President Donald Trump on June 14 said it “doesn’t matter” if Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the upcoming G20 Summit or not, saying he believed the two countries would reach a trade deal at some point anyway.
Trump has on several occasions said the two leaders would meet at the G20 Summit in Japan later this month. However, the Chinese regime has not yet confirmed such a meeting.
Trump has previously said he would decide on whether to impose further tariffs after meeting with Xi during the G20 Summit.
In the Fox interview, Trump also said the United States was taking in billions of dollars worth of tariffs on Chinese goods, which was causing many companies to move their production out of China.
He added that the regime subsidizes their industries and manipulates their currency to offset the effects of the U.S. tariffs.
“They’re paying hundreds of billions in dollars. I have 25 percent on $250 billion,“ he said. ”They’re manipulating their currency in order to pay for it.”
Reiterating previous remarks, Trump then said he increased tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods in early May because the regime tried to renegotiate parts of the trade deal. Relations between the world’s two largest economies have since deteriorated.
The Chinese regime imposed a retaliatory tariff hike on $60 billion of U.S. goods, while the United States blacklisted Chinese telecom-gear maker Huawei, on national security grounds, from doing business with American firms.
Speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Kudlow explained the impetus for the current trade war with the Chinese regime.
“We didn’t start this,” Kudlow said. “What I will call the China problem has been going on for a long time, several decades. But President Trump is the first guy in these several decades to take strong actions to remedy a very unbalanced trading relationship, where the Chinese have violated international trade law.”