Squabbling over the effectiveness of President-elect Donald Trump’s trade negotiations had one shark calling for a “DEFCON One” escalation with China.
(Video Credit: CNN)
Overlooked by naysayers, who often ignore how the tariffs instituted under the first Trump administration had been kept in place by President Joe Biden, and in some cases increased them, was the end goal of the GOP leader’s trade policy.
While panelists on “CNN NewsNight” debated if a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, as well as 10% more on China, would do anything but result in retaliatory tariffs, businessman Kevin O’Leary called for a different approach as he argued the president-elect immediately escalate to 400%.
“China is at the forefront of this fentanyl thing. And I think the real tariff war is not going to be on Mexico or Canada. It’s focused on a cheater, a liar, a stealer since 1999 when they came into the [World Trade Organization],” the entrepreneur of “Shark Tank” fame contended. “This is a country, not the people, but the leadership, that just doesn’t want to play by the rules. And I live it in my businesses every day.”
“I would like to go to DEFCON One with China — tariffs 400%. I brought it up,” said Mr. Wonderful. “Bring the supreme leader to Washington or crush his economy until he has riots in the streets for food.”
“This is a time to really put the screws in,” O’Leary argued before Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell tried to contend it was a rehash of the “same set of solutions that do not work.”
“What you have to do is target parts of their economy where there’s a lot of workers. Let’s just say, for an example, let’s say yoga mats. Let’s say we import a million yoga mats a month,” the businessman proposed. “All the yoga mat factories have 400 percent tariffs on yoga mats. They all get unemployed. They go to the streets, they scream at Supreme Leader, ‘I’m starving’ — riots. That’s when he wakes up and says, ‘Wow, I can’t sustain my supreme leadership.”
Following Trump’s announcement that he would sign day one executive orders to impose tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico if drug trafficking and the open border were not addressed from their ends, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had been quick to reach out to the president-elect to discuss the matter.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum attempted to take a moral high ground, arguing that the United States was responsible for arms trafficking into her country while promising to meet any tariffs from Trump with some of her own.
Still, O’Leary’s assertion that the United States was in an “economic war” maintained a focus on communist-controlled China requiring more serious tactics than kid gloves.
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