Trump doesn’t want ‘to hurt Ireland’ — but he might

DUBLIN — U.S. President Donald Trump says he doesn’t “want to do anything to hurt Ireland” — but that “fairness” might force his hand.

That was the big takeaway from Trump’s at-times-excruciating, 45-minute White House monologue Wednesday, with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin on hand for a St. Patrick’s Day-linked visit that was viewed back in Dublin with dread and anxiety.

Martin, a diplomatic veteran, spent long periods sitting in bemused silence, his hands clasped tightly on his thighs and a Mona Lisa smile on his face. Trump, beside him, spent much of their time bashing past U.S. presidents and Brussels, although aiming no direct hits at Ireland.

The U.S. president at times projected a confused understanding of Ireland’s enthusiastic place within the European Union, wondering why his own Irish golf resort should be subject to EU environmental laws.

Martin must have sighed in relief when Trump brought up the EU’s court order from last year requiring that Apple pay a staggering €14 billion in back taxes plus interest to Ireland, which is the base of the iPhone maker’s European operations. That money, accepted with professed reluctance by the government in Dublin, is now helping to bloat Ireland’s EU-leading budget surplus and its new sovereign wealth funds.

Yet Trump said he thought the Apple billions were being spent, “I guess, to run the European Union.” Martin didn’t correct him.

Ireland’s former ambassador to Washington, Dan Mulhall, said that Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach or “chieftain,” had played his cards almost exactly right — by knowing when to hold ‘em.

“Naturally it’s the Donald Trump Show when you’re in the Oval Office, and Donald Trump likes to perform for the media,” said Mulhall, who was ambassador during Trump’s first term. “The Taoiseach obviously didn’t do most of the talking. That was probably a good thing.”

Indeed, Martin mostly spoke only to reinforce Trump’s preferred language on Ukraine and Israel — to the irritation of left-wing opposition leaders back in Dublin, who had wanted him to denounce Trump’s professed support for building a resort in a cleared-out Gaza Strip.

The only time Martin politely pushed back was when Trump complained that Ireland had hoovered up far too much U.S. corporate investment with “smart” tax incentives — and vowed that his administration would somehow reverse this. (Trump pulled the U.S. out of OECD-led international cooperative efforts to address aggressive tax competition earlier this year.)

Micheal Martin, a diplomatic veteran, spent long periods sitting in bemused silence, his hands clasped tightly on his thighs and a Mona Lisa smile on his face. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Martin stressed, as expected, that U.S.-Irish trade was growing strongly in both directions to the benefit of both nations. He cited Ireland as the biggest buyer of Boeing aircraft outside the United States, namechecking airline Ryanair and aircraft lessor AerCap.

Trump took that as his cue to condemn America’s failure to block U.S. pharmaceutical companies, in particular, from shifting their headquarters and profit-reporting centers to Ireland.

Provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax reform, inspired by earlier OECD-led global reforms, make such moves by multinationals less effective. Nonetheless, most of Ireland’s record-high €72 billion in goods exports to the U.S. last year were for drugs and related chemicals produced overwhelmingly by American multinationals that shifted to Ireland before Trump first took office.

“We do have a massive deficit with Ireland, because Ireland was very smart,” Trump said. “They took our pharmaceutical companies away from presidents that didn’t know what they were doing — and, you know, it’s too bad that happened.”

Trump said that had he been president since Ireland started winning Big Pharma investments in the 1990s, he would have punished any firms that tried to sell Irish-made products back into the U.S. market.

“When the pharmaceutical companies started to go to Ireland, I would have said: That’s OK … but if you want to sell anything into the United States, I’m gonna put a 200 percent tariff on you so you’re never gonna be able to sell anything into the United States. You know what they would’ve done? They would’ve stayed here.”

Amid a clamor of shouts from journalists, Trump gestured to Martin beside him: “He’s so lucky that I wasn’t!”

Trump claimed that four-fifths of Irish-Americans had voted for him in the 2024 election — and wondered aloud whether he might lose some of that support if his plans for sharp tariffs on EU goods, including Irish-made drugs, caused too much harm to Ireland.

“If I drained Ireland of all the companies, maybe I’d lose the Irish vote. We don’t want to do anything to hurt Ireland. But we do want fairness,” Trump said, glancing again at a Sphinx-like Martin.

“He understands that.”