Donald Trump rips reporter who asked if he ‘always chickens out' on tariff threats: ‘That's a nasty question'
President Trump bristled when asked by a reporter Wednesday whether markets have been calm in the face of his tariff spree because they believe he 'always chickens out' on tariff threats, blasting the question as 'nasty.'
During a brief gaggle in the Oval Office after the swearing in of Interim Attorney for the District of Washington Jeanine Pirro, CNBC White House correspondent Megan Casella asked Trump about his credibility on tariffs.
'Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the TACO trade. They're saying 'Trump always chickens out' on your tariff threats. And that's why markets are higher this week. What's your response to that?' she asked.
Trump appeared frustrated by the question, which seemingly referenced Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong's assessment of how Wall Street is interpreting the administration's tariffs.
'Oh, isn't that nice. Chicken out. I've never heard that,' Trump replied before turning indignant. 'You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100 and then down to another number. I said you have to open your whole country.'
'And because I gave the European Union a 50% … tariff and they called up and they said, 'Please let's meet right now,' he added. 'And I said, 'I'll give you until July' … you call that chickening out?
'Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead,' he later said. 'People didn't think it would survive, and you ask a nasty question like that. It's called negotiation … Don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question.'
Back on April 2, which he dubbed 'Liberation Day,' Trump had fired off a 10% baseline tariff rate, then a blitz of customized rates against virtually every country on the planet. The move sent markets into a nosedive.
But just before the customized rates were poised to take effect, Trump announced that he would pause all of them, except the one on China, until July 8 to give his trade team time to negotiate lightning deals with countries. Markets quickly began rebounding.
The Trump administration has since cut a deal with China, subject to his highest tariff rates, to reduce them to about 30% temporarily while negotiations play out.
'We have $14 trillion committed to investing when Biden didn't have practically anything — this country was dying,' he added. 'You know, we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.
'I went to Saudi Arabia. The king told me, he said, 'You have the hottest country in the world right now,'' Trump added.
Earlier this week, the president agreed to delay the deadline he imposed against the European Union from June 1 to July 9, during which he's threatened to slap 50% tariffs on the bloc. The move came after a call with EU President Ursula von der Leyen.
The Trump administration previously imposed 25% tariffs on automobiles, aluminum, steel and imports from Canada and Mexico that don't comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
That's in addition to the baseline 10% tariff rate on all imports and the 30% tariffs on China.
Originally published as Donald Trump rips reporter who asked if he 'always chickens out' on tariff threats: 'That's a nasty question'
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Star Wars fizzled not only because technology didn't catch up in time, but because of the enormous drain on taxpayer dollars that subsequent administrations decided were better deployed elsewhere, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Democrat senator Ed Markey has branded Golden Dome ' economically ruinous '. 'Mega-projects' like this go wrong, says Marcus Hellyer, 'because you don't understand the requirements, and the requirements keep blowing out. And as the requirements blow out, so does the technical difficulty, and therefore the cost and schedule. And, at the moment, Golden Dome's requirements are essentially unbounded.' What about the space lasers? Miniaturisation, and vast improvements in computing power and data storage, not to mention AI, make the idea of a space defence that can co-ordinate attacks autonomously seem much more technologically feasible than in Reagan's era. Satellite networks such as Elon Musk's 7000-strong Starlink have already proved it is economically possible to launch thousands of small objects into orbit. Loading The not-insignificant hurdle that remains, once these things are in space, is successfully destroying enemy missiles. Do interceptors shoot something at them? Or would they zap them with Reagan's beloved lasers? These days, laser weapons do exist, but they require enormous energy and weigh a lot; typically, they are installed on warships. Says Hellyer: 'It's been really hard to get them to work even against fairly traditional threats like cruise missiles or drones.' Star Wars offers some lessons (the real one, not the film). Many of Edward Teller's claims to Reagan