Trump Admits American Companies Will Have To ‘eat’ Tariffs When Grilled On ‘policies That Will Hurt America’

President Donald Trump on Friday suggested that American companies will have to endure some form of suffering as a result of his tariffs.

On Friday morning, Trump threatened to hit Apple with a 25% tariff on all iPhones made outside the U.S. It was the president’s latest effort to move its manufacturing back to the country. While taking questions in the Oval Office hours later, Trump added that he’d also do the same for companies like Samsung. He also said that companies like Walmart would have to “eat” the cost of the tariffs.

When asked if his comment about U.S. companies “eating” tariffs was an acknowledgement that domestic companies will pay as opposed to foreign companies, Trump said:

Sometimes the country will eat it; sometimes Walmart will eat it; and sometimes there’ll be something to pay something extra. I’ve always been a fan and I’ve always believed, and if you look — take a look at what I did four years ago. We had the greatest economy and we had no inflation. Remember that. We had no inflation, and yet we had hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs that I put on China; yet we had no inflation. We had no big cost differential. Oftentimes — and I don’t like it when a department — because they’ll do a lot of business, but, you know, they announce record profits and everything else. They have to take out some of their profits. They’ll make a little bit less money, but I don’t want the consumer to pay.

Trump was then asked why he would impose tariffs that were “hurting American businesses.”

“They’re not hurting,” Trump said. “They’re helping because they’re creating jobs in America, and we’re creating tremendous amounts of jobs in America like you’ve never seen. We’re having investment in America. We’re not getting ripped off by every country in the world. We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world. They’re making their product. They sell it. They don’t give our people the jobs. They make it with other countries’ jobs, and we will have something that nobody will ever see again, I think. I think we have a potential to do numbers that we never envisioned in the wildest years.”

Watch above via Fox News

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