Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent appears on CBS’s Face the Nation for an inflation and affordability debate with narrative engineer Margaret Brennan.

The primary narrative can be seen in Brennan’s emphasis of the new democrat catch phrase “affordability.”  Having gaslit the American electorate over the issues of Joe Biden’s economic/energy policy which created record inflation, the same media who ran cover for Joe Biden have switched during the Trump administration to calling the subsequent high costs an “affordability” crisis.

In essence, Biden’s economic, energy and monetary policies drove 2021/2022 inflation to record levels, this made all prices rise massively.  Those high prices are now the “affordability problem.”  WATCH:

[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: Good morning and welcome to ‘Face The Nation.’ We have a lot of news to get to, and we begin with the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. Good to have you here.

TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: Morning, Margaret.

SEC. BESSENT: Mr. Secretary, a lot of people are out there holiday shopping. Here is how the President described back in April, what to expect from this season.

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U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is questioned about the Trump administration strategy or lack thereof. “Yes, there’s a strategy,” Greer says in this new interview. “First of all, you don’t change 70 years of trade policy overnight. And second of all, when some people say, ‘Oh, well, this is chaos. What’s your strategy?’, what they really want to know is can we go back to how it was before? And that’s not going to happen.”

The interview is in an audio file presented by Politico and shared below. This is some really good information on the various free trade agreements and the regions represented by some of our largest trade partners. Well worth listening to as you go about your day and travels today. Embed below:

USTR Greer notes how the tariffs are being used, the upcoming Supreme Court decision, the need for congress to codify the tariff regime in legislation and the various regional strategies for the deployment of countervailing duties.

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The European Union has fined the X social media platform (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk and his investment group, $140 million (usd) for violations of the EU Digital Services Act.  The decision by the EU is likely to create even more friction between President Trump and the European Union.  However, this problem is not difficult to solve.

The collective government within the EU accuse Elon Musk and X of permitting misinformation, disinformation and malinformation to appear on the platform.

The European DSA is ultimately designed to control information, that reality should not be debated. All efforts to control traditional and social media are efforts to control information.

The specifics of the reasoning for the fine are typically European.  (1) Twitter allows ordinary people to deliver information at the same level as people who should be defined as more important.  (2)  Advertisers of those who pay for promotion of information on X are not easily identifiable – people need to figure it out on their own.  (3)  It is too difficult to figure out who is providing the information.

Basically, all of the EU concerns center around information control.  It’s really an ideology issue.  In the outlook of the EU, bureaucrats and elites feel they are superior and must rule/protect the people under them.  Ordinary people having access to information that may or may not be approved by the EU is the underlying issue.

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In the world of Trumpian geopolitical trade stuff, three issues are very interesting to watch. (1) The strategic reset with Russia which could break the official western construct of financial control. (2) The proactive and defensive positioning of Mexico (desperate attempt to retain economic attachment), and (3) the certain dissolution of the USMCA what Canadians call CUSMA.

Canadian media are starting to realize something we have talked about on these pages for years; President Trump intends to end the USMCA because the USMCA was used as a fracture point to eliminate NAFTA.

Wall Street, the U.S. Congress, the massive K-Street lobbying network around the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the entire political apparatus of business and industry would never permit the end to NAFTA; too many trillions at stake. So, President Trump replaced NAFTA with the interim USMCA, which was better but factually more useful in elimination of the original.

Now, as we have discussed by highlighting President Trump’s no-so-subtle words on the issue, the Canadian media is realizing the USMCA will be dissolved in favor of two independently negotiated bilateral trade agreements; one with Canada and one with Mexico.

🚨MAJOR BREAKING

Trump signals that he could EXIT from USMCA entirely.

This is EXTINCTION LEVEL to Canada.

He going to do it. I have a strong feeling about this.

We’re talking about 400,000 jobs and an instant severe recession! pic.twitter.com/X2uIQaJLQ3

— Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@Tablesalt13) December 4, 2025

(CTV) – U.S. President Donald Trump could decide next year to withdraw from the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement (CUSMA), Politico reported on Thursday, citing U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

“The president’s view is he only wants deals that are a good deal. The reason why we built a review period into CUSMA was in case we needed to revise it, review it or exit it,” Greer told Politico’s White House bureau chief Dasha Burns in a podcast episode that airs Friday.

Greer also raised the idea of negotiating separately with Canada and Mexico and dividing the agreement into two parts in the podcast, adding that he spoke with Trump about that possibility just this week.

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In an effort to return common sense, practicality and affordability to the American consumer base for automobiles, President Trump announced the elimination of Joe Biden’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for manufactured cars and trucks.

Under the auspices of the “Green New Deal”, the Biden administration mandated ridiculous quotas for EVs and demanded lower power combustible engines, or pay a climate change tax. These CAFE standards resulted in a surcharge for large vehicles, large engine autos and SUVs, and essentially bifurcated the auto consumer into those who could afford to pay for efficiency and stability, and those who could not.

