Comedian and podcast megastar Andrew Schulz repeatedly defended and explained the rationale around President Donald Trump placing tariffs on countries around the world, and the ongoing trade war with Communist China, saying Trump brought several countries to the negotiating table while isolating the Communist regime.

“Art of War,” Schulz said as to why Trump paused tariffs on every country expect China. “I think he paused everybody else’s tariffs because they all came to the table, and none of them did reciprocal. The only country to do reciprocal was China. So Trump is like, your shit is not going anywhere. I’m going to negotiate with all these other countries. And we’re going to freeze your ass out.”

“China, could have come to the table and said you know what, that’s right. It is weird that there’s no tariffs in this direction and we tariff you. Let’s have a fair tariff exchange. But instead, China up’d it. Somebody is already fucking you. And then you say I want to make it easier [for you] and they go and fuck you harder?”

“We’re low key good,” Schulz continued. “They need us to buy shit. They make shit. We have a saying in America: the costumer is always right. The power is in the costumer’s hands. We are the world’s costumer. We have a $31 trillion consumption habit. $20 trillion of that goes to buying goods from other countries. And we we’re charging them nothing to have access to that wallet. They were charging us.”

“It’s going to take years to build factories in America. And in five to ten years, it’s not going to create new jobs because going to be robots running every mother fucking thing anyway,” Charlamagne da God replied.

“It’s more about national security than it is about creating jobs,” Schulz responded “You need to be able to create your own submarines. You need to have an assembly line. You need to have the manufacturing capability to create the devices that protect you. If you don’t, you’re in a real liability when it goes to global war. We didn’t even have masks when it came to COVID.”

“It’s America’s fucking fault,” Charlamagne said.

“How do we fix it? We have to incentivize. They tariff us. We should tariff them back. Why is that so crazy, if other countries tariff us? If we weren’t tariffed then we wouldn’t need to tariff.”

After Charlemagne asked why President Trump put a tariff on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, where “they got all the penguins and no humans there,” Schulz replied that China used those countries to bypass U.S. tariffs by sending their products to another country, that then turns around and and send the product to America.

“What used to happen was, you would make some shit in China, they would send it to Mexico, and Mexico would stamp it ‘Made in Mexico,’ and there was no tariffs from Mexico to America,” Schulz explained.

“So basically what they did is, they go, ‘Everybody is going to get a baseline 10 percent tariff so that you can’t do that little fugazi fucking arbitrage,” he added. “There are certain things that don’t look like they make sense, and they’re a lot of fodder for a headline, but in reality, I think they do.”

“I think it’s all about getting people to the negotiating table, and if it ends up working out, there’s a world where these tariffs that we put on other countries could generate like $750 billion,” Schulz said, adding, “If that happens, and then they say, ‘We’re gonna eliminate income tax for everybody making under $150,000.’”

“How would you like that?” Schulz asked, to which Charlemagne replied by dodging the question, saying, “It sounds like a pipe dream.”

Charlemagne insisted President Trump will “never lower the deficit by doing the tariffs.”

“Most people don’t even understand what the debt is,” Schulz said. “It’s like, you invest in America, you buy these treasury bonds, and America goes, ‘Yo, we’re gonna pay you back five percent on that thing you bought.”

“Debt isn’t a bad thing. It’s not like they loaned us money. They’re investing in America, and then we owe them every year, this percentage, and that percentage hopefully is eradicated by the growth of our GDP,” Schulz added.