President Trump said Tuesday he raised tariffs on Switzerland after a phone call with the country’s former president, saying he did not approve of “the way she talked.”
Trump told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow that he once had an “emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland, and she was very aggressive. Nice, but very aggressive.” He recalled that she repeatedly said, “we are a small country.”
“Again and again and again. I couldn’t get her off the phone,” the president continued. “So [the tariffs were] at 30 percent, and I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, and so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent, and then I got inundated by people from Switzerland and I figured, ‘Do you know what? We’ll do something that’s a little bit more palatable.’”
Trump was likely referring to former Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, who left office Dec. 31 and was succeeded by current President Guy Parmelin. The Hill reached out to the White House for clarification.
He previously referred to the same phone call during a speech last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Trump gave a similar description of the conversation, adding that she “just rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you.”
