Former South Carolina Gov. Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Haley sharply contrasted her views on trade with those of Donald Trump on Monday ahead of fundraisers with members of the Wall Street elite.
On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Haley criticized Trump’s proposal of a blanket 10 percent tariff on all imported goods. “This is a man who now wants to go and put 10 percent tariffs across the board, raising taxes on every single American,” Haley said. Trump “is going to raise every household’s expenses by $2,600 a year,” she claimed, citing a report from the National Taxpayers Union.
While free trade agreements and policies have decimated American working-class communities and led to the offshoring of millions of American jobs, they have been highly lucrative for the Wall Street investor class, many of whom support Haley’s campaign. On Tuesday, Haley is attending a fundraiser hosted by billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller. Tickets to the swanky New York City event start at $3,300 and go up to $33,200.
Michael Every, a global strategist at Rabobank, said that critics of Trump’s tariff policy fail to understand its reasoning. “They don’t grasp that Trump isn’t talking about a 10 percent tariff just because it’s a 10 percent tariff,” said Every, adding that Trump “is talking about structurally breaking the global system, by hook or by crook, to basically re-industrialize the U.S.” He aims to establish “a barrier between it and the rest of the world so it’s cheap to produce in America and more expensive to produce everywhere else if you’re importing into America,” Every explained.
