Donald Trump’s tariff scheme has upended the stock market and cast the United States’ diplomatic ties into doubt, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the president.
Neither hide nor hair of the roiling economy made it into Trump’s speech before the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday night. The president donned a tux to tell the GOP bigwigs his reciprocal tariff plan was going swimmingly.
After briefly calling the tit-for-tat over import duties a “war on the world,” Trump repeatedly assured his party that everything was peachy. On the subject of peaches, he said that U.S. trade partners were waiting in line to pucker up.
“I’m telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” he said. “They’re dying to make a deal.”
In his winding speech, the president called Adam Schiff a pencil-necked geek with a “watermelon head,” repeatedly insinuated that the 2020 election was stolen and told the assembled small gov crowd that states were merely agents of the federal government. But few of Trump’s discursive asides carried as much weight as the announcement that he planned to levy further tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals.
“We’re gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they’re going to come rushing back,” he said. “The advantage we have over everybody is that we’re the big market. We’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”
Trump also touted his 104% tariff on imported Chinese goods, refusing the framing that tariffs are taxes. (A tariff is, by definition, a tax.) He stuck to his talking point that America was being “ripped off” by countries that imported less from the U.S. than they exported to the U.S.
“They’ve ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping,” he shared, before saying that China would pay a “big number” to the Treasury. “Don’t let them keep telling you that this is a tax on our people. I hate that.”
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