Donald Trump recently sat down with the Financial Times for his first interview with the publication since becoming President in January.
They discussed his conduct as President, his Twitter presence, Brexit, and the relationship between the US, China and North Korea.
Trump was discussing his upcoming meeting with the Chinese President Xi Jinping when asked if he was going to equalise tariffs in order to cut down the country's trade surplus.
But, er, we're not sure if he knows what tariffs are...
* Me, hungover in Econ 101, being called on to answer a question when I clearly didn't do the reading
* The President of the United States pic.twitter.com/PAXIa1Gmr2
— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) April 2, 2017
Speaking to Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times Trump said:
"I don’t want to talk about tariffs yet, perhaps the next time we meet. So I don’t want to talk about tariffs yet.
But you used the word equalise. That is a very good word because they are not equalised. If you used a word other than tariff, it is not an equal.
You know when you talk about, when you talk about currency manipulation, when you talk about devaluations, they are world champions.
And our country hasn’t had a clue, they haven’t had a clue.
The past administration hasn’t had and many administrations — I don’t want to say only Obama; this has gone on for many years — they haven’t had a clue.
But I do."
During his presidential campaign, Trump said that he wanted to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese goods.
Last week, he tweeted that "we can no longer have massive trade deficits with China" and that China isn't doing anything to help with North Korea.
The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017 North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been "playing" the United States for years. China has done little to help!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2017
As Twitter users have pointed out, he sounds more like a hungover student in an 'Intro to Macroeconomics' lecture than the most powerful man in the world.
Currently, the China is the US's biggest trading partner in goods, with nearly $600 billion in total traded between the two world's largest economies in 2016.
Goods exported from US to China totaled $116 billion and goods imported from China to the US totaled $482 billion in 2015.
Presently, US tariffs on Chinese goods amount to 2.5 per cent for agricultural products and 2.9 per cent for nonagricultural products.
Chinese tariffs on US goods sold in China are significantly higher, around 9.7 per cent for agricultural products and 5 per cent for nonagricultural products.
By Patricia Zengerle and Jonathan Landay | WASHINGTON Former U.S. President Barack Obama warned then-President-elect Donald Trump not to give the post of national security adviser in his administration to Michael Flynn who was eventually fired in a controversy about ties to Russia, a former Obama aide said.
Obama gave the warning in an Oval Office meeting with Trump just days after the Republican's surprise election win last Nov. 8. The warning, first reported by NBC News, came up during a discussion of White House personnel.
The nature of Obama's misgivings about Flynn were not clear.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Flynn has emerged as a central figure in probes into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Moscow.
A former U.S. deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, is expected to tell a Senate Judiciary subcommittee later Monday that she had warned the White House after Trump took office that Flynn had not told the truth about conversations he had held with the Russian ambassador to Washington.
Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, in February for failing to disclose talks with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak about U.S. sanctions on Moscow and then misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the conversations.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Jonathan Landay; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Frances Kerry and Grant McCool)
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