Trump: ‘Trade wars are good, and easy to win’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday declared a global trade war and said it would be “easy to win,” promising to hammer “reciprocal taxes” on any country that charges tariffs on U.S. goods and services.
His threats, made in a series of Twitter posts, looked to escalate his new protectionist policies far beyond the steel and aluminum tariffs he said he would impose next week. Instead, he vowed to impose trade restrictions on any country that he felt had an unfair trade relationship with the United States, following through on nationalist threats that many aides had spent more than one year trying to contain.
Mr. Trump tweeted: When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big.It’s easy!
Over the past 24 hours, Mr. Trump has drawn the blueprints for the most protectionist U.S. trade policy in roughly 100 years. The White House has provided no information or details about how these trade practices would go into effect. Instead, they’ve been sketched out in rough terms in off-the-cuff remarks after a meeting with steel and aluminum executives and in a series of social media posts that many trade experts said grossly misrepresented how tradeworks.
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill have expressed alarm at Mr. Trump’s sudden insistence on broad steel and aluminum tariffs and have frantically tried to get him to back away from his vow. Foreign leaders, meanwhile, have responded swiftly, saying they will retaliate with tariffs of their own meant to inflict economic pain on U.S. industries, some of which happen to be in politically sensitive parts of the country.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said the European Union was preparing retaliatory tariffs against Harley Davidson motorcycles, Levi’s blue jeans, and Kentucky bourbon, a move that could enrage Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Canadian officials said the steel and aluminum tariffs would be unacceptable and that they would retaliate if it affected their exports to the United States. A number of other countries also expressed alarm. German politician Bernd Lange, who heads the trade committee at the European Parliament, shot back: “With this, the declaration of war has arrived.”
But some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the tariff decision said they were undeterred. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, speaking to CNBC, said the impact of the increase would be broad but not as painful as many companies are alleging, holding up soup and soda cans that he said would be hardly impacted.
He said other countries would only lose if they vowed to respond with tariffs on U.S. agricultural products, as it would drive up costs for their own consumers.
“This is scare tactics by the people who want the status quo, the people who have given away jobs in this country who have left us with an enormous trade deficit,” he said.