In a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday evening’s Fox program The Ingraham Angle, U.S. President Donald Trump shared his views about Canada and some of its politicians with host Laura Ingraham. His comments were far from positive.
“Here’s my problem with Canada,” he said at one point. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidize Canada by $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their lumber… We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything.”
When Ingraham interjected that it seemed he was being tougher on Canada than on some of America’s biggest adversaries, Trump replied: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.”
When she then asked about the danger of perhaps pushing Canada closer to China, Trump responded: “I deal with every country, indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
He continued sarcastically: “Good old Justin — I call him Governor Trudeau — his people were nasty, and they weren’t telling the truth. They never told the truth. You know they’d say, ‘Well, we don’t charge.’ Well they do. They charge tremendous.”
He added: “And if you look at dairy products, what they’ve done to our farmers. I’d go up to Iowa, I’d go up to different places, Nebraska, and they would always complain about Canada, how they get ripped off. Do you know that Canada has a 250 percent tariff? Two hundred and fifty, nobody knows that. They charge us numbers that are crazy.”
Trump then brought up what he called “a very big deficit with Canada,” and he and Ingraham sparred over whether it was $60 billion (her take) or “much more” (his) before she muttered: “I don’t think so.”