Berlin, Germany. Donald Trump is certainly telling Germans what his inner voice says, and some would say that voice says, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”
Pool reporters on the Trump European trip reported that Trump “voiced significant displeasure” about Germany’s trade surplus during a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium.The White House advisers are clearing up comments made by President Donald Trump that “the Germans are bad, very bad.”
“If you go down Fifth Avenue everyone has a Mercedes-Benz in front of his house, isn’t that the case?” said Trump. “The fact is that … there is no reciprocity. How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not very many, maybe none at all it’s a one-way street. It must work both ways.”
Spin-damage control began quickly on Friday morning in Taormina, Sicily, the site of a meeting with G7 leaders, White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump’s comments were about trade, trying to downplay Trump’s verbal blast of Germans and their liberal-democratic air of moral superiority.
“He said they’re very bad on trade but he doesn’t have a problem with Germany,” said Cohn. “He said his dad is from Germany. He said, ‘I don’t have a problem with Germany, I have a problem with German trade.'”
“I think he’s learning to understanding the European position,” said Cohn still spinning. “Look, as you know from the US, there’s very strong views on both sides. Both sides are running ads. So he knows that in the US, there’s very strong opinions on both sides but he also knows that Paris has important meaning to many of the European leaders. And he wants to clearly hear what the European leaders have to say.”
Trump is still deciding whether or not America will stay in the agreement. On Thursday, twenty-two Senate Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sent a letter to the White House urging the president to pull out of the deal, citing concerns about jobs.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former chief executive of Exxon, supports the deal while Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt disagrees.