Trump says open to negotiations to India, but also links tariff ‘penalty’ to BRICS membership

Following his announcement of a 25% tariff rate on India plus an unspecified “penalty” tariff for India purchasing Russian energy and arms, U.S. President Donald Trump said his administration was still negotiating the final tariff rate with India, while at the same time linking India’s membership to the BRICS group of countries as another reason for the penalty.

“Well, we’re negotiating right now,” Mr Trump told a reporter who had asked what the additional penalty for “support to Russia” would be.

“There’s also BRICS. You know they have BRICS, which is basically a group of countries that are anti The United States, and India is a member of that, if you can believe it,” Mr Trump said.

“It’s an attack on the dollar, and we’re not going to let anybody attack the dollar. So it’s partially BRICS, and it’s partially the trade… this trade situation… it’s a deficit, we had a tremendous deficit,” he added.

India and the U.S. are in the process of negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA), a process that was launched in February during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the White House. On April 2, Mr Trump announced a “reciprocal tariff” schedule for America’s trade partners — with a 26% rate for India. This was put on hold pending the agreement of a “mini trade deal” initially due to be announced in early July.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump said that the Prime Minister was a friend of his, but that India did not do much business with the U.S.

India sold a lot to the U.S., but did not buy from the U.S., Mr Trump said, blaming high Indian tariffs for this and saying there were among the highest in the world.

The U.S. is India’s largest trade partner and India had a trade surplus of $41.18 billion in the last fiscal year, as per government data. Mr Trump is known not to like trade deficits the U.S. runs with other countries and has based tariffs on the magnitude of these deficits.

“Now they’re willing to cut it very substantially, but we’ll see what happens. We’re talking to India now we’ll see what happens. It doesn’t matter too much whether we have a deal or whether we charge them a certain tariff, but you’ll know at the end of this week,” Mr Trump said.

The President said August 1 (Friday) was going to be a very big day for the U.S., because money was going to “pour into” the country in an unprecedented way.

Asked again if he was open to negotiations with India on the tariff front, Mr Trump said he was.