Trump’s global tariffs have been locked in: Who is winning and who is losing?
President Donald Trump’s new round of global tariffs is causing major economic changes. This is who gets it and who gets the biggest hit.
BRASILILIA, Aug. 6 (Reuters) – Brazilian President Louise Inacio Lula da Silva said in an interview with Reuters that there is no room for a direct meeting with US President Donald Trump, who appears to be “humiliation.”
Brazil is not trying to announce mutual tariffs, he said. His government will also not give up on cabinet-level consultations. However, Lula herself is not in a hurry to ring the White House.
“I won’t hesitate to call him on the day my intuition says Trump is ready to speak,” Lula said in an interview from the presidential residence in Brasilia. “But today my intuition says he doesn’t want to speak, and I don’t humiliate myself.”
Despite Brazil’s exports facing one of the highest tariffs imposed by Trump, the new US trade barrier is unlikely to derail Latin America’s biggest economy, with room for his position against Trump more than most Western leaders.
Lula explained the US-Brazil relationship at the lowest point of 200 years after Trump tied new tariffs to his demands to end the prosecution of former right-wing president Jae Bolsonaro, who is setting trials that Trump attempted to overturn the 2022 election.
The president calls the former right-wing president “a traitor to the land” that the Brazilian Supreme Court, who has heard of the lawsuit against Bolsonaro, “Don’t mind what Trump is saying.” Bolsonaro should face another trial to trigger Trump’s intervention, calling the former right-wing president a “traitor to the country.”
“We had already allowed the US to intervene in the 1964 coup,” Lula said.
“But this is not a small intervention now. It is the US president who believes that the rules of sovereign countries like Brazil can be determined. That’s not acceptable.”
The Brazilian president said he has no personal issues with Trump, adding that he will be able to meet at the UN next month or at the UN climate consultations in November. However, he noted Trump’s track record of dressing down White House guests such as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ukrainian President Voldi Zelensky.
“What Trump did with Zelensky was humiliating. That’s not normal. It was humiliating that Trump was Ramaphosa,” Lula said. “One president cannot humiliate another president. I respect everyone and I want respect.”
Lula said his government was focusing on domestic policies to ease the economic blow of US tariffs while maintaining “fiscal responsibility.”
The president declined to elaborate on pending measures to support Brazilian companies that are expected to include lines of credit and other export support.
He also said he plans to call leaders of BRICS groups in developing countries beginning in India and China to discuss possible joint responses to US tariffs.
“There’s no adjustments between Bricks yet, but there will be, but there will be,” Lula said. “What is the bargaining power of a small country with the United States? None.”
Separately, he said Brazil is considering filing a collective complaint with other countries in the World Trade Organization.
“I was born through negotiation,” said Lula, raised in poverty and rose to overtake union ranks to serve two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, before reentering politics in the 2022 election, beating the incumbent Bolsonaro.
But he said he was not in a hurry to either enter into a contract or retaliate against US tariffs: “We need to be very careful,” he said.
When asked about measures targeting US companies, including intensifying taxation on large-scale technology companies, Lula said his government is studying how to tax US companies in an equal position with Brazilian companies.
Lula also described plans to create new national policies for Brazil’s strategic mineral resources, treating them as a matter of “national sovereignty,” breaking the history of mining exports that bring little value to Brazil.
(Reporting by Brad Haynes and Lisandra Paraguassu, edited by Alistair Bell)
