‘How is That Conservative?’ ABC’s Jon Karl Spars With Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Proposed Trump Tariffs

ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl sparred with Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a new interview over former President Donald Trump’s proposed tariff policy.

Sanders joined Karl for an interview on Sunday’s This Week where the topic of Liz and Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris came up. Huckabee responded to the news by claiming the Cheneys are “conservative Republicans” and people who want to “protect the establishment.”

Karl then shifted the conversation to focus on Trump’s policy to impose a significant tariff on goods coming into the country. He asked the governor of Arkansas whether Republicans would support Trump’s policy because “conservatives usually don’t like taxes.”

KARL: Donald Trump is talking about widespread tariffs — tariffs on virtually everything that is imported into the United States, big tariffs. It’s become almost a centerpiece of his economic message right now. How is that conservative? I mean, I’ve been covering politics for a long time. Conservatives usually don’t like taxes, don’t like tariffs. Now, Trump is talking about them all the time.

SANDERS: This is a president who uses that as a tool to hold others’ feet to the fire. He wants to make sure that we’re actually making things in America. There’s nothing more conservative than empowering Americans and American companies to build things here versus building them overseas. We have to quit becoming completely dependent and reliant on people who hate us, people like China, people like Russia, people like Iran. We have a president now who has allowed himself to be completely walked all over, and a vice president who has been right there by his side, allowing other countries to take the lead. As we move into the next four years in the next administration, we have to decide who do we want to be the world leaders?

Do we want it to be the United States or do we want it to be our adversaries like China, like Russia? Frankly, I don’t want it to be them. I want it to be the United States. And there’s only one person and one president and one administration who’s done that before and will do it again, and it’s Donald Trump. We certainly cannot count on Vice President Harris to build back American strength when she’s never demonstrated a capability of doing that in the past.

Watch the clip above via ABC News.