During a meeting with top leaders of the European Union, President Donald Trump said “the Germans are bad, very bad,” according to participants in the room who spoke to German newspaper Der Spiegel.
Trump’s specific criticism was that Germany’s auto industry exported cars. “See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S. Terrible,” Der Spiegel reports he said. “We will stop this.”
In January, Trump threatened to slap a 35 percent tax on German auto imports. “If you want to build cars in the world, then I wish you all the best. You can build cars for the United States, but for every car that comes to the USA, you will pay 35 percent tax,” he said. “I would tell BMW that if you are building a factory in Mexico and plan to sell cars to the USA, without a 35 percent tax, then you can forget that.”
Trump’s new comments impugning the Germans for exporting cars were made in a meeting with the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the European Council president, Donald Tusk. Juncker, Der Spiegel reports, supported the Germans.
Another German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that E.U. representatives felt their U.S. counterparts did not understand that the E.U. negotiates trade agreements as a single entity, rather than on a country-to-country basis. That is, the U.S. can negotiate trade deals with the E.U. as a whole, but not individually with the separate members of the E.U.
Der Spiegel reported that Gary Cohn, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, appeared to believe that the U.S. could negotiate different trade deals with Germany and Belgium.
This is not the first time this basic misunderstanding has cropped up. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the White House in March, she had to explain how E.U. trade deals were negotiated almost a dozen times, a senior German official told the Times of London.
“Ten times Trump asked [Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the EU,’” the official said. “On the eleventh refusal, Trump finall |
