Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Monday farmers from the Midwest and workers from states such as New Hampshire shouldn’t be used like “poker chips” in a game at one of President Trump’s “bankrupt casinos” amid the administration’s recent standoff with Mexico over tariffs.

“I don’t think, having just been in Iowa and my own state, that the farmers of the Midwest or the workers in New Hampshire should be poker chips which he appears to be using them in, in some kind of game from one of his bankrupt casinos,” Ms. Klobuchar said, echoing a line she had delivered Sunday.

The Minnesota Democrat and presidential candidate made the comments at a “Politics and Eggs” event hosted by Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester.

She said she’s not opposed to using tariffs in a targeted way and that China has been creating an “uneven playing field” when it comes to trade, but that the answer isn’t to go it alone.

Ms. Klobuchar said the way Mr. Trump recently tied his threat to impose tariffs on imports from Mexico to border security wasn’t a “good precedent for the future.”

Mr. Trump said late last week that the promised tariffs wouldn’t take effect as scheduled after Mexico agreed to step up its own border security efforts.

But Ms. Klobuchar was skeptical.

“And then what do we find out? We find out in a headline in the New York Times that actually most of that agreement had been made before he tweeted out that he had gotten this miraculous save of an agreement in response to a crisis that he had created,” she said.

For his part, Mr. Trump on Monday called the New York Times report “nonsense.”

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