In a Fox Business interview, Trump repeated that EU is treating the US as bad as China in terms of trade. And, asked if he would agree to zero tariffs on autos if the EU proposed so, Trump said “no”. He added, “I would do it for certain products, but I wouldn’t do it for cars.” Trump is again inconsistent with what he said before. Apparently, he’s not that much of a free trade advocate as he proclaimed.
In the G7 summit last June, Trump surprised other leaders and called for dropping all tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies. He said that “Ultimately that’s what you want, you want tariff free, no barriers, and you want no subsides because you have some countries subsidizing industries and that’s not fair”. And, “so you go tariff free, you go barrier free, you go subsidy free, that’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of Finance.”
Economic advisor Larry Kudlow also aid “I don’t know if they were surprised with President Trump’s free trade proclamation, but they certainly listened to it and we had lengthy discussions about that… “As the president said, reduce these barriers, in fact go to zero, zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, zero subsidies, and along the way we’re going to have to clean up the international trading system.”
