You don’t know Robert Lighthizer but his influence with President Trump could change America’s economy. Lighthizer was the top U.S. trade negotiator in the first Trump administration and he’s an evangelist for tariffs—taxes on imported goods. Yesterday, the president declared an emergency and imposed unusually high 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and 10% on China to coerce them to stop the flow of the deadly drug fentanyl. That’s unusual because tariffs are normally used to balance trade. And in Lighthizer’s opinion, America has little choice. He says China’s three-to-one dominance in trade is a threat to our way of life.
Robert Lighthizer: China to me is an existential threat to the United States. It is– a very, very competent adversary. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way. They view us as in the way. They have the biggest army in the world and they’re growing it, the biggest navy in the world, and they’re growing it. They’re spying on us, they are taking our technology, they’ve been waging an economic war against the United States and winning that war for at least the last three decades.
Scott Pelley: So your tariff regime for China would be what?
Robert Lighthizer: I believe in strategic decoupling. I’m not saying no economic relationship with China. That’s not my position at all. I think you want balanced trade. And how do you get balanced trade? You’re gonna get balanced trade by having large tariffs on most of what they send to us.
Scott Pelley: What’s large?
Robert Lighthizer: You know, the president has floated numbers, 50%, 60%. But I think they’re big numbers like that.
Scott Pelley: Wait a minute. You’re talking about decoupling from China. What would that look like?
Robert Lighthizer: So, a strategic decoupling. So, we would still have trade. So, I would say, “We sell you $150 billion. We buy $150 billion from you. No more.” We don’t allow investments in China except in circumstances where we believe that’s in the interest of the United States. We don’t allow inbound investment, so we begin to disentangle. We disentangle our technology. You could ask yourself, “What is China’s policy towards us?” It is exactly a mirror image of what I just said. So, what I’m suggesting we do to China is what they do to us.
Ronald Reagan gave the young trade lawyer his first White House job and 77-year-old Bob Lighthizer has been advising Republicans since. In Trump’s first term, Lighthizer was in charge of negotiating trade agreements. In “Trump 2.0” he’s an unofficial advisor—but a passionate one. We noticed when he apologized for chewing up time.
Robert Lighthizer: …just because I talk too much… So…
Scott Pelley: It is 60 Minutes, after all. And we don’t get all of it.
Robert Lighthizer: It’s not 60 days! Is that what you’re thinking?
It’s not days but centuries that tariffs have been debated. Every U.S. president has used them. But in the 1930s, tariffs deepened the Great Depression and after World War II, America led a broken world toward free trade. U.S. manufacturing jobs were stable until around the year 2000. Then, in 10 years, a third of manufacturing jobs were lost—nearly six million. There was a modest rebound under Obama, Trump and Biden. (That dip is COVID.) But fewer than 1 and a half million jobs are back.
Stacey Dahle: You don’t know how much you love goin’ to work until you can’t go there anymore.
Stacey Dahle, Michelle Lopez and Matt Frantzen are among 1,200 laid off in 2023 when the Belvidere, Illinois, auto assembly plant shut down.
Michelle Lopez: This is my home. And when they told me that we were done it hurt. It really did.
Matt Frantzen: We’ve got a community of 24,000 people. There’s probably not a street you can go down that somebody’s not tied to this plant. We’ve been here since 1965. It’s a good job. Provides a great living, and we would just like to see it come back.
‘Come back,’ from Mexico. In 2016, car maker Stellantis moved one of Belvedere’s jeep models south of the border. In 2023, Belvidere closed.
Robert Lighthizer: We’ve lost electronics. We’ve lost textiles. We’ve lost chemicals in a large way. We invented the semiconductor. Now we make 8% of semiconductors for the world. And none of the really high-tech ones. More than half of the cars sold in America are now imports.
Mexico, Canada and China are America’s largest trading partners. But China, Bob Lighthizer says, has an enormous advantage because of the trade imbalance and Chinese espionage, stealing U.S. trade secrets.
Robert Lighthizer: You add it all up, you can get to around $1 trillion a year of wealth from the United States being transferred to a geopolitical adversary. It’s insane. And it’s working. And then you ask yourself as a national security issue, how do you fight a war if, God help us, we ever have a war with China when they’re now four times more likely to be able to– produce what is needed in a war?
Scott Pelley: But isn’t trade one of the ways we avoid a hot war?
Robert Lighthizer: The way you prevent wars is by having the strongest, biggest, best army, biggest, best navy– best economy in the world, best technology. You do those things, the allies come to you. They see you as the future.
Scott Pelley: Already, China’s manufacturing sector is bigger than that of the United States, Germany, and Japan combined. Isn’t China too big to snub?
Robert Lighthizer: We should never have that attitude. There are things we can do. The genius of America combined with our allies; we can turn this around. But what do we need? We need to change the relationship with them. We need tariffs. In my judgment, we need subsidies in certain areas, and we need an economic policy and a military strategic policy that rises up to the challenge.
