President-elect Donald Trump took a brief hiatus from the U.S. government’s shutdown crisis Friday morning to re-up his threats of a trade war with the nation’s closest allies.
“I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday morning.
“Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!” he added.
Who exactly Trump “told” within the 27-member, multi-institutional bloc remains at this stage something of a mystery.
But it’s not the first time he’s made these threats, having campaigned earlier this year on a platform for imposing tariffs of up to 20 percent on all goods imported into the U.S.
The threats also carry echoes of the earlier trade war he waged against the EU during the first half of his earlier stint in the White House, lambasting European countries for treating the U.S. like “a piggy bank that everybody’s robbing.”
In the meantime, however, Trump arguably has more pressing things to worry about, after a number of Republican congressional representatives defied him on Thursday night to vote down a spending bill he and tech billionaire buddy Elon Musk were backing.
As of Friday morning, the House remains locked in a desperate scrabble to approve some sort of spending bill to avert a government shutdown at midnight and the holiday travel chaos it would inevitably precede.
