Remarks · Administration
Lutnick on TSMC: tariff shelter as industrial location signal.
The Commerce Secretary frames TSMC's $100 billion U.S. commitment as the working logic of the new administration: build greatness in America to avoid the tariff.
TSMC, the greatest manufacturer of chips in the world, is coming to America with a $100 billion investment. And, of course, that is backed by the fact that they can come here because they can avoid paying tariffs. So, the idea is: come to America. Build greatness in America. Build for the American customers: the Apple, Nvidia, that whole list.
The TSMC announcement is the doctrine running on home soil. The mechanism is the same one the Forward Deployed Industrial Base will later use abroad: a legal-architecture signal, here tariff exemption, that makes the location decision rational for the world's most strategically significant manufacturer.
Lutnick's framing collapses the trade-policy and industrial-policy debates into a single instrument set. Tariffs are not revenue. They are the price of shipping into the United States from terrain whose rules capital cannot read. Build inside the rules and the price goes away.