President Trump offered insights about a broad range of topics in a 1 hour, 40 minute address to Congress on March 4, but his views on tariffs, trade and the CHIPS Act were most important to the electronics industry. He also discussed the gold card that would cost $1 million apiece to allow tech companies to buy green card status for promising job candidates to keep them in the US instead of leaving after graduation. Funds from the program could go to reducing the national debt, he said.
Here are some verbatim comments from the address:
Trump on gold card:
Today, interest rates took a beautiful drop, big beautiful drop — it’s about time. And in the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget. We are going to balance it. With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million, we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship.
It’s like the green card but better and more sophisticated. And these people will have to pay tax in our country. They won’t have to pay tax from where they came. The money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that. But they have to pay tax, create jobs. They’ll also be taking people out of colleges and paying for them so that we can keep them in our country instead of having them be — being forced out. No. 1 at the top school, as an example, being forced out and not being allowed to stay and create tremendous numbers of jobs and great success for a company out there.
Trump on tariffs and tax cuts on business:
In addition, as part of our tax cuts, we want to cut taxes on domestic production and all manufacturing. And just as we did before, we will provide 100 percent expensing. It will be retroactive to Jan. 20, 2025. And it was one of the main reasons why our tax cuts were so successful in our first term, giving us the most successful economy in the history of our country. First term, we had a great first term.
If you don’t make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff and in some cases, a rather large one. Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries. On average, the European Union, China, Brazil, India, Mexico and Canada — have you heard of them? And countless other nations charge us tremendously higher tariffs than we charge them.
It’s very unfair. India charges us auto tariffs higher than 100 percent. China’s average tariff on our products is twice what we charge them. And South Korea’s average tariff is four times higher. Think of that. Four times higher. And we give so much help militarily and in so many other ways to South Korea. But that’s what happens. This is happening by friend and foe.
This system is not fair to the United States and never was, and so on April 2 — I wanted to make it April 1, but I didn’t want to be accused of April Fools’ Day — it’s not — it’s just one day which costs us a lot of money. But we are going to do it in April. I’m a very superstitious person. April 2, reciprocal tariffs kick in, and whatever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them. That’s reciprocal, back and forth.
Whatever they tax us, we will tax them. If they do nonmonetary tariffs to keep us out of their market, then we will do nonmonetary barriers to keep them out of our market. There’s a lot of that too. They don’t even allow us in their market. We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before. I did it with China, and I did it with others and the Biden administration couldn’t do anything about it because it was so much money they couldn’t do anything about it. We’ve been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on earth, and we will not let that happen any longer.
Much has been said over the last three months about Mexico and Canada. But we have very large deficits with both of them. But even more importantly, they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people, destroying families. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They are in effect receiving subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars. We pay subsidies to Canada and to Mexico of hundreds of billions of dollars. And the United States will not be doing that any longer. We are not going to do it any longer.
Trump on recent private investments in US manufacturing by TSMC and others:
Thanks to our America First policies we are putting into place, we have had $1.7 trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks. The combination of the election and our economic policies that people of Softbank, one of the most brilliant anywhere in the world, announced a $200 billion investment. OpenAI and Oracle, Larry Ellison, announced $500 billion investment, which they wouldn’t have done if Kamala had won.
Apple announced $500 billion investment. Tim Cook called me. He said: I cannot spend it fast enough. It’s going to be much higher than that I believe. They will be building their plants here instead of in China. And just yesterday, Taiwan Semiconductor, the biggest in the world, most powerful in the world, has a tremendous amount, 97 percent of the market, announced a $165 billion investment to build the most powerful chips on earth, right here in the U.S.A.
And we are not giving them any money. Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing. We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn’t mean a thing. They take our money and they don’t spend it. All that meant to them — we giving them no money — all that was important to them was that they didn’t want to pay the tariffs, so they came and are building, and many other companies are coming.
We don’t have to give them money; we just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America. That feel like it’s amazing. You should get rid of the CHIP Act and whatever’s left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt. Or any other reason you want to.
Trump on trade affecting farms and other areas:
Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer — I love the farmer — who will now be selling into our home market, the U.S.A., because nobody is going to be able to compete with you. Because those goods that come in from other countries and companies are really, really in a bad position in so many different ways.
They are uninspected, they may be very dirty and disgusting when they come in, and they pour in and they hurt our American farmers. The tariffs will go on — agricultural product coming into America and our farmers starting on April 2, may be a little bit of an adjustment period. We had that before when I made the deal with China. $50 billion of purchases and I said just bear with me and they did. They did. Probably have to bear with me again. And this will be even better. That was great. The problem with it was that Biden didn’t enforce it. He didn’t enforce it.
$50 billion of purchases and we were doing great, but Biden did not enforce it and it hurt our farmers. But our farmers are going to have a field day right now. So to our farmers, have a lot of fun. I love you too. I love you too.
And I have also imposed a 25 percent tariff on foreign aluminum, copper, lumber and steel because if we don’t have, as an example, steel, and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and frankly we won’t have — we just won’t have a country very long.