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Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) yesterday spoke during a press conference on Trump’s upcoming tariff announcement, held by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee after House Republicans abruptly cancelled votes for the week and fled town.

The press conference featured U.S. Representatives Linda Sanchez, Don Beyer, Suzan DelBene, and Jimmy Panetta; Sanchez is the Ranking Member of the Trade Subcommittee, and Beyer, DelBene, and Panetta introduced legislation to block Trump’s destructive tariff rampage, which is wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy.

Video of Beyer’s remarks is available here, and his remarks follow below.

The last time we tried this tariff policy, we got ten years of the Great Depression.

This is really stupid public policy.

And it's no surprise that the Republicans are leaving this afternoon. I wouldn't want to be here for “Liberation Day.”

[Trump is] going to be “liberating” the American people from their savings. “Liberation Day,” these 25% tariffs, are going to be the largest tax increase in American history.

Peter Navarro the other day estimated at $600 billion.

It'd be one thing if the $3,900 in extra costs that every American family is going to pay would do something useful, but it's going to try to fund the [Trump tax cuts] for the richest Americans.

We've heard all these different reasons for the tariffs. Most of them are contradictory, but I'm not going to address any of them because they're all in bad faith. None of them are what this is really about.

Trump likes tariffs because he's a bully. He likes him because he's authoritarian, because they make him feel important, because he doesn't realize that it actually costs real people real money.

Make no mistake – these tariffs are going to wreck our economy.

Already we're seeing manufacturing numbers are down. Inflation expectations are up. Consumer confidence is plunging.

Stock markets are down almost 8% since he took office. And we just had the worst quarter in the last three years, after a very strong fourth quarter.

This is a guy who couldn't care less about us. He says “I don't care if prices go up.”

He clearly does not care, because they're going to go up a lot.

I was a car dealer for 46 years. This is going to wreak havoc in the international auto place that we have, where cars and parts come from all over assembled here. They're shipped from here to all over.

And this – I think Ronald Reagan may have said it best, not the first to say it, but: “no one wins a trade war.”

This is dumb policy.