President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed the import taxes he has unilaterally imposed on Americans with ill-defined emergency powers have brought about the end of “most” of the seven conflicts he claims to have “solved” since returning to office.
The president made the madcap assertion during a marathon press conference in the Oval Office alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and other Department of Justice officials, who boasted about the Trump administration’s efforts to combat violent crime this past summer.
After a reporter started to ask Trump if he intends to escalate his ongoing trade war with China if his planned meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Korea next month goes poorly, Trump did not answer directly but instead pivoted to defending his use of tariffs — which he frequently and falsely claims are paid by foreign countries rather than American importers.
“If we didn’t have tariffs, we would be exposed as being a nothing. We would have no defense … if we don’t have tariffs, we’re not going to have national security,” Trump said.
He then offered a stem-winding example of how he’d been negotiating a trade deal with “Iran and Pakistan” — apparently meaning to say “India and Pakistan” — and said both countries wanted “to negotiate much differently” because of his use of tariffs.
“And then I heard that they’re shooting at each other, and I said during one of my conversations, are you guys going to go to war? If you go to war. I’m going to put a 200% tariff. I’m going to stop you from doing any business in the United States. I said it to both of them. Within 24 hours the war ended. That would have been a nuclear war,” he said.
Trump added that the controversial import taxes, which are currently the subject of a Supreme Court case over his use of emergency powers to impose them without intervention by Congress, are important not just because of the revenue they bring into the treasury from American taxpayers pockets, but because they give him “the power to keep peace” and “the power to be used for good.”
“If we don’t win that case, we will be a weakened, troubled financial mess for many, many years to come,” he said.
“Of the eight wars, I was saying seven of the eight wars, I would say tariffs are directly responsible for me ending six of them, five or six. Without the tariffs, you have wars raging all over the world.”
He added that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking to overturn his use of emergency powers for tariffs — including an American educational toy importer and multiple U.S. states — are “people that are aligned with foreign nations that are now being treated fairly, as opposed to just ripping us off and ripping us asunder.”
