Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Miami on September 16. Reuters
Steve Wynn sounds jubilant these days.
On Thursday, the Las Vegas casino billionaire gave his quarterly address to shareholders of Wynn Entertainment.
Business at his new hotel and casino on the Chinese territory of Macau is growing as he would like, and — for the first time in a long time — the mogul known for his bombastic tirades against the Chinese and American governments seems pleased with politics.
When a worried Wall Street analyst asked him whether he thought trade spats between President Donald Trump and a nationalistic Chinese government might hurt his business, he sounded confident.
«As you know I am acquainted with the administration. Several of us within in our business were sitting 30 feet from Trump when he took his oath on Friday,» he said.
«There isn’t a leader in America or a leader in China that doesn’t understand that when these two countries come together on an intelligent basis the world is better … It gives me long-term confidence, in spite of what happens in the short term, verbally. »
Actually, trade wars start verbally, and Trump so far has been sticking to his verbal commitments. Earlier Thursday he told a crowd in Philadelphia that he would throw out the US’s regional trade deals and negotiate them all one by one. He would give nations 30 days to comply with his offer or he would put up a tariff.
Later that day the news broke that he was considering putting a 20% tax on all goods from Mexico. The president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, had already canceled a meeting with the White House scheduled for next week because Trump tried to threaten him into paying for a wall on the border between the US and Mexico.
The president of Mexico’s national conference of governors, Gov. Graco Ramirez of Morelos, told a Mexican newspaper that Trump had declared «war» on Mexico.
«With Trump, dialogue is exhausted,» Ramirez told El Universal. «It doesn’t make sense to sit down with him. He doesn’t change his attitude or his position. »
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Reuters
This kind of response from Mexico isn’t out of the ordinary.
«The presumption seems to be that nations will just roll over, and that’s just not the way it happens,» said Lee Branstetter, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon who is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
