Trump Tariff Quotes

withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a regional free trade deal negotiated under Obama that lowered tariffs and provided a forum to resolve intellectual property and labor disputes between the U.S. and 11 other nations, including Japan, Canada and numerous countries in Southeast Asia.

One day in the Oval Office, Cohn brought in the latest job numbers to Trump and Pence. “I have the most perfect job numbers you’re ever going to see,” Cohn said. “It’s all because of my tariffs,” Trump said. “They’re working.” Trump had yet to impose any tariffs, but he believed they were a good idea and knew Cohn disagreed with him.

He talked about how tariffs risked roiling the markets and jeopardizing a lot of the stock market gains. He said the tariffs would be, in effect, a tax on American consumers. Tariffs would take away a lot of the good that Trump had done through tax and regulatory reform. You’re the globalist, Trump said. I don’t even care what you think anymore, Gary. Trump shooed him away. Cohn retreated to a couch.

Trump was determined to impose steel tariffs. “Look,” Trump said, “we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll undo it.” “Mr. President,” Cohn said, “that’s not what you do with the U.S. economy.” Because the stakes were so high, it was crucial to be conservative. “You do something when you’re 100 percent certain it will work, and then you pray like hell that you’re right. You don’t do 50/50s with the U.S. economy.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

Loudon replied: “When President Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods, the Chinese declared a ‘People’s War.’ This is a Maoist concept. It means a war of attrition on every front. It is harassment to exhaust the United States. They want to take over areas around cities and starve the cities. What they do in an urban setting is attack police stations and set up their own police. They are trying to use these areas as Maoist bases to eliminate the Republican Party in those states.

Political power converts into economic benefit. That problem has only worsened in the Trump years, with the Trump tax cut and the Trump tariffs the leading culprits. In December 2019, the Federal Reserve released the first close study of the impact of Trump’s economic policies on consumer welfare. The language of the study was delicate, but the conclusions were damning. “We find that tariff increases enacted in 2018 are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices.” And while some might argue that hurting consumers is an acceptable price to pay to revive US manufacturing, “our results suggest that the tariffs have not boosted manufacturing employment or output, even as they increased producer prices.”27

It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.

Few people in the USA seem to realize that President Trumps ‘Made In America’ through international tariffs is likely to make almost everything more expensive and it will hit the poor, sick and elderly the hardest.

President Trump is taxing the USA masses with import tariffs.

Until Donald Trump upped the ante with the threat of tariffs, Mexico had no respect for Washington, DC. After all the empty threats during the Bush, Obama, and previous administrations, it’s no wonder they believed Donald Trump was bluffing. But on the Friday before Trump’s deadline, with the first 5 percent tariff just three days away and the president leaving for England for a state visit with the royal family, it finally dawned on Mexico that Trump wasn’t bluffing.

The Chinese knew exactly how to inflict economic and political pain. The United States was in kindergarten compared to China’s PhD. The Chinese knew which congressional districts produced what products, such as soybeans. They knew which swing districts were going to be important to maintain control of the House. They could target tariffs at products from those districts, or at a state level. The Chinese would target bourbon from McConnell’s Kentucky and dairy products from Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin.

More surprising than Trump’s lack of knowledge of geopolitics is his ignorance of economics, the field in which he was given a bachelor’s degree by the University of Pennsylvania. Anyone who did the work to earn such a degree would know that imposing a tariff on imports from Mexico to pay for his wall means that American consumers would bear the cost, not Mexicans.

the real battle was going to be over tariffs, where Trump had the most rigid views and where he could do the most damage to the U.S. and world economies.

Steve wants to force a million people out of the country and repeal the nation’s health law and lay on a bunch of tariffs that will completely decimate how we trade,

It’s true they didn’t much like Trump, and eventually, given his narcissism, the sentiment was returned. By August 2018, the president was tweeting that, because the Koch brothers opposed his wall and his tariffs, they had “become a total joke in real Republican circles.” But the joke seemed more likely to be on Trump. It was increasingly clear that the Kochs had milked the administration for what they really wanted (tax cuts, deregulation, Supreme Court justices) and were now looking forward to the Pence years.