President Trump stood by his wide-scale tariffs, calling them a “beautiful thing to behold” that will eventually be largely supported even as stock futures dropped Sunday evening.
“They are already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold. The Surplus with these Countries has grown during the ‘Presidency’ of Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump blasted out Sunday night on Truth Social as he attempted to justify the action he took against around 90 nations last week.
“We are going to reverse it, and reverse it QUICKLY. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”
The president said the leaders of several countries are calling him and are ready to make a deal with the US while speaking to reporters on Air Force One Sunday evening.
“But I said we’re not gonna have deficits with your country. We’re not gonna do that because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or we’re at worst gonna be breaking even.”
Despite the commander-in-chief’s optimism, investors weren’t convinced.
Stock futures dropped Sunday evening with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 2.1% and the S&P 500 plummeting about 2.5% while the Nasdaq fell almost 3.1%.
Asian shares also sharply fell, with Tokyo’s 225 index losing about 8% when the market opened and down 6% by midday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 9.4% and the Shanghai Composite index lost 6.2%.
The president insisted he doesn’t want stocks to decline, but “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
“We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen,” Trump said. “They took our business, they took our money, they took our jobs.”
Billions of dollars are funneling into the US as a result of the tariffs, Trump added.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday morning that about 50 countries have reached out to discuss the sweeping tariffs, but the US would not postpone any measures taken at this point.
Trump unveiled the baseline 10% tariffs on imported goods that went into effect Saturday, as well as harsher “reciprocal” tariff rates on individual countries that go into effect this Wednesday.
The new tariff plan helped wipe out $6 trillion in US stocks last week as fears of a recession rose.
