WATCH: Trump Tells Reporter “I was Fighting Lunatics Like You” When Asked why he Didn’t Impose Tariffs During First Term – “We Took in Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, but You People Didn’t Cover it Very Well” | The Gateway Pundit

President Trump told a reporter that he was busy “fighting lunatics like you” during his first term and slammed the fake news for not covering him fairly during his first term. 

President Trump on Thursday spoke to reporters after signing an executive order to reestablish the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition as well as the Presidential Fitness Test in public schools.

The President was asked why he didn’t impose sweeping tariffs, which have already brought in over $100 billion in revenue since January, during his first term, as Democrats level court challenges against his authority to impose tariffs on foreign imports, and amid tomorrow’s August 1 tariff deadline.

Trump responded, “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,” a nod to the bogus media coverage of his first term and the Russia Collusion Hoax that Obama, Hillary Clinton, and intelligence community officials orchestrated.

Notably, it can also be recalled that when Trump threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico and replaced NAFTA with the USMCA, the leftists raged that the price of avocados would be an existential threat to the economy.

The Democrats and their leftist media allies also lost their minds over Trump’s tariffs on China, similar to what we’re seeing with today’s tariffs.

Trump also credited COVID-19, another Democrat hoax and biological weapon that was used to rig the 2020 election, for his inability to fix trade deficits that he is now addressing.

“We took in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs, but you people didn’t cover it very well,” Trump concluded.

WATCH:

Reporter: Your tariffs policy goes into effect tomorrow. As you know, a federal appellates court heard oral arguments today about whether or not you had the authority to unilaterally impose those tariffs. I’m not going to get you to weigh in on the legal arguments, but you’re weighing your decision to do that, your authority to do that, based on a 1977 law that’s never been invoked before. 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: 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. And we did do certain tariffs in the first term, if you look at China. China, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China, but 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. We had to fight the COVID situation when that came. But if you look at my first term, we took in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs, but you people didn’t cover it very well.