WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 39

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about President Trump's latest efforts to reinvigorate Michigan's manufacturing, a Supreme Court case about enforcing mail-in voting laws, a deal to secure most-favored nation pricing for more prescription drugs, and more. I’m your host, Luke Miller, and on this show we’ll cover the news you didn’t catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome, to “Under the Radar.”

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about President Trump's latest efforts to reinvigorate Michigan's manufacturing, a Supreme Court case about enforcing mail-in voting laws, a deal to secure most favored nation pricing for more prescription drugs and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media.

While they're covering the president's latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a statement released by the Trump White House, announcing some deals that they've made with American manufacturing companies to secure investments in the state of Michigan. Now, to put this in context, the statement was released last Monday, when J.D. Vance made a trip to Sterling Heights, Michigan to campaign with Michigan Senatorial candidate Mike Rogers. who is running against Abdul al-Said for a very, very important Michigan Senate seat.

Now, the statement was released to put J.D. Vance's remarks in context. J.D. Vance spoke to the people of Michigan about the Trump administration's America First manufacturing agenda with President Trump's goal to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Many American manufacturing companies have offshoreed a lot of jobs to Mexico, to China, and elsewhere, and the Trump administration has made it a priority. to secure deals with American companies to invest in more manufacturing in the United States. And this statement was released to show kind of what the Trump administration has done to secure some of that investment in the state of Michigan, with the hopes of influencing Michigan voters

to vote for Mike Rogers who backs the Trump agenda. So the statement starts by saying Vice President J.D. Vance is going to Michigan to mark the Trump administration's unprecedented crackdown on fraud and the comeback of American manufacturing under the leadership of President Trump. Since taking office, the Trump administration has onshore production, restored factory jobs, and put vehicles back on Michigan assembly lines, while delivering tax relief that leaves more money in workers' pockets. So first, let's evaluate the truth of some of these claims,

and then we can get into the Trump policies that have had an impact on Michigan and how they've had an impact on Michigan. As far as putting vehicles back on Michigan assembly lines goes, many of the auto companies that make their home in Michigan have committed to investing more, in manufacturing in the state. For example, General Motors has agreed that they are going to invest $6 billion in U.S. manufacturing in the state of Michigan, particularly a major expansion at its Orion Township

plant in Michigan. They've also noted that demand is really surging for their American-built vehicles, and so they're going to onshore more production. But the Trump administration has also given them tax incentives to do so as well. Ford Motor Company has committed to a $3 billion investment in a couple of of their plants in Michigan, which they project the expansion in Marshall, Michigan to create 1,700 new manufacturing jobs. And that's obviously a huge deal for that area. I mean, Marshall's not a big city. It's about 7,000 people in population. So that's going to bring more people into the area

that's going to boost the economy. That's going to do a lot more for that area than just adding jobs. I mean, the trickle-down effects from investment like that changes communities. And Ford also announced that they plan to add more jobs at their Dearborn Manufacturing plant, well. The auto company Stalantis has committed to investing nearly $400 million in what they are calling a state-of-the-art mega hub in Van Buren, Michigan, and $140 million expansion to its Detroit plant, as well as another $100 million investment to add production in Warren, Michigan. So all of that is going to create more manufacturing jobs in the auto industry as well. And so overall, that brings us to about $9.5 billion that's going to be invested in Michigan auto manufacturing.

So there's a few factors that play into why these companies would want to invest so much money in the state. The first is that 2025 was the strongest year for new vehicle sales since pre-COVID. So people have more disposable income. They feel more secure about the economy in the future, which is when they're willing to make purchases like new vehicles, which often require loans. And people don't take out loans unless they're confident in the security of future interest rates and the ability to pay back those loans. So that does reflect on the Trump administration's economic accomplishments. I mean, the COVID years, which feels so long ago now, but really weren't that long ago, marked a time when people had no confidence in the future of the economy. They had no confidence in their ability to be

