President Donald Trump served quite the White House word salad Monday during a press conference with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, as he was asked about potentially reviving trade talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — only to start rambling about magnets.
“China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets,” Trump said Monday. “And nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets.’ There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”
“It’ll take us probably a year to have ’em,” he continued. “We’re heavy into the world of magnets now. Only from a national security standpoint, but we have a powerful thing.”
The U.S. relies on these resources for the automotive, electronics and renewable energy industries, and while China dominates the world’s rare-earth magnet production, it also reportedly needs airplanes — and is currently negotiating buying a sizable fleet from Boeing.
Trump said Monday that he’s “sent them all of the parts so their planes can fly.”
“I could have held them back,” he added. “I didn’t do that because of the relationship I have. And their planes are now flying. Two hundred of their planes were unable to fly because we were not giving them Boeing parts purposefully because they weren’t giving us magnets.”
Trump argued his tariffs are “a much more powerful thing,” however, and said the U.S. now has “tremendous power” over China. He concluded that “we’re going to have a lot of magnets” soon — so many, in fact, that “we won’t know what to do with them.”
His digression on the “magnet situation” spawned pained reactions on social media.
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