Chris Van Hollen: “I want to start by thanking our colleagues from Virginia, starting with Senator Kaine, who brought us to this debate…”

“I want to start by thanking our colleagues from Virginia, starting with Senator Kaine, who brought us to this debate here on the Senate floor today on a very important question, and to my other colleague from across the Potomac River from Maryland, Senator Warner. We sometimes disagree on various issues. On this, we have solidarity across the Potomac River. That unity comes from a very simple result, which is that we are here to sound the alarm about the trade war that Donald Trump just unleashed today. He calls it ``Liberation Day.'' If he had made this announcement yesterday, on April Fools' Day, people would have thought it was an April Fools' joke. But this is no joke, and it is not liberation day. It is a national sales tax day because that will be the result of the President's action--a sales tax on the American people, a national sales tax, because today the President announced he was levying massive, across-the-board tariffs on countless goods, making big promises but at the end of the day betraying the American people, who are going to be hit hard by rising prices. We have heard the President make a lot of promises about what these tariffs will do. It is like a miracle cure. They are going to revive American manufacturing. They are going to stop fentanyl. They are going to balance our budget. They are going to make all of us rich, and all of those other countries are going to pay for it. The problem is, none of that is true.…”