able to repay loans. The interest rates would remain the same, that they would be able to keep their jobs. And it's common sense that people just don't invest in major purchases when they're uncertain about the future of the economy. And then in the post-COVID years, we'll say in the rest of the Biden administration, we saw massive inflation. We saw prices soar, auto prices soared, house prices soared, and times of major inflation are also times when people are not confident about the future of the economy. They're worried that their grocery bills are going up. They're worried that the pace of inflation is going to mean that their paycheck doesn't go as far. And so they're not going to make purchases like new vehicles. And so to see in this,

second Trump administration's first full year, a spike in new vehicle purchases. That means that people are confident about the future of the economy, and that is reflective of the Trump administration's efforts to bring down inflation. And it probably also reflects just a general recovery from the COVID years and from the latter years of the Biden administration. The other factors all directly have something to do with Trump administration policies, the most notable of which is tariffs. So some of the major tariffs that the Trump administration has implemented have been on imported vehicles and vehicle parts. So in 2025, President Trump imposed a 25% tariff on passenger vehicles and trucks that were built outside the United States. And you're probably thinking right now about the Supreme Court case that I know everyone heard about.

At least you have if you've been listening to this show where the Supreme Court rejected a lot of President Trump's tariffs. Those were all the ones that President Trump tried to institute under the international economic. Economic Emergency Powers Act. But a lot of the Trump tariffs that were imposed under different avenues are still in place, including the tariff on imported vehicles and the tariff on steel, which is a major component of automobiles. And then he backed that up by signing another executive order that would incentivize domestic assembly of automobiles. The idea was that the more automobile parts that you get from the United States, the lower percentage of tariffs you would pay for the imported parts. So if you built a car with 85% of the parts coming from the United States,

you would pay an extremely low tariff. You'd get a tariff reduction, which is basically a tax reward. You get a tax reward for building your vehicles with more American-made parts. So if it costs more with a 25% tariff to import vehicles or vehicle parts, and it costs less to build those vehicles with American-made parts because you get a tariff reduction, then you're just incentivizing companies to invest more. more production in the United States because it's the right business move for them to do so. It's cheaper. It's more efficient. This is the long game of Trump's tariff policy.

In the short run, more of the price of the tariffs are passed along to the consumers, but that doesn't last forever. That doesn't just drive up auto prices forever because eventually the manufacturers have to adjust because some of the burden does fall on them, and over time, increasingly more of the burden falls on them. And as more of the burden of tariffs falls on them, they are more incentivized to produce domestically, because then they don't have to pay the tariffs. They can avoid the tariffs that way. And if you play the carrot and the stick game and you pair that up with tax incentives

that reward them for producing domestically, which also gives jobs to more Americans and stimulates the economy in places like Michigan, then what you've done is you've brought back manufacturing jobs, you've protected the national industry, and you've stimulated the economy. You just had to be patient enough to let the process play out. Because it does actually hurt in the short run. It hurts the wallet of the consumer, and it also hurts the companies a little bit at the beginning, because if their prices have to go up, people aren't going to buy them nearly as much, and then they have to cut some jobs. And that is true. But just because Michigan manufacturing jobs have gone down in the last year does not mean that they were all

due to the tariffs, but some of them probably were due to the tariffs. But you let the process play out. You have a massive spike in 2025 in vehicle purchases, new vehicle purchases, in the United States, then you have the tariffs and the tax rewards incentivizing people to invest domestically, and now you get $9.5 billion in the state of Michigan alone from auto manufacturing companies investing in new plants, which bring more jobs and are going to stimulate the economy. So you just have to let it happen over time and bear the short-term costs of it in exchange for the long-term benefits of it, which also include protection of the national industry because now we're not relying on other countries to send us automobile parts.

