'Feel like a sucker tonight': 'Mad Money's' Jim Cramer delivers scathing takedown of Trump
Until this week, Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money" was sympathetic to President Donald Trump's plan to drop tariffs on foreign goods — but then he saw the actual plan.
The "Liberation Day" tariffs, which put new duties of 10 to 49 percent on goods for just about every foreign country and even some uninhabited Antarctic islands, were billed as "reciprocal" tariffs to retaliate against unfair trade barriers other countries have imposed — but in reality, said Cramer, Trump's tariffs don't have anything to do with what trade barriers actually look like.
"I went deep on the numbers today, and the numbers did not make any sense," Cramer told CNN's Erin Burnett on Thursday night's edition of "OutFront."
"I just said, you know, it's one of these things where if I'm doing $100 billion and I'm like, you're letting me do $10 billion and I'm letting you do $100 billion, there was a way to be able to make it work," Cramer continued. "But the numbers that they did and they had this ridiculous — I mean, I was, that was the chart that they had with the, with the mathematical equation? I mean, are you kidding me?"
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"It was just wrong," said Cramer. Ultimately, he added, "what bothered me, Erin, was that they really did, over and over again, the president said, listen, it's going to be reciprocal. So you do it, we do it. And that was going to be so great. And I really believed in it. And I feel like a sucker tonight."
"I am not a free trader, and I do not believe in free trade," Cramer stressed. "And I was just as tough, if not tougher, than his people. But they screwed it up and they really made — they did it a totally ill-advised way. And I was very let down. As someone who really, truly believes the free trade is awful for the American working person, this is what they came up with. Jeez, come on, have some gumption. Have some math."
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