Donald Trump says he woke up one morning and saw the truth: America’s a sucker.
The president shared his unvarnished opinion of the country he leads during a Wednesday night interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.” Speaking from the White House, Trump said that the U.S. had been playing the rube in unbalanced deals with its biggest trading partners.
While discussing a potential summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Trump touted his plan to increase tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China.
“China will pay and other countries will pay. We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world, friend and foe,” Trump said. “April 2, I call it the ‘liberation of America.’ We’ve been the fat, dumb, foolish country that allowed everybody to rip us off.”
Trump went on to say that the country had been “raped and pillaged” by “our friends” and waved off concerns that a trade war could spark a recession.
“If I didn’t get elected, our country would be finished,” he said. “We’re going to have the strongest economy in the history of the world.”
Trump’s interview aired on the same day that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell blamed Trump’s tariffs for economic uncertainty and the Fed potentially failing to meet its targets in its fight against inflation.
“With the arrival of the tariff inflation, further progress may be delayed,” Powell said while announcing that interest rates would remain steady. “[The forecast] “doesn’t really show further downward progress on inflation this year, and that’s really due to the tariffs coming in.”
