US President Donald Trump said he ordered an additional 9 percent tariff increase on Switzerland because he did not like “the way a Swiss leader addressed him” while calling on him to remove the tariff.<\/p>\n
Trump, in an interview with Fox Business, said that the tone of Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the Swiss Federal Council, whom he mistakenly called prime minister, was “repetitive” and “aggressive.”<\/p>\n
“I set tariffs at 30 percent, which is very low. Then I got an urgent call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland, and she was very aggressive, but polite, but also very aggressive. She said, ‘God, we’re a small country. We can’t do this. We can’t do this.’ I couldn’t get her off the phone,” he said.<\/p>\n
He points out that Keller-Sutter constantly repeated that Switzerland is a small country, which, according to him, made him even more nervous.<\/p>\n
“I couldn’t get him off the phone, so it was 30 percent. And I didn’t really like the way he spoke to us, so instead of reducing it, I increased it to 39 percent,” the 79-year-old said.<\/p>\n
Trump made similar comments a few weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he indicated that he did not know whether Switzerland had a prime minister or a president.<\/p>\n
“I assumed the prime minister, I don’t know, the president, the prime minister had called, a woman. And she was very repetitious. She said, ‘No, no, no, you can’t do that, 30 percent. We’re a small, small country.’ But I said, ‘You may be small, but you have a big deficit,'” the American leader emphasized.<\/p>\n
Switzerland has no prime minister or executive president. Instead, the country is governed collectively by a seven-member Federal Council. However, U.S. and Swiss negotiators reached a preliminary agreement in November to lower the tariff to 15 percent, and Swiss industry pledged to invest $200 billion in the United States by the end of 2028. \/Telegraph\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump said he ordered an additional 9 percent tariff increase on Switzerland because he did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,534,17,533,330],"class_list":{"0":"post-433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-karin-keller-sutte","10":"tag-switzerland","11":"tag-usa","12":"tag-video"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}