On the campaign, Trump proposed historic tariffs — 10-20%on all imports, 25% on Mexico and Canada, 60% on China. He said America would grow wealthy collecting taxes from overseas.
President Trump (during Aug. 17 Wilkes-Barre, PA rally): A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That’s the way it is whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say, “Oh it’s a tax on us.” No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs.
But most any importer or economist will tell you the president is mistaken.
Tariffs are not a tax on a foreign country. The tax is paid by the importer in the United States. For example, Walmart imports goods from China, and when those goods cross into the United States, Walmart pays the tariff. If Walmart decides to pass the cost to consumers, then, you paid the tariff– not China.
Mary Lovely: So, if you go to Walmart, if you go to Target, you’re gonna see higher prices for imported goods.
Economist Mary Lovely studied Trump’s proposals for the Peterson Institute for International Economics—a leader in nonpartisan research.
Scott Pelley: The argument is made that, if tariffs are imposed, American consumers will buy less of the foreign goods, more domestically produced goods, and that’s a great thing for consumers and for jobs.
Mary Lovely: Well, it’s a great thing for consumers if you don’t care about how much they are able to buy, because the prices of everything they buy will go up. Will they substitute toward domestic goods? Let’s just take that to start. Yes, to some extent, they will. But the prices of those domestic goods will also rise ’cause they no longer have to compete with imported goods.
Lovely’s research estimates the tariffs Trump talks about would cost an average household around $200 a month.
Mary Lovely: Footwear, toys, home goods, certain types of machinery, certain active ingredients in pharmaceuticals, certain types of chemicals. We’re still very dependent in certain categories.
But worse, Lovely says, tariffs can kill jobs. She points to Trump’s first term tariffs on imported steel. as intended, steel prices rose. U.S. mills were protected. but the higher prices hurt steel buyers like car makers. Economists estimate that the tariffs created 1,000 jobs in steel but cost 75,000 jobs among U.S. companies overall.
Mary Lovely: This idea that it creates jobs, yes, in a few places for a few people. But for the majority of us, it’s more pressure on employers. It’s more pressure on our wages. It’s more pressure on our jobs. And, obviously, more pressure on our wallets when we go to the cash register.
Scott Pelley: The argument is made that when you increase the cost of parts and supplies coming into the country, you’re hurting Apple. You’re hurting Ford. You’re hurting American companies.
Robert Lighthizer: Will these very highly paid CEOs have to figure out how to– how to make a profit in a new environment, one that helps workers and helps innovation and– is more American-focused, America first? The answer is yeah, they’re gonna have to figure it out. Will they figure it out? Of course they’ll figure it out. They’re gonna learn how to make money.
Scott Pelley: One of the ways they figure it out is by laying people off.
Robert Lighthizer: Well, no. You see, I don’t believe that’s true. I think– to me, the exact opposite will happen. You will see more production in the United States. You will see more jobs, better jobs, more pressure, upward pressure on wages, which is my objective.
Scott Pelley: The way you paint it, it seems like tariffs are magic.
Robert Lighthizer: Well, I wouldn’t say magic. Remember, the tariffs are part of an economic policy. The policy has tax cuts. It has– it has– spending cuts. It has energy production. It has regulatory reduction. And it has tariffs. The combination of that, I think (and tariffs are an important part of it), has the potential to have this kind of renaissance.
We saw some of that combination he talks about back in Belvidere where turbo charged tariffs have been hitched to a big taxpayer investment.
Scott Pelley: When you were putting that T-shirt on Joe Biden, did you think, “That’s it. The plant’s opening again.”
In 2023, Matt Frantzen, president of the UAW Local, welcomed President Biden to Belvidere with a union shirt.
Matt Frantzen: I thought we were well on our way, you know? Belvidere’s always fought for themselves. And in this scenario, we needed—- We needed everybody to fight for us. And they did.
Biden did. He increased Trump’s earlier, 25% tariff on Chinese cars to 100% for Chinese electric vehicles. Then, Biden gave car maker Stellantis a $335 million grant to convert Belvidere to electric cars. We don’t know how much that helped, but last month, Stellantis said it would reopen in 2027.
Matt Frantzen: They need to realize that, whether you’re Democrat, Republican, independent, we need to work on the middle class. If the middle class is strong, that helps so many different areas. So, it’s not just gonna be the tariffs. It’s gotta be policy that’s set for the middle class.
But tariffs cut both ways. Canada and Mexico now say they will retaliate against Trump’s new tariffs with their own tariffs on U.S. goods–the opening shots of a trade war.
Mary Lovely: The real fear that I have is that we have real problems. And I’m afraid that tariffs, time and time again, proven to not deliver. So, in the long run I’m afraid it will just increase cynicism among the American public about whether the government is able to deliver and make their lives better.
Scott Pelley: What are the chances that you’re wrong?
Robert Lighthizer: Well, I– once again, we tried it the other way, Scott. If we do this, in 10 years it doesn’t work, we can go back and always fail again the way we have in the past.
Produced by Maria Gavrilovic. Associate producer, Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by Peter M. Berman.
