President Donald Trump brushed off stock market fluctuation over his announced tariffs on China by promising wins in the long term.
“The easiest thing for me to do would be just to close my eyes and forget it,” he said during a Friday morning radio interview. “If I did that, then I’m not doing my job. I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain but the market’s gone up 40 percent, 42 percent—so we might lose a little bit of it—but we’re going to have a much stronger country,”
“We may take a hit and, you know what, ultimately we’re going to be much stronger for it. But it’s something we had to do.”
The President continued that he believes trade war with China has “already been lost” saying “We’ve lost the trade war because for many years, whether it’s Clinton or the Bushes, Obama, all of our presidents before, for some reason it just got worse and worse.”
“Now it’s $500 billion in deficits and a theft of $300 billion in intellectual property. So you can’t have this.”
Trump announced late Thursday that he would consider tariffs on an additional $100 billion worth of Chinese goods after China said it would reciprocally retaliate against the original pledge of a tariff on 50 billion dollars of goods. China responded to Trump’s threat saying it would fight such tariffs ‘at any cost” and warned that negotiations are impossible.