What he said is he made very clear the U.S. position on yes or not NATO as part of a peace deal.
And he is totally entitled to do that.
Thank you so much.
unidentified
Thank you so much.
That's all we have time for.
This morning, Vice President JD Vance will give remarks at the annual Munich Security Conference.
He plans to discuss the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia and a push for negotiations between the two nations.
Watch live at 8.30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
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Coming up, President Trump signs a presidential memorandum making tariffs against foreign nations equal with their tariffs on U.S. goods and services.
Following the signing of the memorandum, the President fielded questions from reporters on the Russia-Ukraine war and the rationale behind the tariffs.
India traditionally is the highest, just about the highest tariff country.
They charge more tariffs than any other country.
And, I mean, we'll be talking about that.
But again, whatever they charge us, we're charging them.
So it works out very well.
It's very, it's a beautiful, simple system.
And we don't have to worry about you.
We're charging too much or too little.
But traditionally, India is right at the top of the pack, pretty much.
There are a couple of smaller countries that are actually more.
But India is a very, very, they charge tremendous tariffs.
I remember when Harley Davidson couldn't sell their motorbikes into India because of the fact that India, the tax was so high, the tariff was so high, and Harley was forced to build, I guess they built, I don't know, that was a while ago, but I think they built a factory in India in order to avoid paying the tariffs.
And that's what people can do with us.
They can build a factory here, a plant or whatever it may be here, and that includes the medical, that includes cars, that includes chips and semiconductors, that includes everything.
If you build here, you have no tariffs whatsoever.
And I think that's what's going to happen.
I think our country is going to be flooded with jobs.
Oh, I think what's going to go up is jobs are going to go up, and prices could go up somewhat short term, but prices will also go down.
And I think the farmers are going to be helped by this very much because product is being dumped into our country, and our farmers are getting hurt very badly by the last administration.
The last administration hated our farmers, like at a level that I've never seen before.
I think our farmers are going to be helped.
Jobs are going to be helped, but our farmers are going to be helped.
Our manufacturers are going to be helped.
And again, if somebody wants to come in, including the car companies, if they want to come in and build car plants, they'll do it without tariffs.
And therefore, prices won't go up.
There could be some short-term disturbance, but long-term, it's going to make our country a fortune.
Well, what they are now is they have a 20% VAT tax, which we're considering to be similar or the same as the tariff.
Plus they charge lots of fees.
And, you know, they're doing something else.
European Union's been very tough on our companies.
They sued Apple, they sued Google, they sued Facebook, they sued many other companies and American companies.
And the kind of numbers are staggering.
And the court system over there is not very good to our companies.
If you know that Apple had to pay, I think, $16 billion in a penalty, a court case that was really shocking because most people thought they would have won that court case, people that watched it.
So they've been very tough.
Airlines have called me up and they said, could you help us with Europe because they're charging us so many different fees.
I got a call from the head of American United and other airlines saying every time we land a plane we get just absolutely killed by the European Union.
And so they haven't been treated as good.
You know, we think the European Union is wonderful.
We all love Europe.
We love the countries in Europe.
But European Union has been absolutely brutal on trade.
Canada's been very bad to us on trade, but now Canada is going to have to start paying up.
And Canada's been tough on the military because they don't have a very, they have a very low military cost.
They think we're going to protect them with our military, which is unfair.
So Canada is going to be a very interesting situation because we just don't need their product.
And yet they survive off the fact that we do 95% of what they do.
And Canada is just absolutely, I say it, and sometimes people smile and sometimes they say great idea, but Canada, their taxes would come down greatly.
Their security would go up greatly.
Amazing things happen to Canada.
And really Canada in this particular, why would we pay $200 billion a year in subsidies to Canada when they're not a state?
You do that for a state, but you don't do that for somebody else's country.
So I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state.
unidentified
There was obviously a delay in implementing those tariffs.
Did you ask Secretary Hexett to walk back his comments yesterday saying Ukraine won't join NATO and won't go back to pre-2014 workers because those are the bargaining chips you could use?
Somebody told me, but I thought his comments were good yesterday, and they're probably good today.
They're a little bit softer, perhaps, but I thought his comments from yesterday were pretty accurate.
I don't see any way that a country in Russia's position could allow them, just in their position, could allow them to join NATO.
I don't see that happening.
And long before President Putin, Russia was very strong on the fact that I believe that's the reason the war started, because Biden went out and said that they could join NATO, and he shouldn't have said that.
As soon as he said that, I said, you know what?
You're going to have a war now.
And I was right about that.
This is a war that would have never happened if I were president.
They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India.
But India is a very hard place to do business in because of the tariffs.
They have the highest tariffs just about in the world, and it's a hard place to do business.
No, I would imagine he met possibly because he's running the company.
He's doing this as something that he's felt strongly about for a long time because he sees what's happening and he sees how the country is really being hurt badly by all of the fraud, waste, and abuse.
unidentified
So how is William whether he's meeting with a CEO or meeting with a representative of your government?
I think they're all coming more or less at the same time.
And it's not going to be a big shock to the system.
But what it's going to do is it's going to bring pharmaceuticals back to our country.
Much more important than the money.
It's a lot of money, but it's going to bring pharmaceuticals back to our country.
