EJ Haust, a digital marketing expert and official guest host of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, criticized the mainstream media for uniformly labeling President Donald Trump’s tariff trade strategy as “chaos” as part of a coordinated messaging effort to attack the administration.
On April 2, deemed by the Trump administration as “Liberation Day,” the president unveiled his trade plan, which included the U.S. charging 10 percent baseline tariffs on nearly all goods imported from other countries, reciprocal tariffs on nearly 90 countries that have the highest trade deficits with the U.S., and a 25 percent tax on all imported vehicles.
Trump has since issued a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries except China, which currently has a base tariff rate of 145 percent, as nations worldwide have expressed interest in negotiating fairer trade deals with the U.S.
Noting how the U.S. stock market sustained losses in the days after Trump’s announcement earlier this month which sparked the narrative of “chaos” within the media, Haust said the world “needed a reset” anyways.
“[The media] got the memo and chaos was the word of the day…I don’t care if it is chaos, to be perfectly honest. The world needed a reset and it was coming whether Trump did this or not,” Haust explained.
Haust further argued that the U.S. could not have withstood its deficit much longer, saying how Trump’s tariff strategy is a necessary reset to reclaim U.S.-based manufacturing and for the country to maintain superpower status.
“We can’t sustain this kind of debt deficit and not make anything in the United States. Cars, pharmaceuticals, steel, buildings, everything, literally everything that we build now in America has parts from other countries. We can’t outsource everything and then expect to remain in superpower status,” Haust said.
Noting how China has retaliated against Trump’s tariffs which has fueled the “chaos” media narrative, Haust offered a more optimistic approach, explaining how the president’s tariff strategy has pushed countries toward considering better trade deals which, if successful, would result in reducing U.S. reliance on China.
“Everybody is worried about China, but if we have deals with all these other countries, guess what? We don’t need China…The truth is, if we have all of this other free trade and fair trade going on, we don’t need China,” Haust said.
With further regard to China’s retaliation, Haust noted how Chinese manufacturers have been flooding TikTok and other platforms with videos showing how luxury goods – including $30,000 Hermès Birkin bags – are made and revealing their true costs.
Haust pointed out that such videos omit the reality of slave labor and child labor involved in production which, as the visibility of China’s retaliatory tactics influences public opinion, makes the propaganda effort ineffective.
“TikTok is a flutter right now and it’s hitting Facebook and X and everything now too with all of these Chinese manufacturer types that are showing everybody the origins of all their fancy luxury goods. China is exposing that a lot of the purchases that we have here are probably dupes…What they’re also not showing though, on any of these videos, and I don’t care where you get it, whether it’s fake or real or whatever, the teeny tiny little hands in slave labor that are putting those things together,” Haust said.
“So China’s making this big PR move, they’re putting out all of these videos on American media sources…but I’m here to tell you it’s backfiring because people are like, ‘eh, we don’t really need those Birkin bags’,” Haust added.
Watch the Michael Patrick Leahy Show on X Live now — Hour 2 https://t.co/bjrwNcaEJw
— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) April 15, 2025
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
