White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled no punches in a fiery speech delivered to the reporters gathered for the White House Press Briefing on Tuesday, April 8, commenting during her speech on why President Trump is precipitously raising tariffs. Doing so, Leavitt exposed the hypocrisy of Democrats, as shown by a speech Nancy Pelosi gave in 1996 in which she called for tariffs of the sort that Trump is now implementing.
As background, in the 1996 speech, Rep. Pelosi commented on the massive trade deficit America had with China even then, and asked when the American government would get serious about challenging the status quo, something that President Trump is now finally doing.
In that decades-old speech, Rep. Pelosi said, “How far does China have to go? How much more repression, how big a trade deficit and loss of jobs to the American worker, and how much more dangerous proliferation has to exist before members of this House of Representatives will say, I will not endorse the status quo.”
Further, Rep. Pelosi said in her speech that China was benefitting from unfair trade policies, saying, “This is the biggest and cruelest hoax of all—not only do we not have market access, not only do they have prohibitive tariffs, but China benefits with at least 10 million jobs from U.S.-China trade. The fact is, U.S.-China trade is a job loser.”
It was to that speech that Leavitt referred during her Tuesday tirade. Beginning, she said, on the matter of what Democrats have long been saying, “Democrats have long said that the United States of America has been ripped off by the countries around the world. They just don’t want to admit it now, because it’s President Trump who is saying that.”
Continuing, Leavitt got to calling out Rep. Pelosi by name, noting that in her speech she called for the very sorts of things America is now doing thanks to President Trump. She said, “In June of 1996, Nancy Pelosi spoke on the House floor. She urged her colleagues at the time to fight against the status quo trade policies that have contributed to America’s trade deficit with China.”
Building on that, she quoted Pelosi, saying, “In fact, Nancy Pelosi said: ‘How far does China have to go? How much more oppression. How big a trade deficit? How many jobs have to be lost for the American workers. How much dangerous proliferation has to exist before members of this House of Representatives. Well I say, ‘I will not endorse the status quo.””