Trump’s conversation with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow
"I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland. They were paying no tariffs, sending stuff over here like nobody could believe. And we had a $42 billion deficit. And we weren’t taking anything. I said, ‘Well we have to do something because we have to even that up a little bit.’ I didn’t have to get everything at one time. So I put on a 30 percent tariff, which is very low. Still, we were having a big deficit, but it was half the deficit.
And I got an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland. And she was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive. ‘Sir, we are a small country. We can’t do this. We can’t do this.’ I couldn’t get her off the phone. ‘We were a small country.’
I said, ‘You may be a small country, but we have a $42 billion deficit with you.’
‘No, no, we are a small country,’ again and again and again. I couldn’t get her off the phone. So it was at 30 percent. And I didn’t really like the way she talked to us and so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent. And then I got inundated by people from Switzerland. And I figured, you know what? We’ll do something that’s a little bit more palatable, at least now. But I realized that all these, you know, Switzerland, you think of as, you know, ultra chic, ultra perfect. They’re not. They’re only that way because we allow them to rip us off and make all this money. And I could say the same thing with another forty countries. You know better than I do. You and I could name them. Some are much more egregious."