Trump's approach to trade is Stupid with a capital S. Today, he said the deals we've been waiting on won't actually be agreements. Instead, Trump will just specify the tariff that each country must pay and if they continue selling to the U.S., then he will call it a "deal." If that was always the plan, then why didn't he do that in the beginning? What was the purpose of Liberation Day? This new approach is a retreat from Liberation Day.

Just to finish, we also have a situation because everyone says when, when, when are you going to sign deals? We don’t have to sign deals. We could sign 25 deals right now, Howard, if we want it. We don’t have to sign a deal. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market. They want a piece of our market. So we can just sit down, and I’ll do this at some point over the next two weeks, and I’ll sit with Howard and Scott and with with our great vice president, who has done a really good job.

We have some good news to report and a lot of fronts, but JD will be there, and Marco and we’re going to sit down and we’re going to put very fair numbers down and we’re going to say, here’s what this country, what we want and congratulations, we have a deal. And they’re either say great and they’ll start shopping or they’ll say, not good. We’re not going to do that. That’s OK. You don’t have to shop. Now, we may think, well, they have a right, that maybe we were a little bit wrong. So we’ll adjust it.

And then you people say, oh, it’s so chaotic. No, we’re flexible, but we’ll sit down and will at some point in some in some cases will sign somebody else. It’s much less important than when I’m talking about. For the most part, we’re just going to put down a number and say, this is what you’re going to pay to shop, and it’s going to be a very fair number. It’ll be a low number. We’re not looking to hurt countries. We want to help countries. We want to be friendly with countries.

But you keep writing about deals, deals. When are we going to sign? It’s very simple. We’re going to say, in some cases we want you to open up your country. In some cases, we want you to drop your tariffs. I mean, India as an example, has one of the highest tariffs in the world. We’re not going to put up with that. And they’ve agreed already to drop it. They’ll drop it to nothing. They’ve already agreed they would have never done that for anybody else but me.

So, we’re going to put down some numbers that we’re going to say our country is open for business and they’re going to come in and they’re going to pay for the privilege of being able to shop in the United States of America. It’s very simple. It’s very simple. So I wish they’d stop asking, ‘How many deals are you signing this week?’ Because one day we’ll come and we’ll give you 100 deals, and they don’t have to sign all they have to do is say, oh, we’ll start sending our ships right now to pick up whatever we want or to bring whatever we want. It’s very, very simple. And I think my people haven’t made it clear.

We will sign some deals, but much bigger than that is we’re going to put down the price that people are going to have to pay to shop in the United States. Think of us as a super luxury store, a store that has the goods. You’re going to come and you’re going to pay a price, and we’re going to give you a very good price. We’re going to make very good deals. And in some cases we’ll adjust.

But that’s where it is. And, we’ve been ripped off by everybody for 50 years, for 50 years. And we’re just not going to do that anymore. We can’t do that. And we can’t let any country do that to us. We’re just not going to do it anymore.

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