We don't have to rely on them nearly as much because we're producing more of them domestically. And the less entangled we can be with foreign economies, the more independent we can be, and the more powerful we're going to be. For example, in 2024, Americans bought about 16 million new cars, and 50% of those vehicles were imports. The United States trade deficit in automobile parts was about $94 billion in 2020. for. That's an industry that America has owned for decades, that Michigan specifically has owned for decades, that we see slipping away from us because of offshoring. And if Michigan voters

are unhappy with the decline in manufacturing jobs in the state, which they have a right to be, they should look at the $9.5 billion in investments by these auto manufacturing companies that the Trump administration policies have secured in the last year and a half. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case in which the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow them to enforce an executive order which will secure mail-in voting. So on March 31st of this year, President Trump signed an executive order called Ensuring

Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections. And the executive order does three things. The first thing that it does is that it instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of all of the adult U.S. citizens in each state and then to send those lists to the states at least 60 days before any federal election. Now, that is not the same thing as a voter role. It's just a list of all the adult U.S. citizens. The idea there, I would guess, is that the Trump administration wants states to not have an excuse. They can't just say, oh, we thought this person was a citizen when we sent them a mail-in ballot. If the Department of Homeland Security sends

each state's election office a list of all of the adult U.S. citizens in that state, then they have no excuse for sending mail-in ballots to people who are not on that list and therefore are not eligible to vote because they are not adult U.S. citizens. The second thing that the executive order does is it instructs the U.S. Attorney General to, quote, prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and local officials who issue federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a federal election. So that one's pretty straightforward. The idea there is that the U.S. federal government will be able to prosecute state officials who send mail and ballots to people who are not eligible to vote in those elections. Now, notice each one of those said in federal elections.

That's the Trump administration trying to avoid any problems because they cannot constitutionally set the time, place, or manner of holding state-level elections. And the third thing that the executive order does is that it requires states to give the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters to whom the states intend to send mail ballots. And then it prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from mailing ballots to voters who are not on those lists of enrolled voters that these states send them. So the idea there is it gives the state some accountability. If the states have a list of enrolled voters and then they try to send mail-in ballots to people who are not on that list of enrolled voters that they themselves created, then the U.S. Postal Service does not have to deliver

those mail-in ballots to those people. Now, this executive order was challenged in the state of Massachusetts by a group of 23 states who challenged the executive order, basically saying that it is illegal under the Constitution because the federal government cannot determine voter eligibility or set the times, places, and manner of holding congressional elections. The Constitution leaves those powers up to the states. And so a U.S. District Judge in Boston named Indira Talwani barred the federal government from implementing the executive order for the 26 midterm elections. Now, here's where the story gets pretty ridiculous. On July 27th, the Trump administration appealed Judge Talwani's decision and asked the Supreme Court to step in and decide this.

The Trump administration was joined by a group of 12 states who also legally argued before the Court that the executive order should be carried out, and the Supreme Court decided that the Trump administration would be allowed to implement the executive order. So the Supreme Court overturned Judge Tawani's block on the executive order. The Supreme Court argued that it was too soon for courts to consider the state's challenge because they had no standing. The executive order had not been put in place yet, and because of that, the states had not suffered any kind of injury that would allow them to have standing for a lawsuit. So, case is over. Supreme Court decided it, right?

Wrong. Judge Talwani again placed a temporary restraining order that blocked the Trump administration from requiring states to comply with the executive order, which is just unbelievable to me. That's just absolutely unbelievable how one district court judge in Boston can stop the whole Trump administration

from implementing an executive order, then the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration, and this district judge again is somehow able to put a temporary restraining order on the Trump administration. Now, Judge Talwani got around this whole thing by saying that the Postal Service would require certain designs

of the ballot envelopes. And so that component of the executive order is in a different way the federal government trying to determine the times, places, and manner of holding congressional elections, which is ridiculous. As John Sauer, who's the U.S. Solicitor General, argues he says, quote,

the Postal Service's final rule imposes only modest envelope design and addressy information requirements for federal election ballots sent via U.S. mail. He also brought up the examples that the Postal Service does have the authority to require different envelope designs. For example, if you're sending replica explosives, that has to be marked. If you're sending cremated remains, that was another example he brought up, that has to be delivered in certain packaging.

