'Please Make It Stop': Trump’s Weird New Rant Polarizes Critics Online

The president met Monday with South Korean leader Lee Jae-myung before taking questions about his ongoing trade war in the Oval Office.

President Donald Trump served quite the White House word salad Monday during a press conference with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, as he was asked about potentially reviving trade talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — only to start rambling about magnets.

Trump told reporters that he would “like to meet” with the North Korean dictator for a fourth time, but then began discussing his precarious trade truce with China. He warned of steeper tariffs if China’s rare-earth magnet exports were curbed when the diatribe truly began.

“China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets,” Trump said Monday. “And nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets.’ There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”

“It’ll take us probably a year to have ’em,” he continued. “We’re heavy into the world of magnets now. Only from a national security standpoint, but we have a powerful thing.”

Trump announced a sweeping 10% baseline tariff in April on all U.S. imports, with levies on dozens of countries set even higher. China responded by limiting magnet and rare-earth mineral exports, resulting in a 90-day trade truce agreed on earlier this month.