Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, President Trump was asked how soon he wants to bring down the tariffs on China.
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00:00Thank you to the veterans who are here. Thank you so much for defending us. And then I wanted to ask you, Mr. President, because you said you want to bring the tariffs on China down soon. How soon do you want to bring the tariffs on China?
00:14Well, that depends on them. We have a situation where we have a very, very great place. It's called the United States of America, and it's been ripped off for years and years. These people know it. We talked about it before you came in. We've been ripped off by every country in the world, practically, and friend and foe. And we will be not doing that anymore. So what's happened is we've Howard, how many countries have we spoken to already?
00:42Ninety. Ninety. And they all want to make deals, and we're going to make deals, but they're going to be fair deals. They're not going to be ripoff deals. And, you know, we were losing almost $5 billion a year. No country can do that. And now we have it down almost to even, maybe even better than even, because of the tariffs on cars and aluminum and steel. We have tariffs 25% on cars, aluminum and steel.
01:11There's a rush to build new steel plants, a rush to build new aluminum plants, and the biggest rush I've ever seen that we've ever seen to build car plants. We have like 11 of them or something, big ones, where you guys maybe work, maybe you won't want to work, you'll do something else instead of that.
01:28But if you like cars, you'd like to work on one of these plants, the biggest plants in the world. Three of them have left Mexico before construction started, one of them during construction, and they're coming to this country.
01:39They're coming back. Don't forget, and we get along great with Mexico, but Mexico took 32% of our car building business. So it's amazing what's happened. Remember this number? Anywhere from $3 to $5 billion a day.
01:56That's not a million dollars, that's a billion dollars a day. Nobody can even imagine it. And that's what we were losing. And, you know, hence we have $36 trillion in debt and everything else.
02:07And in the end, I think what's going to happen is we're going to have great deals. And by the way, if we don't have a deal with a company or a country, we're going to set the tariff.
02:16We just set the tariff. It's something that we think that will happen, I'd say, over the next couple of weeks. Wouldn't you say? I think so. Over the next two, three weeks.
02:24We'll be setting the number. And we're going to pick, could be for China, too. Could be for China. We're dealing with almost all of them.
02:31Too many to fully deal with, but we're going to be fair to them. But we're dealing with a lot of countries right now.
02:38And it could be with China, but maybe we'll make a special, you know, a deal. And we'll see what it will be.
02:45Right now, it's 145%. That's very high. It got there because of the fentanyl. They're sending, you know, massive amounts of fentanyl into our country and killing a lot of people.
02:56Probably 200,000 plus a year, wiping them out. You probably all have friends who were killed, somebody who was killed in your family or your friends with fentanyl.
03:05And somehow it's made almost exclusively in China. And as you know, we essentially taxed them 10 and then another 10.
03:15And we also taxed Mexico 25 and we taxed Canada 25. And that's the kind of money that's what's pouring into our country right now.
03:26And it's gotten us down from losing three to five billion dollars a day to actually making money, but breaking even, let's say.
03:33But we're going to make a lot of money and that money is going to be used to reduce taxes.
03:37We're going to get big, big tax breaks. We're going to, you know, there was a time, I said it this morning, I think some of you were there.
03:45There was a time from 1870 to 1913. It was a long time ago. We were an all-tariff nation.
03:52Foreign nations paid taxes. They paid money to us in the form of tariffs.
03:56And that was when we were the wealthiest. We were the wealthiest proportionately that we ever were.
04:01And they formed committees in 1887 in particular, but they formed committees to determine what we should do with all the money.
04:10We had so much money. You guys would have loved it. We had so much money.
04:14They didn't know what to do with it. We gave it away to different causes.
04:18And you haven't seen that too much anymore, although we give plenty away.
04:23But now we shouldn't be giving it away. We have to take care of ourselves first, right?
04:26But we were very wealthy and proportionately the wealthiest we ever were.
04:32We built the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter gave that away for $1, by the way.
04:36One of the most profitable things ever built, the Panama Canal, we gave it away for $1 to Panama.
04:42Why? I don't know. Nobody knows. But that's what we had.
04:46We had people like that sitting behind this desk. And that shouldn't have happened.
04:50And Panama Canal, we spent, it was the most expensive thing ever built by our country in history.
04:57I'm talking relative dollars. We've never built anything so expensive.
05:01I think it was the equivalent of $1.7 billion.
05:06And we've never built anything like that.
05:09We built a lot of things, but never so expensive that we started building other things.
05:15We had a lot of money to do it, all based on foreign countries coming in and paying these tariffs.
05:21And we're doing that again. And I think we're going to make so much that we're going to be able to reduce taxes in this country by a lot.
05:26And we're also going to treat those countries very fairly.
05:29But if we don't make a deal, which is possible, we're going to just set the price.
05:34Because you remember, they have to come in, they want to come in here, and they want to do business with the United States.
05:39So we want to set a fair price. And we'll do that. We're going to be very fair.
05:43But we'll set a fair price. And then they can make a determination as to whether or not they want to do business with the United States.
05:50And I think most of them will. And I think we're going to treat them very fairly.
05:53Were you worried about what the 145 percent tariffs were doing to small businesses here in the U.S.?
05:59No, no.
05:59Is that why you're bringing it down?
06:00No, no. No, I haven't brought it down. I haven't brought it. It's still 145. I haven't brought it down.
06:06I said it's a high tariff. It is a high tariff. But I haven't brought it down.
06:10It basically means China's not doing any business with us, essentially, because it's a very high number.
06:15So when you add that to the price of a product, you know, a lot of those products aren't going to sell.
06:21But China's not doing any business. They were doing $1.1 trillion. Think of that. $1.1 trillion. You know what that is?
06:32And it was just very unfair to us. And we were doing very little, relatively very little with them.
06:38It was a one-sided, very one-sided. But we get along. I get along very well with President Xi and I hope we can make a deal.
06:44Otherwise, we'll set a price and hopefully they'll come here and they'll contribute. And if they don't, that's okay.
06:51There's a lot.
06:54There's a lot.