Reply With Quote
Trump Reportedly Called Germans ‘Very Bad,’ Vowed To Stop German Car Sales In The U.S.
“See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S. Terrible.”
During a meeting with top leaders of the European Union, President Donald Trump said “the Germans are bad, very bad,” according to participants in the room who spoke to German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel.
Trump’s specific criticism was that Germany’s auto industry exported cars.
“See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S. Terrible,” Der Spiegel reports he said. “We will stop this.”
Another German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that E.U. representatives felt their U.S. counterparts did not understand that the E.U. negotiates trade agreements as a single en y, rather than on a country-to-country basis. That is,
the U.S. can negotiate trade deals with the E.U. as a whole, but not individually with the separate members of the E.U.
Der Spiegel reported that Gary Cohn, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, appeared to believe that the U.S. could negotiate different trade deals with Germany and Belgium.
This is not the first time this basic misunderstanding has cropped up. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the White House in March, she
had to explain how E.U. trade deals were negotiated almost a dozen times,
a senior German official told the Times of London.
“Ten times Trump asked [Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the EU,’” the official said. “On the eleventh refusal, Trump finally got the message, ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then.’”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...Email%20052617
