Renewable Revolution

May 29th, 2017 by Steve Hanley

Originally published on Gas2.

Donald Trump is suffering from oral diarrhea again. On May 25, while attending a NATO function in Brussels, the braying jackass masquerading as America’s putative president told the assembled officials, “The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of cars they sell in the US. We will stop this.”

Image by Kürschner, art produced and displayed in Germany 
His remarks were first reported by German newspaper Der Spiegel and some have suggested that translation issues may have been responsible for a misunderstanding. However, Der Spiegel claims a number of people heard The Donald’s intemperate remarks and interpreted them the same way. Remember, this is the same little boy in grownup clothes who handed Angela Merkel a bill for the cost of keeping American troops on German soil for the past 50 years when she visited Washington earlier this year.

This is not the first time Trump has had vacuous things to say about German carmakers. In January, he said much the same thing, complaining he sees nothing but Mercedes in Manhattan but no Cadillacs in Europe. He threatened back then to impose a 35% import duty on German cars, which spurred one German car company executive to quip that America should “build better cars.”

Trump repeated his threat to slap a high tariff on German cars again in Brussels, blissfully unaware that Volkswagen and BMW manufacture large number of cars in the US. His remarks are just another example of someone who shoots from the lip without any knowledge of the subject he is talking about. As one person commented on Jalopnik, “The working assumption now is that Donald Trump doesn’t know anything, period.”

“According to MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity, a visualization tool for international trade data, Germany has a $252 billion positive trade balance, with the majority of goods being cars, which make up 12 percent of all exports,” Jalopnik writes. “The top destination for German export goods, the OEC shows, is the U.S., representing 9.9 percent of all export value, or $122 billion.”

Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, says the press is blowing this all out of proportion. “He did say, ‘They’re very bad on trade,’” Cohn admits, but he claims his boss doesn’t have a problem with Germany. “He said his dad is from Germany. He said, ‘I don’t have a problem with Germany, I have a problem with German trade.’”

But another German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, claims European officials who heard Trump’s remarks were horrified at our Dear Leader’s lack of the most basic understanding of international trade agreements. He continues to spout ignorance every time he opens his mouth and did little on his grand tour to the G7 meeting other than convince world leaders he is a dangerous lunatic who is best ignored. Sadly, America’s position on the world stage is being greatly diminished by Trump’s stupidity. Soon, the world will move on to more important things and leave America to stew in its own hyper-nationalistic juices.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/29/another-way-donald-pissed-off-germany/