Donald Trump gives a press conference on reciprocal tariffs for US trading partners

It it’s a beautiful simple system, and we don’t have to worry about you we’re charging too much or too little, um, but traditionally India is right at the top of the pack pretty much there are a couple of smaller countries that are actually more, but India is a very, very, they, they charge tremendous tariffs. If you build here, you have no tariffs whatsoever and I think that’s what’s gonna happen. I think our country is gonna be flooded with. Jobs. Let’s see what happens. Nobody really knows what is going to happen other than. We know that jobs are going to be produced at levels that we haven’t seen before. We know that we think interest rates are gonna ultimately be coming down because of things that happen, and they go hand in hand with the tariffs, but we think that we think that the prices for some things, many things, it could be all things will go down, ultimately will go down. What’s the earliest date that you think tariffs will actually be implemented? Well, I would say maybe I’ll ask Howard to answer. Because he’s going to be the one that’s implementing. What do you think? Our studies should be all complete by April 1st, so we’ll hand the president the opportunity to start on April 2nd if he wants. So I think we’ll be ready to go on April 1st and we’ll hand it to the president and he’ll make his decisions. But remember, if they drop their tariffs, prices for Americans are coming down. You’ve talked about the VAT in the EU before and your concerns with how the EU treats you. Do you have a number in mind on the European Union? Do you have an idea of where that number is going to land? Well, what they are now is they have a 20% VAT tax, which we’re considering to be similar or the same as the tariff. Plus they charge lots of fees and you know they’re doing something else. The European Union’s been very tough on our companies. They sued Apple, they sued Google, they sued Facebook. They sued many other companies and the American companies and the kind of numbers are staggering. Canada’s gonna be a very interesting uh situation because, uh, you know, we just don’t need their product and yet they survive off the fact that we’re, you know, we do 95% of what they do and Canada is just absolutely I say it and sometimes people smile and sometimes they say great idea but. Uh, Canada, their taxes would come down greatly. The security would go up greatly. Amazing things happen to Canada and really Canada in this particular, why would we pay $200 billion a year in subsidies to Canada when they’re not a state? It’s the most beautiful, and I’ll tell you what I think really reciprocal tariffs, those two words, uh, reciprocal reciprocal makes tariffs really fair. This will eventually be the car companies and chip companies. We have to have chips made in this country right now everything’s made in Taiwan practically, almost all of it, a little bit in South Korea, but everything, almost all of it is made in Taiwan, and we want it to be made. We want those companies to come to our country in all due respect. when we straighten it all out, then I wanna have one of the first meetings I wanna have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that. If BRICS wants to play games, those countries won’t trade with us, we won’t trade with them, and if any trading gets through, it’ll be a 100% tariff at least.