President Donald Trump continues to adamantly refuse to cede even an inch to his critics, maintaining himself — in his words — as one of the top if not the greatest president in U.S. history, which is supposed to be reassuring or something. This Tuesday morning, he took to Twitter to passionately defend his repeated rush to imposing tariffs as a punitive foreign policy tool, specifically calling out Fox News hosts who have apparently spoken out against his incessant tariffs in the process. Senate Republicans have already amassed against the president’s tariff regime, which he derided as foolish, and now the situation has progressed to him lecturing conservative and Trump world darling Fox News on social media.
As he put it, in part:
‘Maria, Dagan, Steve, Stuart V – When you are the big “piggy bank” that other countries have been ripping off for years (to a level that is not to be believed), Tariffs are a great negotiating tool, a great revenue producers and, most importantly, a powerful way to get Companies to come to the U.S.A… But very happy with the deal I made If Mexico produces (which I think they will). Biggest part of deal with Mexico has not yet been revealed!’
Trump had, as he indicated, been threatening to impose a 5 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico that would have gone into effect this Monday. That harsh import tax was indefinitely suspended, as he put it, after the U.S. and Mexico came to a deal surrounding the acute way forward in addressing undocumented immigration over the southern U.S. border, which although completely unrelated, Trump’s oh-so-brilliant tariffs had been meant to address.
After a report emerged in The New York Times outlining the main provisions of that deal as having already gotten rolling months ago, Trump came out with the idea that we should all rest assured because there’s some secret part of the deal that’s going to be revealed at some unspecified later time. In reality, Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard has flatly denied the existence of some kind of secret deal, and Trump administration officials have provided essentially no concrete evidence for what they’re talking about.
They’re just more lies — like the claim Trump added early Tuesday that there’s been “little effect to consumer” from the tariffs that are already in place covering other imports. Washing machines — just washing machines! — went up in price by about 12 percent following Trump’s tariffs, helping spark an extra cost to consumers of about $1.5 billion a year.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
Featured Image via screenshot
