Trump Tells Minnesotans EU Doesn't Take Our Farm Products
President Donald Trump, speaking at an April 15 rally designed to celebrate the tax law's changes, continued to threaten the European Union with car taxes if it doesn't change its policies. "We're in massive trade negotiations, as you know, because our farmers haven't been treated properly for many years," he said. He then said negotiations with China are going well, but said the EU needs to recognize things are different now.
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He said the EU has "barriers ... to agricultural products and cars and so many other things. But the agricultural products -- they barely take our agriculture products. And yet, they can sell Mercedes-Benz and they can sell anything they want in our country, including their farm products. And it's not fair." Trump said he told EU officials: "'Look, if it doesn't change, we're going to tariff all of your cars and everything else that comes in. You can't treat our farmers that way. You can't treat our people that way.'"
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, the EU purchased about $13.5 billion in U.S. agricultural products in 2018, making it the third-largest customer for American ag exports. According to a fact sheet posted on the website of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. imported $20.6 billion in agricultural products in 2016 from the EU, with wine and beer as the leading category of products. The USDA says that various regulations on genetic engineering, pesticide residues and hormone treatment of animals in the EU reduce American export opportunities, and in the case of chicken, bar U.S. products entirely.
Trump would use Section 232 to tax European cars, which is the same mechanism he used to tax steel. He bragged about the consequences of that in his speech, which was given in the area where iron ore is mined.
"Our steel industry is vibrant again. It was dead. It was going to -- we weren’t going to have a steel industry, if you can even believe that. No, obviously, you need that for military and for protection. You need that for a lot of things. But you need it for military. You need it -- we can't play games. We had no steel industry. It was going to die, the rest of it -- the remaining little bit. You'd see these massive plants that used to take care of so much of the world's steel, and they'd be using a little corner or they'd be using nothing.
"I put a tariff on the dumping. They were dumping -- China and other countries were dumping steel all over the United States, and in many cases, it was very inferior product, very bad stuff. And we need it for the military. We need it for structural buildings. We need it for a lot of structures. You got to have great steel. And we get it right from you."