President Donald Trump smacked down a reporter who tried to goad him into backing down about the effectiveness of his tariffs during a testy encounter in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Taking unplanned questions from the press, Trump looked on sternly as CNBC White House correspondent Megan Cassella cited a source claiming he “always chickens out” when it comes to implementing tariffs. The question occurred against the backdrop of his decision to pause a planned 50% tariff on European Union nations on Tuesday.
“You mean because I’ve reduced China from 145 percent, that I went down to a hundred and down to another number, and said you have to open your whole country, and because I gave the European Union a 50 percent tax, tariff, and they called up, they said, ‘Please let’s meet right now, please let’s meet right now,’” Trump said while listing off some of the recent deals he’s struck with China, the EU, and other nations.
“We have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening out? Because we have 14 trillion dollars now committed to investing when Biden practically didn’t have anything,” he raged.
“This country was dying… We have the hottest country in the world right now. Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead,” he continued with visible emotion. “We had a dead country. We had a country, and people didn’t think it was going to survive, and you ask a nasty question like that.”
The response led to silence in the room and reverberated across social media on Wednesday, where MAGA supporters cheered his putting Cassella in her place.
Before moving on, Trump looked back at the CNBC reporter and warned her, “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question… To me, that’s the nastiest question.”
The stakes for trade deals are higher now that Wall Street is baking in an estimation that tariffs will not be enacted while foreign nations remain at the negotiating table. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been at the front of the administration’s public relations campaign, arguing that countries like China stand to bear the greater brunt of a trade war.
Despite the accusations of flip-flopping by Wall Street analysts, Trump has not refrained from appearing unscripted before reporters at historic levels unseen in modern times. Politico reported that Trump has done media appearances on 111 of his 138 days in office, a rate of 80% that includes weekends.
Even today’s 2 p.m. signing to appoint Jeanine Pirro as Washington, D.C.’s top prosecutor was not scheduled to be a press conference. Trump, unlike Biden, appears to relish the opportunity to spar with members of the media.
Kaitlan Collins, the CNN correspondent who frequently serves as his foil in the Oval Office, has been silenced multiple times this year after Trump chided her for asking questions out of turn, leading to similarly surreal viral clips on social media.
