Fox News anchor Chris Wallace excoriated President Trump after the president went on a Twitter tirade about the U.S.-China trade war.
The president demanded Friday morning that “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing … your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon.”
“The best I can tell, the American president can’t order U.S. companies how they’re going to do their sales and where they’re going to have their supply chains. We have a free-market capitalist system. I don’t think the president can order a car company to move some of its factories from one place to another,” Wallace told Sandra Smith on America’s Newsroom.
“He could impose tariffs or make it economically untenable, but I don’t think he can sit there and order the CEO or the board and my guess is that most people in this country wouldn’t want to see a president be able to do this,” Wallace said.
Wallace went on to push back on Trump for attacking his own pick to lead the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. In one tweet of the thread president’s morning thread, he questioned who was a “bigger enemy” to the United States, Powell or China’s Chairman Xi.
….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
“When you have the president of the United States sort of flailing around this way and ordering companies to move back to the U.S. and saying that the head of the Federal Reserve is the enemy of the country, is that going to create more consumer confidence about the state of the economy or not?” Wallace asked rhetorically.
