US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping attend a business leaders event inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9, 2017.
Nicolas Asfouri | AFP | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump plans to escalate the U.S-China trade war he launched during his first term as president if he is elected to the office again in November.
The GOP frontrunner confirmed in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he is considering a plan to impose tariffs of 60% or higher on Chinese goods in his potential second term.
“We have to do it,” Trump said in an interview on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The Washington Post first reported the Trump campaign was weighing a theoretical 60% Chinese tariff plan.
On Sunday, the former president said he might even go higher: “Maybe it’s going to be more than that.”
Beyond China, the former president has said he would impose a blanket 10% tariff on all U.S. imports, despite broad criticism over how that could hurt consumers.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump’s sole remaining presidential challenger, criticized that policy proposal for the impacts it would have on American pocketbooks.
“What Donald Trump’s about to do, is he’s going to raise every household’s expenses by $2,600 a year,” said Haley in a January interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” referencing data from the fiscally conservative National Taxpayers Union.
Her disapproval echoes the concerns of Wall Street investors who worry that another China trade war would disrupt markets again.
Starting in 2018, Trump began a wave of $250 billion in tariffs against China. The country then struck back with its own set of tariffs against the U.S. in a back-and-forth economic battle that lasted years and disrupted global trade dynamics.
Trump’s trade war with China cost Americans an estimated $195 billion since 2018, according to the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. The economic battle also led to the loss of more than 245,000 U.S. jobs, according…
Read the full article here
