U.S. President Donald Trump reasserted on Friday that Mexico has “nothing” the United States needs — apart from “hot tamales” and “tomatoes” — and therefore the U.S. could cease trading with its southern neighbor.
However, Trump said he didn’t want to end trade with Mexico — a country that sent more than US $60 billion worth of exports to the U.S. in July alone — “because we get along very well” with President Claudia Sheinbaum.
🇺🇸🇲🇽 Donald Trump aseguró que México no tiene “nada que ofrecer” a Estados Unidos más allá de “tamales y tomates”, al hablar sobre su política comercial desde el Despacho Oval.
Pese a la declaración, el presidente estadounidense descartó por ahora interrumpir el comercio con…
— Azucena Uresti (@azucenau) September 4, 2026
His remarks from the Oval Office came just hours after he threatened in a social media post to “STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” among which is Mexico, if the U.S. Federal Reserve doesn’t lower its benchmark interest rate, which is currently set at 3.50%-3.75%.
“The Fed Board, with its great new leader [Kevin Warsh], must get smart – BE PATRIOTS for a change. High interest rates put the U.S.A. at a very unfair disadvantage, and I won’t allow that to happen!” Trump wrote on Truth Social ahead of the Fed’s next interest rate decision on Sept. 16.
Later on Friday, the U.S. president told reporters that “we could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries.”
“We lose with the European Union $200 billion a year. If I didn’t trade with them, we’d lose nothing — just one swipe of the pen,” Trump said.
“We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year,” he said, referring to the United States’ trade deficit with its southern neighbor in 2025.
“… They have nothing that we have to have — I mean hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things,” Trump said.
“But basically they have nothing that we need. We have oil, we have everything,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to end trade with Mexico “because we get along very well with the president.”
“We like the president, [we] respect her a lot, but if we didn’t want to trade with Mexico, if we didn’t want to trade with Canada, we’d save from $60 billion to $90 billion a year, just by not trading with Canada,” Trump said.
The U.S. president has previously asserted that the United States doesn’t need anything from Mexico and Canada, its two largest trade partners.
“With Mexico and Canada we have trade deficits. We should have surpluses with them. We don’t need their cars, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said on June 10, the same day that he declared that he wasn’t seeking to renew the USMCA free trade pact.
Three weeks later, the United States announced that it had declined to renew the trilateral agreement in its “current form,” a move that paved the way for annual reviews of the USMCA, which remains in force.
Trump’s assertion that Mexico has “nothing” that the United States needs collides with the reality that the U.S. and Mexican economies are highly integrated and that Mexico ships huge quantities of goods to its northern neighbor on a daily basis. Among Mexico’s exports to the U.S. are vehicles, auto parts, machinery, medical devices, AI servers, alcoholic beverages and fresh food, including tomatoes.
In July alone, Mexico exported goods worth $60.55 billion to the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Mexico’s exports to the U.S. in the first seven months of 2026 were worth $358.7 billion, an increase of 16% compared to the same period of last year.
Mexico News Daily
