Lost in Trump's China Week Was a Postcard to Europe: You're Next

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-17/lost-in-trump-s-china-week-was-a-postcard-to-europe-you-re-next

President Donald Trump drew so much attention this past week on matters ranging from wanting to buy Greenland to a supporter’s weight problems, that it was easy to miss some of his more stinging remarks on trade.

While much of the focus was on his plans to divide up implementation of the next round of 10% tariffs on Chinese imports between Sept. 1 and Dec. 15, and on the stock market plunge that followed, comments he made at a rally in New England signaled no backing down from his views about imbalances elsewhere.

“The European Union is worse than China, just smaller. It treats us horribly: barriers, tariffs, taxes,” he told a crowd Thursday in Manchester, New Hampshire, a city originally modeled after its industrial namesake in England. “They treat us really badly."

It’s hardly the first time he’s gone there with the EU. But Eurostat numbers on Friday didn’t help the continent’s case with Trump, who sees a ledger with more exports than imports as winning. The EU’s trade surplus with the U.S. stood at almost 75 billion euros ($83 billion) in the first half of 2019, up more than 11% from a year earlier. Germany’s surplus is by far the largest in the bloc.

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