Donald Trump claimed Monday that the use of magnets was part of a plot begun by the Chinese two decades ago.
During an Oval Office meeting Monday with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, the president said he may impose a steep tariff if China didn’t give the U.S. magnets.
“They have to give us magnets. If they don’t give us magnets, then we have to charge them 200 percent tariff for something, you know?” said Trump, who recently delayed putting tariffs on Chinese goods until November.
In response to U.S. tariffs, China has prevented the exportation of some magnets and rare earth minerals.
“You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,’” Trump went on. “There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”
The president estimated that it would take “probably a year” to acquire them.
The U.S., he said, will be “heavy into the world of magnets now—only from a national security standpoint.”
Trump’s mention of magnets came amid a discussion on Boeing aircraft.
“I sent them all of the parts so their planes can fly,” Trump said of China. “200 of their planes were unable to fly because we were not giving them Boeing parts purposely because they weren’t giving us magnets.”
“But we have a much more powerful thing, and that’s tariffs,” he said, adding: “We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
Trump has portrayed that as a positive development, even if his understanding of the technology might be lacking. Last January, he suggested at a campaign stop that magnets don’t work underwater. They do.
Trump: All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets pic.twitter.com/TopK4BRsOq
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 6, 2024
He also criticized them being used as part of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System earlier this year.
“And they have all magnetic elevators to lift up 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time. And instead of using hydraulic, like on tractors that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything, they use magnets,” he said in February.
“It’s a new theory: Magnets are going to lift the planes up. And it doesn’t work. And they had billions and billions of dollars of cost overruns,” Trump claimed, even there’s no proof that those magnets don’t work.
The post Trump Gets Stuck on ‘Magnets’ in Deranged Rant appeared first on The Daily Beast.