“We’re officially terminating Joe Biden’s ridiculously burdensome, horrible actually, CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems, gave all sorts of problems to automakers,” President Trump announced from the Oval Office. “It put tremendous upward pressure on car prices, combined with the insane electric vehicle mandate. Biden’s burdensome regulations helped cause the price of cars to soar more than 25%,” President Trump said. WATCH:

(Via White House) – DELIVERING A WIN FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES AND AUTOMAKERS: Today, President Donald J. Trump is delivering major relief to American families by resetting the Biden Administration’s costly and unlawful Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

President Trump is returning CAFE standards to levels that can actually be met with conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. The Biden Administration standards imposed unrealistic fuel economy targets that effectively resulted in an electric vehicle (EV) mandate.

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Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, delivers a passionate series of remarks in support of President Trump’s foreign policy.

Outlining the impact of federal policy under President Trump from the perspective of what is in America’s best interest, Rubio notes how foreign policy meshes with domestic policy and is specifically the combination of national security interests that secures prosperity for all American people.

“For the first time in four decades American foreign policy is based on what is in our interests,” Rubio notes.  The entire segment is well presented.  WATCH:

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This level of authenticity is very difficult to fake.  Secretary Rubio is an exceptional advocate for America’s interests.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban not only represents a friendly European voice to the objectives of the Trump administration, but also Orban is a close personal friend of President Trump both in and out of office.

Trump and Orban have long held a very close relationship, including friendship with the family of First Lady Melania Trump.  They are all very close – Shinzo Abe-type close – both from the White House and time in Mar-a-Lago.

On November 7, 2025, Prime Minister Viktor Orban again visited President Trump in the White House, including dinner with the Trump cabinet.  Then, word of the Ukraine corruption scandal broke.

A week following the White House visit (November 14) Prime Minister Orban said, “The golden illusion of Ukraine is falling apart. A wartime mafia network with countless ties to President Zelensky has been exposed. The energy minister has already resigned, and the main suspect has fled the country. This is the chaos into which the Brusselian elite want to pour European taxpayers’ money, where whatever isn’t shot off on the front lines ends up in the pockets of the war mafia. Madness. Thank you, but we want no part of this.”

The direct and non-pretending remarks from Viktor Orban highlighted a sense of the issue carried by a majority of the commonsense people around Russia, Europe, America and the world in general.  However, soon thereafter, as President Trump, Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio were delivering deliberate terms to finally end the conflict, the Western intelligence network leaked an intercepted phone call between Witkoff and Putin’s senior foreign policy advisor, Ushakov.

The intelligence apparatus, likely originating from the U.K., purposefully wanted to disrupt all this peaceful resolution effort. The conflict has both benefactors and beneficiaries that do not want peace, both here and in Europe.

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This is a rather remarkable development that requires an understanding of what is true and accurate, versus what is stated as the justification.

In short, Prime Minister Mark Carney is conceding defeat to President Trump and positioning the Canadian economy to be compliant with U.S-Mexico trade regulations.

However, Carney is not saying that, indeed he cannot; he’s spent over a year telling Canadians that President Trump’s trade and economic demands are not going to be accepted by Canada.  However, what he is factually doing is exactly what President Trump has demanded.

Prime Minister Carney is saying he is restricting Steel and Aluminum imports from non-free trade agreement countries, and he is lowering the tonnage of Steel and Aluminum that will be permitted for import.  His claim is that this approach will help drive up “domestic demand” for Canadian Steel and Aluminum, but that’s ancillary to the real objective.

President Trump has demanded Canada stop importing cheap steel and aluminum mostly from China; including manufactured component goods that are made with steel and aluminum (think autos).  Canada would not stop, because they could not stop.  Their manufacturing base, green energy and climate change economy, is more of a component assembly system now.

So, President Trump hit Canada with a 35% tariff, and things got ugly.  In June Trump raised the tariff to 50%. The back and forth has gone on all year.

Carney now announces restrictions on imported steel and aluminum, as well as restrictions on imported derivative goods that come from steel and aluminum, in combination with a spending plan to bolster the Canadian steel and aluminum manufacturing base.  This ends up shifting the Canadian industrial sector to making steel and aluminum products without Chinese import dependency.

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This could potentially be very good news; however, the battle between where we are today and where we would need to be in order to address unlawful sedition criminally is very far apart.  Let’s hope the Pentagon and DOJ can harden up and start to take down these political bad actors.

In a social media post Monday, the Pentagon said it received complaints over former U.S. Navy Captain Mark Kelly’s efforts to undermine President Trump and destabilize the U.S. government.

[SOURCE]

The pentagon saying they received, “serious allegations of misconduct” against him, and “a thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”

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The majority of New York City residents elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor.  New Yorkers elected him, and New Yorkers are going to have to deal with the consequences of their choice.

True to form, President Trump invited mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to the White House and gave the representative of the New York voters the spotlight their choice represents.  President Trump then holds a media availability with Mayor-elect Mamdani to answer questions.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  WATCH:

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What will the outcome be for New York City?  They will soon find out.

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