Trump, Donald J

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    Russia’s Escape From Trump’s Tariffs Raises Questions

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    When President Trump unveiled major new tariffs on Wednesday, one big economy that he did not target was Russia.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Wednesday that Moscow was spared because sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped. North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, which are also subject to tough sanctions, were also excluded from the new levies.Trade data paints a more complicated picture. The value of U.S. trade with Russia has fallen to its lowest level in decades following the invasion. But last year, Russia still exported about $3 billion worth of goods to the United States, according to U.S. trade figures, mostly fertilizer and platinum.That figure is significantly higher than the value of U.S. imports from some smaller countries that Mr. Trump targeted, such as Laos and Fiji, prompting questions about whether the White House’s decision to spare Russia was a strategic choice.Mr. Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on buyers of Russian oil, a trade that is the lifeline of the country’s war machine, if President Vladimir V. Putin did not cooperate with U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine. Such tariffs would significantly complicate the country’s foreign trade.Mr. Trump may be holding back new economic restrictions on Russia as leverage in the peace talks, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and a former official at the Russian central bank.“I think it’s a political decision,” Ms. Prokopenko said. “Trump does not want to escalate while his talks with Putin are ongoing.”The idea that Mr. Trump is using tariffs as a geopolitical bargaining tool appears to be supported by his treatment of Iran, another target of his deal-making ambitions. He put Iran in the lowest tier of the new tariffs, 10 percent, which is lower than the rate imposed on Israel, a staunch U.S. ally.The composition of Russia’s exports could have also played a role. Russia is the third largest foreign supplier of fertilizer to the United States, and the total amount of its fertilizer exports has increased over the past year.Mr. Trump has been weighing how to protect American farmers, a key constituency, from the effects of his trade wars. Keeping the cost of fertilizer low could be part of that strategy. More

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    How Countries Reacted to Trump’s Tariffs

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    Here is how some of the United States’ key trading partners responded on Thursday to President Trump’s stiff new tariffs:China: The Commerce Ministry in Beijing vowed countermeasures against the sweeping new tariffs, which it described as “unilateral bullying.” The Trump administration hit Beijing with a new 34 percent duty that will be added to the levies that the president had already imposed since January. Mr. Trump also scrapped a loophole that has allowed many e-commerce companies, such as Shein and Temu, to send low-cost goods to the United States from China without having to pay taxes.European Union: The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the bloc would be united in its response, but did not specify what measures it would take. “If you take on one of us, you take on all of us,” she said. Mr. Trump imposed a 20 percent tariff on European Union goods.Britain: Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not suggest that Britain would immediately retaliate, and said that negotiations toward a trade deal with the United States would continue. The Trump administration has imposed a 10 percent tariff on Britain, lower than the 20 percent tariff it levied on the European Union.France: Prime Minister François Bayrou of France, an E.U. member, said that the tariffs were “a catastrophe for the economic world” and would also cause pain for the United States. France’s government spokeswoman, Sophie Primas, provided some detail about how the European Union could respond to the new tariffs. “We are also going to attack services,” which make up the bulk of the American economy, she said in an interview with French radio. That could include online services provided by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, she added.Germany: Finance Minister Jörg Kukies said he remained hopeful that Europe would be able to reach a deal with Washington, but added: “We do need a strong reaction.” He told the BBC, “It would be naïve to think that if we just sit there and let this happen, things will get better.” The tariffs on E.U. goods, especially on automotive parts, threaten Germany’s attempts to revive its stagnant economy, the largest in Europe.India: The Commerce Ministry said it was “carefully examining the implications of the various measures” announced by the United States, after Mr. Trump imposed 27 percent tariffs against it. Mr. Trump has long been irritated by the large U.S. trade deficit with India, despite his close relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Japan: Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called the tariffs “extremely regrettable,” but refrained from talk of retaliation. He said that his government was trying to impress upon the Trump administration that Japan is helping the United States to re-industrialize as its largest overseas investor. More

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    Britain Tried Everything, Including a Royal Invite. It Got a 10% Tariff.

