Scott Bessent Says Tariffs Will Go Up For Any Leader Acting Like ‘Numbskull’ Justin Trudeau

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow Thursday that world leaders emulating “a numbskull” like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could see higher tariffs from the United States.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China would go into effect, citing “vast amounts of fentanyl” pouring into the United States. After noting Trudeau’s defiant response, which included retaliatory tariffs, Bessent, during the interview by Kudlow at the Economic Club of New York, urged world leaders to negotiate.

“As President Trump has said many times, ‘tariff’ is his favorite word. I would say the ‘reciprocal’ is probably his second favorite word. And I think we have to be open to the idea. If you want to be a numbskull like Justin Trudeau and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this,’ then it’s going to — tariffs are going to go up,” Bessent told Kudlow. “But if you want to sit back, have a discussion with the Commerce Department, USTR, they all have my phone number too. I am happy to have a discussion with our foreign counterparts, that says that, ‘Here’s what we think you are doing.’ And the tariffs are the actual easy part. Because we know India does this on U.S. motorcycles. Germany does this on — or EU does this on American cars. That’s a quantitative number.”

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Trump delayed the imposition of the tariffs on Mexico following a conversation with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, thanking her for her “hard work.” Bessent said tariffs were not the only barriers American products faced.

“But, also, what are non-tariff barriers? Apple cannot sell the new iPhone 16 because of local content laws in Indonesia. Are — are you manipulating your currency? Are you suppressing the value of that? Are you unfairly subsidizing select industries either via bank lending or suppressing labor markets?” Bessent asked.

Bessent also noted fines that the European Union was imposing or threatening to impose on American tech companies like Apple, Google and X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Something that’s come to our attention recently, the EU is putting these gigantic fines on our U.S. tech companies, and that’s a form of — that’s a non-tariff barrier too,” Bessent told Kudlow. “So we’re going to look at that and then talk about what could happen on a reciprocal basis. It’s going to be — much of that will come out April 2. And we will then — it’s going to be path-dependent based on our trading partners and there will be a discussion. When Prime Minister Keir Starmer and team U.K. were in the White House on Thursday, we had a very good discussion about getting — going on all of this and more.”

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Rumble/Fox Business)

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