Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics

and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray, I'm deputy editor of the spectator. I'm joined today by John Carney, who is

economics editor at Breitbart, and we're going to be discussing the latest twists in the Trump Tariff Trade Wall.

John, so today it's become clear that Trump is serious about tariffs on Europe, particularly, and that's what everyone in Britain is most bothered about.

And the European Union seems to be serious about retaliatory terrorists.

The idea here is that Trump is making a big mistake because he's picking a fight with Europe

and Europe is serious about retaliatory terrorists and that a trade war is back on having

sort of gone quiet recently. What say you to that?

Well, I think it's important to put this in context. Let's just take the example of automobiles,

which is another place. We don't yet have tariffs on autos, but we're thinking about it.

And that's another thing that has upset the Europeans. U.S. autos exported to Europe

face a 10% tariff. European autos exported into the U.S. face a 2.5% tariff. So the idea that the U.S. is starting a trade war rather than responding in kind to, let's not call it a trade war. I don't think we're going to war on trade with Europe, but that we are creating a sense of reciprocity in the world and that the

EU has been, many countries have actually successfully negotiated themselves out of the steel

and aluminum tariffs, which the administration has actually said today that they are set to, you know, put those in place right away against Europe, Canada and Mexico.

Many countries have negotiated themselves out of those tariffs.

Those negotiations have not gone well with the EU, apparently, but not for lack of trying.

Which countries have successfully got themselves out?

So we've successfully negotiated deals with, for instance, South Korea, and a number of other

trading partners have been able to either, instead of facing tariffs, they face things like import quotas into the U.S.

The problem is that the United States, just to remind all the listeners, the United States determined that its steel and particularly

its aluminum manufacturing capacity faced a lethal threat, largely driven by China dumping

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