One of the reasons the mainstream media despises President Donald Trump with the intensity of a thousand burning suns is because he’s a scrapper from around the way. What I mean is, he doesn’t take their crap. He fights back against their attacks, refuses to allow them to truly control the narrative.
And he made that point very clear during a clash with a reporter on Thursday. A so-called “journalist” — a term we should use lightly when referring to liberal media — asked him some questions about newly signed tariffs and why he didn’t implement them during his first term. The president responded by saying that he was too busy “fighting lunatics like you.”
I believe here is an appropriate place to insert the phrase, “Burn!” which is to be said in the voice of “That 70’s Show” character Michael Kelso. Say what you will about the president, but one of the things we all love about him is the fighting spirit he possesses in spades.
“You’re weighing your decision to do that, your authority to do that based on a 1977 law. It’s never been invoked before,” the reporter asked President Trump during an event at the White House. “Why didn’t you invoke this law in your first term? You could have taken in billions upon billions of dollars in your first term, but you waited until your second term?”
Trump did not waste a single second. He fired back, “Yeah, because in my first term, I was fighting lunatics like you who were trying to do things incorrectly and inappropriately to a president that was duly elected.”
The president slipped and rolled under the punch and slammed this person smack in the chin with a proverbial Mike Tyson uppercut. Lights out. Show’s over. Thanks for coming.
“And we did do certain tariffs in the first term,” he added. “If you look at China, China, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China.”
Fox News is reporting that Trump then spoke about how the COVID pandemic during his first term played a huge role in his decision not to do anything big with tariffs.
“When Covid came the last thing I was going to do is tell France and Italy and Spain and a couple of other countries that we’re going to hit you with tariffs,” he remarked. “We had to fight the Covid situation when that came.”
“But if you look at my first term,” he said, adding, “We took in hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs, but you people didn’t cover it very well.”
On Thursday, the White House released a statement explaining that the president’s executive actions “reflects the President’s continued efforts to protect the United States against foreign threats to the national security and economy of the United States by securing fair, balanced, and reciprocal trade relationships to benefit American workers, farmers, and manufacturers and to strengthen the United States’ defense industrial base.”
Reporter asking about tariff policy: "Why didn't you invoke this law in your first term? … "
President @realdonaldTrump: "Because in my first term I was fighting lunatics like you …" pic.twitter.com/LjWdavFQQt
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 1, 2025
The epic burn delivered by the Commander-in-Chief comes after he and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced there had been a trade deal reached between the U.S. and the E.U.
“We are agreeing that the tariff straight across for automobiles and everything else will be a straight-across tariff of 15%,” Trump explained about the deal.
“So, we have a tariff of 15%. We have the opening up of all of the European countries, which I think I could say were essentially closed. I mean, you weren’t exactly taking our orders. You weren’t exactly taking our agriculture,” he stated, addressing von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen then said that Europe will be snapping up $150 billion worth of U.S. energy as part of the new deal, along with dropping a whopping $600 billion in other investments into the United States.
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