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    After all that — the chummy Oval Office meeting, the extraordinary royal invitation, the paeans to the “special relationship” — Britain and its solicitous prime minister, Keir Starmer, still got swept into President Trump’s tariffs, along with the European Union and other major American trading partners.Mr. Trump imposed his basic tariff of 10 percent on Britain, while hitting the European Union with 20 percent. That drew sighs of relief from Mr. Starmer’s aides, who said the difference would protect thousands of British jobs. They claimed vindication for Mr. Starmer’s charm offensive toward the American president; others said it was a dividend of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016.Yet in another sense, it was a Pyrrhic victory: Britain was subject to the same blanket tariff as dozens of countries, even though the United States runs a trade surplus with Britain, according to U.S. statistics.Britain clearly hopes to strike some kind of trade deal with Mr. Trump down the road, which could spare it the tariffs’ lasting effect. On Thursday, Mr. Starmer told business executives that the British would react with “cool and calm heads.”The question is whether he will stick to his strategy — resisting pressure to impose retaliatory tariffs, for example — or fall into line with other countries, like Canada, in striking back against the United States. Downing Street said it would not impose tit-for-tat measures while trade talks were underway.“His strategy up till now has been perfectly understandable,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London. “If I were him, I would have done the same. Now he needs to avoid confrontation for the sake of it, but there’s no point in appeasement either.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Tariffs Aim to Revive U.S. Manufacturing. Is That Possible?

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    President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on a scale unseen in nearly a century is more than a shot across the bow at U.S. trading partners. If kept in place, the import taxes will also launch an economic project of defiant nostalgia: an attempt to reclaim America’s place as a dominant manufacturing power.In the postwar heyday of American manufacturing, which endured into the 1970s, nearly 20 million people once made their living from manufacturing. The United States was a leading producer of motor vehicles, aircraft and steel, and manufacturing accounted for more than a quarter of total employment.By the end of last year, after a fundamental reordering of the world economy, manufacturing employed about 8 percent of the nation’s workers.Now, the country is wealthier than ever. Yet the economy looks, and feels, quite different — dominated by service work of all types, both lucrative and low-wage. Industrial hubs in the American interior have often withered, leaving many strongholds of Mr. Trump’s base on the economic fringes.Protectionist industrial policies, of varying methods and attitudes, have been on the rise for a decade — from the time Mr. Trump began his first campaign for president in 2015 through the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office again.But the president’s announcement, at a flag-draped Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, represented a tectonic shift in U.S. economic policy, the fullest repudiation of an embrace of global free trade that began on a bipartisan basis in the 1980s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Japan Lacks a ‘Viable Option’ for Retaliating to Trump’s Tariffs

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    After being smacked with double-digit percentage tariffs by a key ally, Japan finds itself with few retaliatory options.Since President Trump began threatening broad tariffs in January, Japan has pursued a conciliatory strategy, with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba pledging in February to boost U.S. investment to $1 trillion.Up until the day before Mr. Trump’s tariff announcements on Wednesday, prominent business executives in Tokyo said they were hopeful Japan would be spared. Those hopes were dashed when Mr. Trump said U.S. imports from Japan would face a 24 percent tariff. Last week, he said that cars, Japan’s top export to the United States, would be subject to a 25 percent tax.While other places affected by the U.S. tariffs — including the European Union, Canada and China — have declared their intentions to retaliate with their own taxes on American goods, Japanese officials have refrained from talking about a similar move.That is in part because the state of Japan’s economy and the importance of its trade with the United States would make it difficult to do so, analysts say.Over the past few years, inflation, largely driven by rising energy and food costs, has surged in Japan and strained its economy. Japan’s imports from the United States are largely commodities, including natural gas and agricultural products.That is why imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports would be “self-defeating” and “simply not a viable option,” said Stefan Angrick, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in Tokyo. “The only remaining strategy is to shift the narrative and emphasize Japan’s willingness to import more commodities,” he said.American officials, including Mr. Trump, have repeatedly raised concerns about Japan’s non-tariff trade barriers, specifically citing import restrictions on agricultural products like rice and automotive standards that they contend put American manufacturers at a disadvantage.At a news conference on Thursday, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, declined to comment on what Japan would be willing to consider conceding in trade negotiations with the United States. Other officials, including the prime minister, refrained from talk of retaliation.Japan’s standards for certifying automobiles for use in the country are based on those established by the United Nations, Mr. Hayashi said. He also said that he has explained to his counterparts in Washington the details and logic behind Japan’s rice-import policies.“Despite this, it is extremely regrettable that the U.S. government has announced the recent reciprocal tariff measures mentioning rice,” Mr. Hayashi said. “In any case, Japan will continue to strongly urge the United States to review its measures.” More

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    China Will Face at Least 54 Percent Tariffs With Trump’s New Order

