President Donald Trump has stated that the U.S. will impose tariffs on countries that "harm" America, explicitly naming China, India and Brazil as examples of nations with high tariffs. Speaking to House Republicans at a retreat in Florida on Monday, his first after starting his second term, Trump said, “We’re going to put tariffs on outside countries and outside people that really mean harm to us. Well, they mean us harm, but they basically want to make their country good.”

“Look at what others do. China is a tremendous tariff maker and India and Brazil and so many other countries. So we're not going to let that happen any longer because we're going to put America first,” he said further.

Trump stated that the U.S. would establish a “fair system” where funds would flow into the country’s treasury, making America “very rich again” in a “very short time.” He emphasised the need for the U.S. to revert to the system that had once made it “richer and more powerful than ever.”

Recalling his inaugural address, Trump said, “Instead of taxing our citizens to benefit foreign countries, we should impose tariffs and taxes on foreign nations to benefit our citizens.” “Under the American first economic model, as tariffs on other countries go up, taxes on American workers and businesses will come down, and massive numbers of jobs and factories will come home,” said Trump.

Earlier, Trump had already spoken of imposing “100 per cent tariffs” on the BRICS grouping, which India is a part of. In his speech, Trump encouraged companies to set up manufacturing operations in the U.S. if they wished to avoid tariffs.

“If you want to stop paying the taxes or the tariffs, you have to build your plant right here in America. That's what's going to happen at record levels. We're going to have more plants built in the next short period of time than anybody ever envisioned before because the incentive is going to be there because they have no tariff whatsoever,” said Trump.

“To further return production to the United States, we're going to environmentally free up our rare earth minerals. We have some of the best rare earth anywhere in the world, but we're not allowed to use it because the environmentalists got there first,” the president said in his speech.