Esra Tekin
07 April 2025•Update: 07 April 2025
ISTANBUL
US President Donald Trump described tariffs as "medicine” for addressing the country’s trade deficit with many countries.
"I don't want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something," Trump told reporters Sunday while flying on Air Force One from Florida to Washington, DC, saying he was not intentionally trying to engineer a market sell-off with his policies.
“What's going to happen with the market? I can't tell you. But I can tell you our country has gotten a lot stronger, and eventually it'll be a country like no other. It'll be the most dominant country economically in the world," he said, defending his tariffs decision.
“We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had a stupid leadership that allowed this to happen. They took our businesses, they took our money, they took our jobs, they moved it to Mexico, they moved it to Canada, they moved a lot of it to China, and it's not sustainable,” he said, referring to the former administration led by President Joe Biden.
"But I do want to solve the deficit problem that we have with China, with the EU and other nations," he said.
Noting that he had already spoken with leaders over the weekend, Trump said that he had expressed his determination to impose tariffs during the talks.
"I spoke to a lot of leaders ‒ European, Asian from all over the world. They're dying to make a deal. But I said we're not going to have deficits with your country. We're not going to do that because, to me, a deficit is a loss," he said.
In a post on his Truth Social platform Sunday, Trump also wrote: "We have massive financial deficits with China, the European Union, and many others. The only way this problem can be cured is with tariffs, which are now bringing tens of billions of dollars into the USA. 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. We are going to reverse it, and reverse it quickly. Someday people will realize that tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!"