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    With the new tariffs announced on Wednesday in Washington, President Trump has now imposed additional tariffs on Chinese goods of 54 percent — an extremely heavy burden that will cause companies to look elsewhere for suppliers.Mr. Trump added a 34 percent tariff on imports from China, to take effect on April 9, on top of two earlier rounds of 10 percent tariffs he had already imposed.Those are just the new tariffs on China since Mr. Trump started his second term in office. During his first term, he put tariffs of 25 percent on a wide range of Chinese industrial goods and 7.5 percent on some consumer goods, which former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left in place.Mr. Trump’s latest action, on what he described as “Liberation Day,” has provoked considerable anger in China. On Thursday, China’s commerce ministry vowed to take countermeasures to “safeguard its own rights and interests.”Many government officials and experts had been hoping that Mr. Trump might follow the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules.He Weiwen, a retired Ministry of Commerce official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing research group, said that Mr. Trump’s actions were the biggest violation ever of the rules of the W.T.O. or its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.The latest tariffs “will not liberate America, but will only cause new suffering to the American economy and American families,” Mr. He said.China’s official news agency, Xinhua, published an editorial describing the Trump administration’s tariffs as “self-defeating bullying,” and said Washington was “turning trade into an over-simplistic tit-for-tat game.” More

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    Senate Votes to Rescind Some Trump Tariffs, With G.O.P. Support

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    The Senate on Wednesday approved a measure that would block some of the tariffs President Trump has imposed on Canada, with a handful of Republicans joining Democrats to pass a resolution that would halt levies set to take effect this week.The measure is all but certain to stall in the House, where G.O.P. leaders have moved preemptively to shut down any move to end Mr. Trump’s tariffs. But Senate passage of the measure on a vote of 51 to 48 — just hours after Mr. Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs on more than 100 trading partners, including the European Union, China, Britain and India — sent a signal of bipartisan congressional opposition to the president’s trade war.The resolution targets the emergency powers Mr. Trump invoked in February to impose sweeping tariffs on Canada, a move that has rattled markets and drawn bipartisan criticism from lawmakers concerned about the economic impact on their states and districts.Mr. Trump imposed the tariffs in an executive order that cited the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, a Cold War-era law that has most often been used to impose sanctions on rogue states and human rights violators. His administration argued that unchecked drug trafficking from Canada constituted a dire threat to American national security and used it as justification to unilaterally impose 25 percent tariffs on America’s closest trading partner.“The president has justified the imposition of these tariffs on, in my view, a made-up emergency,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and the lead sponsor of the resolution. “The fentanyl emergency is from Mexico and China. It’s not from Canada.”The resolution, cosponsored by two fellow Democrats, Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, seeks to revoke the emergency declaration and, with it, Mr. Trump’s ability to enforce the tariffs set to go into effect on Wednesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Americans’ Reaction to Trump’s Tariffs Vary From Worried to Enthused

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    President Trump’s announcement of sweeping universal and so-called reciprocal tariffs on countries around the world drew a swift rebuke on Wednesday from business groups, trade experts, Democratic lawmakers and many economists who warned that they would raise prices for American consumers and slow economic growth.“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president and chief executive of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America. “We had hoped the president would take a more targeted approach, but these broad tariffs will only drive-up costs, reduce product quality and weaken consumer confidence.”Other reactions were more muted, and some positive, saying the move was long overdue.“Today is arguably the single greatest trade and economic policy action in the history of the country, and it absolutely cements President Trump’s legacy that he is trying to usher in a new golden age of economy production and prosperity,” said Nick Iacovella, executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group that supports tariffs. He said the tariffs would contribute to “broadly re-industrializing the United States and creating working class jobs.”Mr. Trump insisted on Wednesday that experts had been wrong all along about his tariffs and that the anxiety about them now were misplaced. But those who will be forced to pay the tariffs were quick to raise concerns about the move, which will increase import taxes on products from some of America’s biggest trading partners including China, the European Union, Japan and India.The National Retail Federation said in a statement that the tariffs would “equal more anxiety and uncertainty for American businesses and consumers.” Tariffs are not paid for by foreign countries or suppliers but by U.S. importers, they said. They also added that “the immediate implementation of these tariffs is a massive undertaking and requires both advance notice and substantial preparation by the millions of U.S. businesses that will be directly impacted.”The National Association of Manufacturers said it was still parsing the details and exact implications of the president’s tariffs. But the group’s president, Jay Timmons, said in a statement that the high costs of new tariffs threatened investment, jobs, supply chains and, in turn, America’s ability to outcompete other nations and lead as the pre-eminent manufacturing superpower.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More