Path to prosperity for US and the world lies in cooperation, not confrontation

Turning a deaf ear to the "hands off" cries of protesters not far from his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he played golf over the weekend, the US president said foreign governments would have to pay "a lot of money" to get tariff relief.

Making the remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One, the US leader said he was not concerned about market losses, which have already wiped out nearly $6 trillion in value last week since the announcement of the so-called "reciprocal tariffs".

In a bizarre move to try and help the US to shirk its responsibility for causing the market losses with its coercive tariff policy, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed the stock market plunge on China's DeepSeek large language models in an interview aired on Saturday. "For everyone who thinks these market declines are all based on the president's economic policies, I can tell you that this market decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of DeepSeek," the US treasury chief disingenuously said.