It's going to bring chips back to our country.
It's going to bring automobile.
We're going to do a lot more automobile manufacturing in our country.
You know, when I did this, when I announced this during the campaign, they were going to build the largest car plant in the world in Mexico.
It was almost under construction.
It was just starting.
And when they heard me make that statement and they thought I was going to win the election, actually, it was a few months before the election itself.
China was building the car plant.
It was going to be the largest in the world.
They immediately stopped construction.
You can see the foundations there.
They immediately stopped.
When they heard I was doing this, that would have destroyed Detroit.
It would have destroyed Michigan.
This plant would have taken up more than almost the whole state built.
And it would have been very destructive.
When they heard me speak, and they said, wow, if he gets in, we're going to lose our shirt.
So they stopped building.
That's the impact that tariffs have.
Again, you know, I say it, and I say it loudly.
It's the most beautiful word, but now I say religion, love, and a couple of other things are more beautiful because I got a lot of problem with the fake news when they said, oh, other things are more important.
God is more important.
But these are the words.
But I would say it's number four or five.
To me, it's the most beautiful.
And I'll tell you what, I think really reciprocal tariffs, those two words, reciprocal, reciprocal makes tariffs really fair.
I was getting ready to do this years ago, and first term, we had the most successful economy in history, and then COVID hit, and this was going to be the thing that I was most waiting to do.
But it was awfully hard to do this with Italy and France and Spain, and all those people were dying, and then we put tariffs on.
I have a big heart.
unidentified
Sir, on Ukraine, when Putin says that he really wants peace, do you believe him?
As soon as things settle down, I'm going to have that conference primarily with China and Russia, because those are the two that really are out there.
And we're going to have them spend a lot less money, and we're going to spend a lot less money.
And I know they're going to do it.
They agreed to it.
We were talking about denuking, denuclearize, denuking.
And President Putin and I agreed that we were going to do it in a very big way.
There's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons.
We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over.
And here we are building new nuclear weapons and they're building nuclear weapons and China's building new nuclear weapons and China's trying to catch up because they're very substantially behind.
But within five or six years they'll be even.
And we're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive.
Hopefully there'll never be a time when we need those weapons.
If there's ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons that we're building and that Russia has and that China has to a lesser extent but will have, very sad day.
That's going to be probably oblivion.
unidentified
Do you see the separate conversations or do you see one giant summit with you, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin?
You know, when I left, we had no Middle East problem.
We had no Russia going into Ukraine.
They never would have done it.
Putin never would have done it.
And I came back, and we got like the whole world is blowing up.
So when we straighten it all out, then I want to have one of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia.
And I want to say, let's cut our military budget in half.
And, you know, I've had a good relationship with President Putin.
I've had a good relationship with President Xi.
It's about people.
And I think when things straighten out, which I hope will be in the not-too-distant future, the meeting I want to have first is a meeting with China and a meeting with Russia on slowing down, stopping, and reducing nuclear weapons in particular, and also on not having to spend the kind of money we're all spending on weapons, military weapons generally.
unidentified
I think my question is: would you have those meetings separately with each of those leaders, or would you try to bring them all together?
And most of those people don't want to, they don't even want to talk about it now.
They're afraid to talk about it because I told them if they want to play games with the dollar, then they're going to be hit with a 100% tariff the day they mention that they want to do it.
And they will come back and say, we beg you, we beg you not to do this.
BRICS is dead since I mentioned that.
BRICS died the minute I mentioned that.
And I know I remember when Obama and Biden in particular, I guess he said that, oh, they have us over a barrel.
They don't have us over a barrel.
We have them over a barrel.
If BRICS wants to play games, those countries won't trade with us.
We won't trade with them.
And if any trading gets through, it'll be 100% tariff at least.
He wanted to go to the end and he wanted to stay leader.
He's not equipped mentally.
He wasn't equipped 10 years ago mentally, in my opinion.
He'd let the Republican Party go to hell.
If I didn't come along, the Republican Party wouldn't even exist right now.
Mitch McConnell never really had it.
He had an ability to raise money because of his position as leader, which anybody could do.
You could do it even.
And that's saying a lot.
But the fact is that he raised money and he gave a lot of money to senators, and so he had a little loyalty based on the fact that as leader you could raise a lot of money.
Senators would call me and they say, he wants to give me 20, 25 million.
Can I take it?
I'd say, take the money.
Take the money.
But he, so he engendered a certain amount of, I don't even call it loyalty.
He was able to get votes.
But I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position, so he can't love me.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy.
From Washington and across the country.
Coming up this morning, David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law School, discusses the legality of the efforts by President Trump and Elon Musk through the Department of Government Efficiency.
Then, longtime economic advisor to President Trump and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Moore talks about the president's economic agenda.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, joining the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
At 12:20 p.m., Tamara Lanier, author of From These Roots, traces her family's bloodline to an enslaved man, Papa Renti, who's in one of the first ever photos of enslaved people from Africa.
Presidents As Authors00:00:28
unidentified
She also speaks about her lawsuit against Harvard University to reclaim the 19th century daguerreotype of him.
And at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, in honor of President's Day weekend, we'll look back at presidents as authors.
You'll hear from Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.