant action on global trade policy in our lifetimes — probably the biggest event on global trade since the ill-fated decision, now being reversed, of knocking down America’s tariff and revenue policies, which led to the offshoring and outsourcing of industry, as he stated it. He said successive 20th-century presidents knocked down the policies protecting American industry, did things he called insane such as letting China into the World Trade Organization, and watched the factories go overseas; he called the announcement the complete reversal — the great onshoring and reshoring of American jobs and wealth, according to his remarks.

Miller said the United States is today totally dependent on foreign countries for the supplies that make the country run — cars, electronics, home and building materials, medical supplies — with entire supply chains embedded abroad, leaving the country defenseless in a national emergency if a foreign power embargoes a sea lane, as he stated it. He said the President is now saying for the first time that if a country has stolen American jobs and thereby threatened national security, the United States will apply a reciprocal tariff based on the degree of its misconduct: a very high rate for China as the most egregious case, and moderate rates for severe but lesser misconduct, with the effect that companies will have to move production back to the United States from Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, Cambodia, China or the European Union — creating jobs in the process, according to his remarks.

Why it matters

The unmediated roundtable is the administration’s own Liberation Day explainer — Miller’s reciprocal-tariff logic, scaled to each country’s ‘misconduct’ as he stated it, is the reasoning the White House chose to present without press filtering.

Sources: The White House, “Senior WH Officials Budowich, Miller, & Leavitt have a discussion on Tariffs with US Trade Rep Greer”, 2025-04-02 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-04-02). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.