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, 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. 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 five billion dollars a year. No country can do that.
00:59And now we have it down almost even, maybe even better than even because of the tariffs on cars and aluminum and steel. We have tariffs 25 percent on cars, aluminum and steel.
01:11There's a rush to build new steel plants, a rush to build new aluminum plants and a 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.
01:25Maybe you won't want to work. You'll do something else instead of that. But if you like cars, you'd like to work on one of these plants, the biggest plants in the world.
01:32Three 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 percent of our car building business.
01:46So it's amazing what's happened. Remember this number anywhere from three to five billion dollars a day.
01:57That's not million dollars. That's a billion dollars a day. Nobody can even imagine it.
02:02And that's what we were losing. And, you know, hence we have thirty six trillion dollars 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.
02:11And 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.
02:21Wouldn't you say? I think so. Over the next two, three weeks, we'll be setting the number and we're going to pick could be for China, too.
02:29Could be for China. Well, we're dealing with almost all of them.
02:32Too many to fully deal with, but we're going to be fair to them.
02:35But we're dealing with a lot of countries right now and 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 one hundred and forty five percent. That's very high.
02:48It got there because of the fentanyl. They're sending, you know, massive amounts of fentanyl into our country and killing a lot of people, probably two hundred thousand plus a year wiping about.
02:59You probably all have friends who were killed. Somebody was killed in your family or your friends with fentanyl and somehow it's made almost exclusively in China.
03:09And as you know, we essentially taxed them ten and then another ten.
03:16We also taxed Mexico twenty five and we taxed Canada twenty five.
03:22And 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.
03:43I think some of you were there. There was a time from 1870 to 1913 is a long time ago.
03:50We were an all tariff nation of foreign nations pay taxes.
03:54They paid money to us in the form of tariffs. And that was when we were the wealthiest.
03:58We 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.
04:13We had so much money. They didn't know what to do with it.
04:15We 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?
04:27But we were very wealthy and proportionately the wealthiest we ever were.
04:32We built the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter gave that away for one dollar, by the way.
04:36One of the most profitable things ever built, the Panama Canal.
04:39We gave it away for one dollar to Panama.
04:42Why? I don't know. Nobody knows.
04:45But that's what we had. We had people like that sitting behind this desk.
04:48And that shouldn't have happened.
04:51Panama Canal, we spent...
04:53It was the most expensive thing ever built by our country in history.
04:57I'm talking relative dollars.
04:59We'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.
05:13Then we started building other things.
05:15We had a lot of money to do it, all based on foreign countries coming in and paying us tariffs.
05:21And we're doing that again.
05:22And 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.
05:36They want to come in here, and they want to do business with the United States.
05:39So we want to set a fair price.
05:41And we'll do that.
05:42We're going to be very fair, but we'll set a fair price.
05:45And then they can make a determination as to whether or not they want to do business with the United States.
05:49And I think most of them will.
05:51And I think we're going to treat them very fairly.
05:53Were you worried about what the 145% tariffs were doing to small businesses here in the U.S.?
05:59Is that why you're bringing it down?
06:00No, no.
06:01No, I haven't brought it down.
06:03I haven't brought it.
06:04It's still 145.
06:05I haven't brought it down.
06:06I said it's a high tariff.
06:08It is a high tariff.
06:08But I haven't brought it down.
06:09It 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.
06:23They were doing $1.1 trillion.
06:29Think of that.
06:29$1.1 trillion.
06:31You know what that is?
06:32And it was just very unfair to us.
06:35And we were doing very little, relatively very little with them.
06:38It was a one-sided, very one-sided.
06:40But we get along.
06:41I get along very well with President Xi, and I hope we can make a deal.
06:44Otherwise, we'll set a price.
06:46And hopefully, they'll come here, and they'll contribute.
06:50And if they don't, that's okay.
06:51On your trip, you're wrong.
06:53There's a lot.