Donald Trump addressed the audience in Davos (Image: Getty)
lashed out at the European Union as he took centre stage at Davos.
Addressing political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, the US President spoke about the war in , the “economic chaos” he said the US is experiencing and his first few actions after returning to the White House.
However, one of his major targets was the . Responding to a question from Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman following his address, Mr Trump said to have “very big complaints” about Brussels.
Asked how he plans to keep the markets ahead of Europe, he complained about the “time it takes for things to get approved” in the bloc.
While saying he has “friends in “, he claimed approval from the EU for a project would take “five or six years”.
:
President Trump claimed the EU treats the US ‘very unfairly, very badly’. (Image: Getty)
President Trump said: “I said you have to be kidding…I said, wait a minute, it’s not that important, I don’t want to go five or six years. But it would have been a big investment.”
The President added: “I sent the people to the EU to see if they could speed it up to get a simple approval that Ireland gave me in less than a week. I realised right then it was a problem, and I didn’t even bother applying, or pulled it out very quickly if I did.”
The EU, he also claimed, treats the US “very unfairly, very badly”.
He added: “They have a large tax and a VAT tax, and it’s a very substantial one. They essentially don’t take our farm products or our cars, yet they send cars to us by the millions. They put tariffs on things we want to do.”
President Trump added that these tariffs make it “very difficult” to bring products into Europe and “yet they expect to sell, and do sell, their products [in the USA].”
He also added that the US has “hundreds of billions of dollars of deficits” with the EU and that “nobody’s happy with it”, before vowing to “do something about it”.
‘I love Europe, I love the countries of Europe, but the process is a cumbersome one’ said Trump. (Image: Getty)
Don’t miss… [REPORT] [REVEALED]
He continued: “I love Europe, I love the countries of Europe, but the process is a cumbersome one, and they treat the US very, very unfairly with the taxes they impose.”
He finished by adding that he receieved a call from a “major airline, one of the biggest airlines in the world”, who asked him for help over landing it Europe which Trump said he described as “brutal” and “unfair”.
President Trump said: “I said ‘how does it compare to ?’ and he said: ‘It’s much worse'”.
“We have some very big complaints with the EU,” Mr Trump concluded.
has been the US President for just three days, having been on January 20.
He has already signed a blizzard of executive orders and taken other actions since being sworn in, including starting the process of as the “Gulf of America”, as well as orders to meet his campaign promises on illegal immigration, gender and diversity policies and pardons for supporters jailed for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.