The U.S. has not had a president with a backbone to actually negotiate trade deals for “decades,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, discussing President Donald Trump’s nature as the ultimate dealmaker-in-chief.
“You can go back to the last three decades, four decades. I don’t know how far you want to go back. We’ve never had a president be able to actually negotiate deals and have a backbone to actually structure it to where the United States is competing on a fair — on a fair playing field,” the senator began, noting that former President Nixon was the first one to begin talking about unfair trade deals.
“And since then, you’ve had Nixon … you’ve had Ford, you’ve had Jimmy Carter, you’ve had Bush, you’ve had Clinton, you’ve had Bush, and Obama. The only one that didn’t talk about the unfair trade deals and the way that the United States is being taken advantage of was Biden,” he said, noting, however, that “President Trump’s the first one to actually step in and say, ‘Hold on! Enough, enough.'”
“And he did it in a way that all his critics, especially media, lost their loving mind over it. He did it all at once. He didn’t try to take one country on at a time, which a lot of his critics, who have been complacent in allowing this to take place over the decades — I mean, these established news outlets, these established reporters, these established politicians — they want to criticize him, but they literally allowed it to take place,” he said, emphasizing the importance of Trump doing all the trade deals at once versus one at a time.
“The reason why it was important to understand why he did the trade deals and the tariffs all at once was to quit playing whack-a-mole, because if he would have done it one at a time, they would have just continued going around us, going to other countries, like when you go after China, they’ll just go into Brazil, or they’ll go into Vietnam, or they’ll go into Cambodia, or they’ll go into another country and get their products to the United States, and just go around whatever deal we want,” he explained.
Trump, instead, knocked them all down at once and is building the blocks back up altogether, adding, “That’s exactly how you build a solid building again.
“The foundation of the world’s economy is the United States. We know that. Everybody else has built their economies on us since World War II, and they’ve continued to take advantage of us. We’ve lost thousands of jobs. We’ve lost trillions of dollars out of our economy. We have literally built China. We have rebuilt Europe. We have built Asia, from Japan to Vietnam to Cambodia, you name the country, South Korea. We built them through … the dollars leaving America, going to their countries,” he said.
All the while, the U.S. has accumulated $37 trillion in debt.
LISTEN:
Breitbart · Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) – May 10, 2025“What President Trump decided to do is, he’s doing it all at once, and you’re seeing it happen. You’re seeing people come back to us. What President Trump knows is — he knows the world’s economy needs the United States a lot worse than we need them,” Mullin observed, noting that we know that countries such as China will eventually come to the table because “40 percent of all their manufacturing goods are sold to the United States.”
He noted that other countries are dependent on access to the American market as well.
“The President made very clear, though, that he wanted UK to be the first in. He wanted to make the very first deal with UK. He did that, and now you’re going to see other countries following quick,” he predicted, noting that the “barriers are more important than actually the tariffs.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