For the U.S. Postal Service to deliver certain items, you have to package. them in a certain way. And the thing that the Trump administration wants the Postal Service to do here is to use an election mail logo on ballots, so there can be some kind of official mail-in ballot demarcation that is only used by the U.S. Postal Service. So it's not like the executive order would make it extremely difficult for people to be able to submit mail-in ballots or extremely difficult for states to send out mail-in ballots and comply with the federal law. But in denial of the Supreme Court, Judge Talwani says, no, you can't do that. So the Trump administration is yet again appealing to the Supreme Court, which is where we're at this week. On Friday, the Trump administration

petitioned the Supreme Court to freeze Talwanese order so that the executive order can be implemented in the early voting stages of the November midterms, which are starting pretty soon, by the way. It's starting in some states as early as September 14th, which is one week from yesterday as I'm recording this. Now, the Supreme Court is out of session right now. They are not in session, but they can hear emergency appeals like this, especially when they come from the Trump administration. The Supreme Court will likely be giving us a return on this appeal within the next week so that the executive order can either be implemented before the beginning of the 2026 midterms or whether one district court judge from Boston can single-handedly overturn this very common sense,

election law. The last piece of news I have for you this week is a deal announced by the Trump administration on August 31st with nine additional pharmaceutical manufacturers to lower drug prices for Americans. So in February of 26, President Trump launched Trump RX, which is a website where patients can access large discounts for a lot of expensive medicines. When it was first launched, most of the medicines that were available on Trump RX had to do with. obesity and infertility. And according to the website, since its February launch, patients have saved more than $700 million on medicines through Trump RX. Now, the reason that Trump RX was able to be successful and was able to offer prescription drugs for lower prices was because

the Trump administration made a deal with five major pharmaceutical manufacturers to secure most favored nation pricing for Americans to get these drugs. Now, without going too deep into it, most favored nation pricing is basically the lowest price that anyone pays to access that product. But as I said before, the reason that companies might be willing to give the United States most favored nation pricing is that they sign a deal with the Trump administration, which secures that they have access to the market. Because if they're one of the in companies that has a deal with the government, then they're not going to run out of consumers to purchase from them, especially when they're operating

through Medicaid. So if they can, like this deal will do, if they can get their pharmaceuticals out to people through Medicaid, they are able to take a lower price because they reach a much wider consumer base, and they most likely get some taxpayer dollars in there as well. So the nine manufacturers involved in this most recent deal, manufacture pharmaceuticals that are used to treat diseases including hemophilia, Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration, glaucoma, liver disease, skin conditions, and various forms of cancer. And this is a really important thing to note about this deal, because this really expands the list of the kinds of medications that are offered under Trump RX. When it's just dealing with obesity and infertility, yes, those drugs are needed,

but if you can lower pharmaceutical costs for drugs that help people deal with different forms of cancer, that can be a life-saving effect of this kind of deal. Additionally, as part of the deal, these nine pharmaceutical manufacturers committed to invest about $20 billion collectively manufacturing in the U.S. And again, if they're willing to commit that much into U.S. investment, not only does that create jobs and spur on the economy, but it also reflects the idea that they are confident in their deal with the U.S. government and with Medicaid programs to secure a consumer base that will be profitable for them.

So the deal is going to work for these companies. It's also going to get people drugs at a cheaper rate. it is always a major red flag when the government steps in and makes deals with private companies, especially to introduce price controls. But the health care system in the U.S., particularly the pharmaceutical industry, is already so socialized, so much of it is paid for and propped up and subsidized by taxpayer dollars, that this is a little bit different than if the government were to say, put price controls on groceries or something like that. In fact, the socialized nature of health care and of pharmaceuticals in the United States

is part of what led to the often outrageous prices of some of these prescription drugs. So if the Trump administration is doing something to work on that, within the given system, which is a socialized health care kind of system, if President Trump can secure most favored nation pricing, that will certainly help people save money on the prescription medications that they need. And the Council of Economic Advisors estimated that the total savings from President Trump's most favored nation deals will reach about $600 billion over the next decade. So to recap this week, we covered Trump's appeal to Michigan voters based on spurring auto investment in the state.

We covered the Trump administration's battle with a district court judge of her mail-in ballot procedure, and we covered a new most favored nation drug pricing deal. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell

Under the Radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.