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5/30/17

EU-US Relations: Trump undercuts White House messaging in critical remarks about Germany’s trade surplus

 Days after President Donald Trump returned from his first overseas trip as the president, he warned that the U.S.-German trade relationship is “very bad” and suggested “this will change,” following a reportedly closed-door meeting last week when he criticized Germany’s trade surplus.

“We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. “Very bad for U.S. This will change”

The president’s latest tweet comes two days after German Chancellor Angela Merkel hinted that her country couldn’t “fully rely” on countries like the United States in part because of “what I experienced in the last few days.” The German chancellor reiterated Tuesday that the German-U.S. relationship is of “outstanding importance,” but suggested that Europe would “take our fate into our own hands” moving forward.

Last week, Trump and Merkel both attended meetings at a NATO summit meeting in Brussels and a Group of 7 (G7) meeting in Taormina, Italy. The most contentious issues were on climate and trade, with Trump planning to pull the United States out of the Paris climate deal. His critical remarks on Germany’s trade policy raised eyebrows with German politicians, including Thomas Oppermann, the parliamentary caucus leader of the Social Democrats.

“Donald Trump is making clear with his tweet that he considers Germany a political opponent,” Oppermann said. “This is a new situation — we lived for decades in the certainty that we could rely on each other as partners in an alliance, and this certainty no longer exists today.”

Trump’s tweet on Tuesday also raises eyebrows in the United States for another reason. It undercuts the White House’s messaging from last Friday, which sought to downplay the seriousness of his critical remarks on trade and his suggestion that the country was selling too many cars to the United States.

Note EU-Digest: Trumps ignorance of the auto industry is terrifying. Before making critical remarks about trade with Germany, is he aware that Germany manufactures cars in the US and employs large numbers of US workers? Here are the facts:

Roughly 850,000 German vehicles are made in the US as reported by Reuters and some 33,000 people are employed by German car companies in the US.

VW recently built an entire plant in Tennessee, employing 2,000 workers directly

And these are just some facts about the German companies = if we add Toyota, Hyundai, Honda  to this equation the numbers of people these companies in their totality employ are staggering.  

Read more: Trump undercuts White House messaging in critical remarks about Germany’s trade surplus

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