While most of this post is the story of a fictional massacre that never happened in the press briefing room, the video isn’t all about the Press Secretary. Only partly. This video highlights clips from the White House and Capitol Hill where this administration’s commitment to the First Amendment is called into question by its words and it's actions.
Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked into the press briefing room and stood behind the podium. She made one statement. A journalist in the front row spoke up to correct the Press Secretary. “That’s not true,” he began.
With a twinkle in her eye, Leavitt parted her lips, inhaled, and exploded. Leavitt slowly moved her head from left to right, trying to cover every inch of the room with her lies —each one in rapid succession, one after the other. They sprayed from her “machine gun mouth” like bullets from a semi-automatic weapon; they pierced the skulls of several reporters in the room. She never paused to catch her breath; it was a continuous, nonstop assault.
When the machine-gun fire finally stopped, the room was filled with a deafening silence. A thin wisp of smoke slid through her lips and floated up to the ceiling. She smirked as she surveyed the damage.
With a sigh, the Press Secretary gathered her documents. She smiled at the video cameras in the back of the room before quietly stepping away from the podium and exiting through the double doors
After the doors closed with a soft click, the reporters looked at the person on their left, then their right, assessing the severity of injuries and documenting the total number of fatalities.
The journalist who spoke moments before the massacre began swallowed hard, feeling regret about his decision to correct Leavitt publicly after she told reporters that the “tariffs aren’t a tax hike, they’re a tax cut” for American consumers.
Since President Trump has started trade wars with several of our closest trading partners, Trump, his allies in the White House, and Fox News have been pushing a false narrative that consumers don’t pay the costs of tariffs; it's the country or the businesses themselves that pay them (Trump sincerely believes that the countries he slaps tariffs on pay the additional costs).
While it’s technically the businesses importing products from another country that pay the tariffs, they will usually pass those additional costs on to consumers.
Fox News viewers watched a real-world example of a small business that was struggling financially because of Trump’s tariffs.
Reporting live from a local car dealership, a reporter asked the business owner if his dealership had been affected by Trump's tariffs.
The owner told the story of a recent customer interaction that gave viewers a clear, easy-to-understand example of how tariffs affect small businesses and consumers.
A customer came to the dealership to buy a new truck. He picked out the truck he wanted, and the owner took him inside to sign the paperwork. The customer was prepared to pay $80,000 for the truck.
However, when the owner printed an invoice for the truck, the original $80,000 purchase price, after all taxes and fees were included, turned out to be $100,000 because of the additional costs of tariffs. The customer decided not to buy the truck.
The tariffs hurt the dealership by costing it an $80,000 sale. They hurt the consumer because he can't buy the new truck he wanted. (And if he were able to afford the higher price, the tariffs would have hurt him by taking $20,000 he would've still had if it weren't for the tariffs.
