The European Union has “done a good job” screwing the United States on trade, President Trump said during his first cabinet meeting on Wednesday, intoning those days are now over.
U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at the European Union protectionist trade bloc, which has long used tariffs and standards as tools to disadvantage imports from other nations, congratulating them on having gotten away with it for so long.
Sitting alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, President Trump spoke in support of his own policy of reciprocal mirror-image tariffs and said of Europe:
They’ve really taken advantage of us in a different way. They don’t accept our cars, they don’t accept, essentially, our farm products. They use all sorts of reasons why not. And we accept everything of them.
We have about a $300 billion deficit with the European Union. Now I love the countries of Europe, I guess I’m from there at some point a long time ago… but I love the countries of Europe. I love all countries, all different. The European Union, it was formed to screw to United States. Let’s be honest… that’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job, but now I’m President.
The European Union has several purposes, and President Trump is quite right that opposition to the power and influence of the United States is one of them, a fact frequently admitted to by top European figures. In 2018, for instance, France’s finance minister spoke of the European Union being an “empire” to compete with America, stating the bloc should “tell the U.S. clearly: we are a sovereign continent.”
Guy Verhofstadt, a deeply influential Eurocrat and European sovereignty extremist has made similar remarks, stating: “The world is developing into one not of nation states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The US is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests”.
As previously reported, European Union Commissioner Günther Oettinger had said of this dynamic: “Our union is a union of values… We are living in a competition — our values against other morals or values. Take state capitalism made in China, take autocrats working in Ankara, Moscow, or even in the White House in D.C.
“If we are convinced that our form of values should survive … then we have to fight.”
Perhaps most remarkable are comments from French President Emmanuel Macron, always keen to be shown as friendly with President Trump, who said during the previous Trump Presidency: “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America… We will not protect the Europeans unless we decide to have a true European army.”
The European Union, in its present incarnation, was founded with the Maastrict Treaty in 1993, but its history under various guises goes back decades before then to the post-Second World War European Coal and Steel Community, and even to the Paneuropeanism of the 1920s and 1930s espoused by diverse individuals including Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley.
But as observed by Trump, tariffs have been integrated into the European project since the earliest days. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951 was based on the notion of a zero-tariff free trade area with common tariffs and restrictions on imports from abroad — including from the United States.
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