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President Donald Trump clashed with a reporter Thursday over questions about a newly signed tariff, telling him that he had spent his first term “fighting lunatics like you.” The intense exchange follows a White House signing ceremony for a series of executive actions aimed at expanding reciprocal tariffs and strengthening U.S. trade policy.
While speaking with reporters at the White House after the signing, a reporter confronted Trump on why he is emphasizing tariffs more in his second term.
“You’re weighing your decision to do that, your authority to do that based on a 1977 law. It’s never been invoked before,” said the reporter. “Why didn’t you invoke this law in your first term? You could have taken in billions upon billions of dollars in your first term, but you waited until your second term?”
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President Donald Trump drilled into a reporter over a question on tariffs on Thursday, telling him that he had to spend his first term “fighting lunatics like you.” (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Without missing a beat, the president shot back: “Yeah, because in my first term, I was fighting lunatics like you who were trying to do things incorrectly and inappropriately to a president that was duly elected.”
“And we did do certain tariffs in the first term,” he continued. “If you look at China, China, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China.”
He also said that the COVID-19 pandemic also played a factor in his decision to not emphasize tariffs as much in his first term.
“When Covid came the last thing I was going to do is tell France and Italy and Spain and a couple of other countries that we’re going to hit you with tariffs,” he explained. “We had to fight the Covid situation when that came.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump holds a “Foreign Trade Barriers” document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo)
“But if you look at my first term,” he went on, “We took in hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs, but you people didn’t cover it very well.”
A statement by the White House said that Trump’s executive actions taken on Thursday “reflects the President’s continued efforts to protect the United States against foreign threats to the national security and economy of the United States by securing fair, balanced, and reciprocal trade relationships to benefit American workers, farmers, and manufacturers and to strengthen the United States’ defense industrial base.”
This comes shortly after Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal between the U.S. and E.U. on Sunday.
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President Donald Trump (R) shakes hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (L) following their meeting in Turnberry, southwest Scotland on July 27, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
“We are agreeing that the tariff straight across for automobiles and everything else will be a straight-across tariff of 15%,” Trump said.
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“So, we have a tariff of 15%. We have the opening up of all of the European countries, which I think I could say were essentially closed. I mean, you weren’t exactly taking our orders. You weren’t exactly taking our agriculture,” he added, addressing von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen said Europe will also purchase $150 billion worth of U.S. energy as part of the deal, in addition to making $600 billion in other investments into the U.S.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom and Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
