President Donald Trump raised eyebrows Monday with comments about magnets, claiming China orchestrated a global reliance on the technology two decades ago.
Speaking during an Oval Office meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, Trump said the U.S. could impose steep tariffs if China does not resume supplying magnets.
“They have to give us magnets. If they don’t give us magnets, then we have to charge them a 200 percent tariff for something, you know?” Trump said. The president has already delayed a new round of tariffs on Chinese imports until November.
China has restricted the export of some rare earth minerals and magnets in response to U.S. trade measures, a move Trump characterized as part of a long-term strategy.
“You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,’” he said. “There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”
Trump estimated it would take “probably a year” for the U.S. to secure enough supply. He added that America would now be “heavy into the world of magnets—only from a national security standpoint.”
The magnet discussion surfaced while Trump addressed U.S. aerospace interests. “I sent them all of the parts so their planes can fly,” he said of China. “Two hundred of their planes were unable to fly because we were not giving them Boeing parts purposely because they weren’t giving us magnets.”
“But we have a much more powerful thing, and that’s tariffs,” Trump continued. “We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the remarks.
Trump has frequently brought up magnets in the past, though his understanding of the technology has been criticized. At a campaign stop last January, he incorrectly suggested that magnets do not work underwater.
Earlier this year, he dismissed the use of magnets in the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, a feature of modern U.S. naval carriers. “And they have all magnetic elevators to lift up 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time.
And instead of using hydraulic, like on tractors that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything, they use magnets,” Trump said in February. “It’s a new theory: Magnets are going to lift the planes up. And it doesn’t work.
And they had billions and billions of dollars of cost overruns.” Despite his claims, there is no evidence that magnets used in such systems have failed.