Trump Admits He 'Could Go Higher' With European Union Tariffs... But Chooses Not To

In a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Trump spoke about tariffs and U.S. relations with the EU.

Transcript

00:00Are you optimistic about reaching the tariff deal with the European Union soon?

00:08Well, the European Union has been speaking to us, Ursula and the whole group, and they've been

00:12very nice. They treated us very badly until recently. Now they're treating us very nicely.

00:16It's like a different world, actually. They've treated us very badly. They were among the

00:21toughest to deal with. Actually, in many respects, they were much worse than China. Look at what

00:27they do to our companies. They sue Apple. They sue Google. $17 billion they got from Apple

00:33on a lawsuit that they didn't have a case. They have, you know, judges that are European

00:39Union judges. And they ruled. They take so much money away from our country in terms of that,

00:45in terms of other things that they do. They're very tough. But now they're being very nice to us,

00:50and we'll see what happens. We're probably two days off from sending them a letter.

00:57We are talking to them. I just want you to know, a letter means a deal. You know, a lot of people

01:02say, we've got 200 countries. We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that

01:09know what they're doing, that are doing a good job. But you can't do it. You have to do it in a more

01:13general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way. And we sent them a

01:18letter. You read the letter. I think it was well crafted. And mostly, it's just a little number in

01:26there. You'll pay 25 percent, 35 percent. We have some at 60, 70. Those are ones with massive,

01:32you know, where we have massive trade deficits because they've treated us very badly. But I would

01:37say in every case, I'm treating them better than they treated us over the years. Don't you agree with

01:42that? I could have done much. I could have been much harsh. I don't want to do that. We want to

01:49have relationships. But in every case, they treated us far worse than I'm treating them. I'm

01:55treating them very good. I could go higher with the tariffs, but I don't want to hurt them. That's

02:00why when you just read it, you come up with the number. It's so incredible that prices are actually

02:04going down. Just so you know, when I got in, everyone said, oh, eggs. Eggs are going through the roof.

02:10I was in for about four days and they started screaming at me about eggs. They said, that's

02:14Biden's problem. I didn't know about eggs. But eggs went up about five times. You did a fantastic job.

02:20And we ended up shortly getting, in fact, for Easter, they said, go out and buy plastic eggs.

02:26You can't use real eggs. Well, we bought 200,000 eggs for the White House for the Easter egg hunt

02:31that we have at the White House. And there were eggs. We had the price down. And now the price is

02:35lower than it was before. We did a good job with eggs, but we did a good, good job with groceries.

02:41Our prices are down in this country. A big part of it's oil, the oil. You have, you had a couple of

02:49places last week, you had $1.99 for oil, for gasoline. Nobody thought they'd see that. I want to get it

02:57lower if I can. But we're, we've done a good job. You've done a very good job.