about the prospects of satellites firing lasers made from concentrated X-rays, particle beams and 'microwave devices' were highly exaggerated, says William J. Broad, author of the 1992 exposé Teller's War, and rarely performed as hoped in tests. The popular notion of a giant space station permanently parked above a rogue state that can shoot death rays on command is, thanks to the laws of orbital physics, probably an impossibility. To park it in a geostationary orbit, it would end up 35,000 kilometres away from Earth, which would put its ability to rain down lasers that have enough power to cause damage into the realm of science-fiction. Washington consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton is instead advocating for a reboot of a curious idea that emerged out of Star Wars research called Brilliant Pebbles. A relatively low-tech scheme (at least, compared with lasers), it would deploy swarms of numerous small interceptors into a low-Earth orbit (2000 kilometres or lower altitude), to collide with enemy missiles as they speed past, their great numbers ensuring there are always enough passing over an enemy's territory to be able to intercept missiles in time. So, what's the catch? One would not imagine Russia or China sitting idly by while the US floods their skies with rocket-killing satellites, potentially depriving them of the capacity to respond to a nuclear strike. Both nations – and North Korea – have already condemned Trump's plan as destabilising. 'You could argue that all it does is kind of foster miscalculation,' Hellyer says. Then there are the inevitable countermeasures to overwhelm the anti-missile missiles (the anti-anti-missiles, perhaps) and space defences. 'All defensive systems can be defeated by countermeasures that cost far less,' wrote Charles Bennett of The New York Times in 1989 when Brilliant Pebbles was first proposed. 'The reason for that is simple. It's a lot easier to hit an orbiting satellite than a warhead moving at a vast rate of speed. Moreover, it's also easy to build enough new missiles to numerically overwhelm a defence, or to develop missiles that get into space before interceptors can target them.' Tellingly, the last remaining bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia (the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which limits the number of long-range nuclear weapons) could expire early next year if not extended, opening the door to another arms race. China is believed to have been developing space-based weapons to disable satellites, Brigadier General Shawn Bratton, deputy director of operations at US Space Command in Colorado, said in 2020. Russia has also been considering sci-fi weapons of its own, says RUSI's Sidharth Kaushal, in the form of nuclear-powered jammers (or signal-blockers) and space-based plasma guns. Then there's the money. Star Wars was already on the nose with Congress by 1987, when doubts grew about its promised capability and Reagan continually asked for more funding. Republican senator Jim Coulter warned that the program would be 'bled to death' by budget cuts unless it could demonstrate at least some defences that could be deployed in a few years. 'I think it's just impossible to sustain a vague defence research goal,' he said presciently. The Congressional Budget Office this year estimated that even a skeleton deployment of what it calls 'space-based interceptors' would probably blow the entire Golden Dome budget, costing between $US161 billion ($250 billion) and $US542 billion ($840 billion). The US is also facing a bill in the billions to upgrade its existing nuclear deterrent, Hellyer says. While upgrading the existing Virginia class submarines to nuclear capability will shoulder some of the load, 'The US is facing a situation where it could be spending itself into irrelevance. It'll have an offensive system that's massively undercapitalised and obsolete and isn't the deterrent that it wants it to be. Meanwhile, it'll have this kind of half-baked defensive system that isn't really a deterrent either because any adversary will look at it and go, 'Well, it can't really stop us getting through'. It's the worst of both worlds.' Loading Malcolm Davis says: 'I think what you will end up with is a leaky shield that makes it more difficult for an adversary to get an attack through, and can certainly defend against limited attacks, but it will never be something that will make it impossible for the Russians or the Chinese to attack the United States.' Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told The Wall Street Journal: 'This missile-defence mirage gives you the illusion you can protect yourself, but you're driving all these countries to build all these hundreds and thousands of missiles.' Says Hellyer: 'What's a satisfactory success rate? Let's say the bad guys launch 100 missiles at you with 1000 warheads. Let's say you have a 90 per cent success rate. Well, that's still 100 getting through.'
