Bummer: Tenacious Swiss Finance Minister Tried To Stand Up To Trump

See, here’s the problem

And

Tenacious Swiss Leader Stood Up to Trump — It Backfired on Her

Karin Keller-Sutter admires the grit of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and as Swiss president is known as technocratic and tenacious. Those traits look to have backfired when she faced off with Donald Trump and led her country into crisis.

KKS — as she is known in Swiss politics — has had the worst week of her more than three-decade career. It’s even worse than in 2023, when over a frantic weekend she pushed through Credit Suisse’s forced marriage to UBS Group AG to limit the fallout on the country’s prized banking sector.

With Trump levying the highest tariffs in the developed world on Switzerland at 39% — more than double the European Union’s rate — there’s little relief in sight.

After the 61-year-old came home empty-handed from a last-ditch trip to Washington, the Swiss government had few answers after an emergency meeting of the seven-member federal council on Thursday, saying it would continue to seek to secure concessions.

She can admire Thatcher all she wants: she has to be able to back it up.

Similar determination led her to stand up to Trump. It looked like it might pan out, with Swiss negotiators thinking they had a deal in sight, but then came a bumpy call last week.

In what was described as a lecturing tone, she dismissed the notion that Switzerland was stealing from the US and insisted on including services in the discussions. That ran afoul of Trump’s focus on the US deficit in goods from exports such as luxury watches, gold and pharmaceuticals.

Her position was that Switzerland stands by its word and it was better to have no deal than a bad deal. But that didn’t go down well with the White House, and Switzerland didn’t have the leverage of bigger trading partners and put little on the table.

See, she’s never truly worked in the private sector, except briefly as a translator. Say what you want about Trump, he spent most of his life in business, with successes and failures. He knows how to negotiate. He knows when he has the advantage. What do the Swiss have? KKS probably thought she could badger and bully and get all big and mighty, and that utterly backfired. Did she think a lecturing tone would work? Should have taken the deal. But, she tried to think like a politician, not a business person. She’s not the only one abroad, and at home, who’ve made this mistake.

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