Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained, in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, how President Donald Trump’s tariff and economic plan will benefit the average American.

He explained how the naysayers predicted gloom and doom during President Trump’s first term for the working class but explained that they benefited greatly from his economic policies.

“The bottom 50 has debt. They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we’ve got to give them some relief. That I was struck by the statistic from last year. That’s the message right there. Just as a bystander, I’m like, wow, okay. Or that I like the examples, and I was really struck by two different statistics last year,” the Treasury Secretary said.

“Summer of 2024, Americans took more European vacations than they had in history. Summer of 2024, more Americans were using food banks than they ever have in history. I went into two food banks near my hometown to ask, what’s the story? And they said, it really takes, for a lot of people, it’s a loss of dignity to walk in a food bank. But they were seeing a new phenomenon that it wasn’t their traditional clientele. It wasn’t people who’d lost their homes,” he said.

“It wasn’t people out on the street. These were working families who could no longer, $100 at the grocery store, that basket of groceries every week, they were missing five, six, seven things, and they were coming to the food bank to top up. So that’s not a great America,” the secretary said.

“Record European vacation, record food banks. And no reason we can’t keep the record European vacations going, but we got to take care of these other people. But, and you know what? That they don’t want handouts. The Democrats had this strategy called compensate the loser. So first of all, the name of that strategy, I don’t think the bottom 50% of Americans are losers,” he said.

“I think the system hasn’t worked for them. I think that they are winners. It’s just a bad system. So we are going to fix the system. And look, they want good jobs. They want their kids to do better than they did,” Bessent said.

“They want to own a home. They want to pay down their debt. This isn’t hard. And I think that we can do this in the next four years,” he said.