“We have very big claims”

US President Donald Trump continued to target the European Union on Thursday for what he says is an unequal trade relationship.

“From America’s point of view, the EU is treating us very, very unfairly, very badly,” Trump said in a virtual speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

After Monday’s inauguration, Trump’s second term has been a key topic of conversation in Davos this year — especially given his threats of trade tariffs on the EU, China, Mexico, Canada and so on.

Echoing earlier comments, Trump said in a speech in Davos: “They make it very difficult to get products to Europe, and yet they expect to sell, and they do sell their products in the United States. So we’ve got, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits from the EU, and nobody’s happy about that, and we’re going to do something about it.”

“They basically don’t take our agricultural products and they don’t take our cars, but they send us cars by the millions. They impose tariffs on what we want to do… We have very big claims against the EU,” he continued.

Trump in December said The EU will face “tariffs all the way” if it does not increase its purchases of oil and gas from the US, which European officials have indicated they are willing to do.

He added on Thursday: “They want to be able to compete better and you can’t compete if you can’t go through the approval process faster. There’s no reason why it can’t go faster … I’m trying to be constructive because I love Europe “.

The US is the largest recipient of goods from the EU almost a fifth of the bloc’s exports. USA largest trade deficit with the EU in machinery and vehicles with a gap of €102 billion ($106 billion) in 2023. In energy, Washington had a trade surplus with the European bloc worth 70 billion euros; it also has a significant positive balance of trade in services.

President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde told CNBC earlier this week in Davos that the EU should “be ready” for US tariffs under Trump. She also said the fact that he did not immediately introduce broad tariffs was “a very smart approach … because blanket tariffs are not necessarily going to give you the results you expect”.

Meanwhile, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told CNBC that a A trade war was not in the interests of the EU or the UScalling the countries’ economies “highly interconnected.”