Trump threatens to escalate his trade war on Europe with car tariffs

President Trump
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Trump responded on Twitter Saturday to reports that foreign governments are weighing their options in response to his spontaneous declaration of a trade war earlier this week. He claimed the United States is mocked and impoverished by our trade partners, promising to escalate the trade war with additional tariffs if other countries retaliate economically:

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Though his trade war announcement came as a surprise this week, the president has long been enthusiastic about tariffs. "For the last six months," he reportedly said of his economic advisers last year, "this same group of geniuses comes in here all the time and I tell them, 'Tariffs. I want tariffs.'"

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.