US President Donald Trump speaks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Policy Conference in Washington, DC | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Trump: ‘Europe treats us worse than China’ Vestager ‘hates the United States perhaps worse than any person I’ve ever met.’

Ahead of a G20 meeting in Japan, Donald Trump launched a scathing attack on Europe, saying it "treats us worse than China" and that EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager "hates the United States perhaps worse than any person I've ever met."

Speaking to Fox on Wednesday, the U.S. president said that "European nations were set up to take advantage of the United States. They have worse trade barriers than China."

Trump's talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to dominate the upcoming G20 summit in Osaka, with the two leaders expected to meet on Saturday. And Trump signaled that he is in more of a mood for rapprochement with Beijing than with Brussels.

Trump described European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as "a fantastic gentleman, a fantastic businessperson, extremely tough." But he was much less kind to Vestager, a key member of Juncker's team, who has taken on landmark cases involving Google and Apple.

"You have a woman in Europe, I won't mention her name, she's actually considered to take Jean-Claude's place ... she hates the United States perhaps worse than any person I've ever met. What she does to our country. She's suing all our companies. We should be suing Google and Facebook, and perhaps we will."

Europe, he said, makes it "almost impossible to do two-way business," adding that "Europe treats us worse than China."

"I don't even say they're wrong, but it's unfair to us."

He also returned to a familiar theme: that European members of NATO don't pay their fair share.

"We pay for close to 100 percent of NATO, people don't know that. Germany doesn't pay what it's supposed to pay. Out of the 28 [sic] countries, seven are paid up. I got them to pay last year $100 billion more, Secretary [-General Jens] Stoltenberg will tell you." He then said Stoltenberg is Trump's "biggest fan in the whole world who goes around saying 'If it wasn't for President Trump, we wouldn't even have NATO.'"