Stock Market Plummets Even Lower After Trump Talks About Tariffs

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Trump is doubling down on his lie that the United States is taking hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff payments from China.

Trump falsely claims that the US is making money on tariffs

Trump said at the White House:

China has been taking advantage of the United States for many, many years. I’m not just talking about during the Obama administration. You can go back long before that. It’s been taken out 400, 500, $600 billion a year. We’ve gone up a lot since our great election in 2016, and if you look at the numbers, they’ve gone down quite a bit. We’re dealing with them. We have a very good relationship. Maybe something will happen. We’re going to be meeting, as you know, at the G-20 in Japan and that will be, I think, probably a very fruitful meeting. But we’re taking in right now hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re taking in billions of dollars of tariffs, and those tariffs are going to be tremendously — if you look at what we’ve done thus far, we’ve never taken in 10 cents before I got elected, now we’re taking in billions and billions.

It went up Friday very substantially. It’s 25% and 200 billion, so now the total is 25% on $250 billion. In addition to that, we have another $325 billion that we can do if we decide to do it. So we are taking in $200 billion. We’ve never done that with China, we’ve never done that before with anybody, frankly, because we’ve been taken advantage of on all our trade deals, frankly. This is a very positive step. I love the position we’re in. There can be some retaliation but it can be very, very substantial by comparison. And out of the billions of dollars that we’re taking in, a small portion of that will be going to our farmers because China will be retaliating to a certain extent against our farmers. We’ll be taking the highest year, the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion and do something reciprocal to our farmers so our farmers can be doing well.

Video:

Trump made the stock market even worse with his remarks

The market had clawed its way back from a 719 loss to a roughly 550 point loss while Trump was talking. After the president spoke, the market losses climbed to over 600 points as it was the worst day for stocks since January 3. Trump doesn’t reassure markets. He destabilizes them. Trump’s talk of imposing even more tariffs on China made the situation worse, while his fundamental ignorance of how tariffs work did nothing to ease the concerns of investors.

The more Trump talks the worse the market gets.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association

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