Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — As markets nosedived and foreign allies recoiled after the unveiling of sweeping tariffs to be imposed by the U.S., President Donald Trump said he was looking toward the future impact of his levies.
In the case of manufacturing growth, a key administration interest in imposing a 10% levy on all trade partners and significantly higher tariffs on certain nations such as China, Trump said it could take years.
“Let’s say it’s a two-year process,” Trump said when asked by a reporter on Thursday how long it will take to get the industry where he wants to see it.
“You know, they start a plant, and they’re big plants We’re giving them approval to also, in many cases, to build the electric facility with it,” he continued. “So, you have electric generation and the plant, and they’re big plants. Now, the good news is a lot of money for them, and they can build them fast, but they’re still very big plants. I’d always say it would take a year-and-a-half to two years.”
Meanwhile, Trump brushed off concerns about the short-term pain economists expect to be passed on to American consumers.
“It’s to be expected where this is a patient that was very sick,” Trump said, comparing his economic policies to surgery.
“It’s going to be a booming country, a very booming country,” the president said.
Trump’s tariff plan, announced in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, includes a baseline 10% tariff against all U.S. trade partners and steeper, more targeted levies against nations that place duties on U.S. imports.
Jay Timmons, the chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, released a statement on Wednesday night criticizing the rollout.
“Needless to say, today’s announcement was complicated, and manufacturers are scrambling to determine the exact implications for their operations,” Timmons said.
Timmons, who oversees the country’s largest manufacturing trade association, said the administration should instead make inputs that manufacturers use to produce products in the U.S. tariff-free and try to negotiate “zero-for-zero” tariffs for American-made goods in foreign markets.
“The stakes for manufacturers could not be higher,” he said. “Many manufacturers in the United States already operate with thin margins,” he added, and “the high costs of new tariffs threaten investment, jobs, supply chains and, in turn, America’s ability to outcompete other nations and lead as the preeminent manufacturing superpower.”
Fallout continued on Friday to Trump’s tariff plan. China hit back with retaliatory tariffs of their own: a 34% levy on all U.S. goods. Markets slipped further in early trading, after recording their worst day since June 2020 on Thursday.
Trump on Thursday signaled an openness to negotiation, despite White House officials throughout the day denying any chance of bargaining on the tariffs.
Then on Friday morning, Trump appeared to only double down, writing on his social media site: “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
(BRUSSELS) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is visiting NATO’s headquarters in Brussels for a meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers, putting him on the front lines of the Trump administration’s push against traditional American allies in Europe.
European leaders were already bracing for a contentious gathering. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull back aid from Ukraine amid its efforts to fight off Russia’s invasion marked a dramatic break with other allies, while his decision to engage Moscow in direct, one-on-one negotiations has left the continent’s diplomats back on their heels.
But on Wednesday, shortly before Rubio was set to depart for Belgium, Trump unveiled sweeping new “reciprocal” tariffs — including a 20% tax on imports from the European Union.
So far, Rubio has declined to address the tariff issue head on, but his Canadian counterpart said the global economic shock made it difficult to focus on the meeting’s pressing agenda.
“Clearly we’re passing that message to our American counterparts that it’s difficult to have these [NATO] conversations in the context of a trade war,” Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said in an interview with CNN.
Rubio has also tried to skirt another topic of contention: Trump’s stated desire to “get” Greenland for the United States by any means necessary.
Rubio met with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen on the sidelines of the NATO ministerial but didn’t respond to reporters’ questions asking what he would say about Greenland during the session. The State Department also made no mention of the Danish autonomous territory in its readout of the engagement.
“Secretary Rubio reaffirmed the strong relationship between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said. “They discussed shared priorities including increasing NATO defense spending and burden sharing and addressing the threats to the alliance, including those posed by Russia and China.”
Rasmussen later said his meeting with Rubio was “good” but that while Greenland was not on the agenda “for many reasons,” he had still taken the opportunity “to very strongly object to claims and presidential statements of a vision of acquiring Greenland.”
It has amounted to a situation in which it’s not within the limits of international law,” he said, calling it “an attack on Danish sovereignty.”
“We have seen these statements from the president, and we can’t accept that,” Rasmussen added. “And I made it very, very clear.”
Rubio and Rasmussen’s meeting comes just days after Vice President J.D. Vance visited Greenland alongside his wife, Usha Vance, and national security adviser Mike Waltz.
The second lady was originally scheduled to headline the trip and spend several days on the world’s largest island, taking in Greenlandic cultural sites, but the visit sparked backlash from Greenland’s interim government and Danish leaders who noted an invitation was never extended.
In the aftermath, the White House added the vice president to the traveling delegation and whittled down the itinerary, shortening the trip to a one-day stop at a remote American military base in northwestern Greenland.
Rubio has taken a more measured approach in his comments about Greenland than the president, but he still emphasized what he said are the pressing U.S. national security concerns surrounding control of the island.
“This is not a joke,” Rubio said in January. “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest, and it needs to be solved.”
At NATO Headquarters on Thursday, Rubio tried to reassure allies that despite the president’s mixed signals, the Trump administration still views the alliance as central to U.S. security.
“President Trump’s made clear he supports NATO. We’re going to remain in NATO,” he said.
Still, Rubio pushed the administration’s message that allies need to increase their defense spending — calling on all of the alliance’s members to commit to putting up to 5% of their annual GDP toward it, a sharp uptick from the previous 2% benchmark.
“We do want to leave here with an understanding that we are on a pathway, a realistic pathway,” he said. “That includes the United States that will have to increase its percentage.”
(WASHINGTON) — On the heels of terminating 10,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services this week, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told ABC News some programs would soon be reinstated because they were mistakenly cut.
Kennedy’s comments were in response to a question about a branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead levels among children and manages prevention across the country. The program was gutted on Tuesday.
“There were some programs that were cuts that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said other programs across HHS would be reinstated as well.
Of the cuts that were made, he said some would be brought back because they were not the administrative roles that the Department of Government Efficiency, run by billionaire Elon Musk, was aiming to eliminate, such as communications or human resources jobs, and that research or “studies” were also wrongly swept up in the mass layoffs.
“We’re streamlining the agencies. We’re going to make it work for public health, make it work for the American people,” Kennedy said. “In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies that should have not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them. Personnel that should not have been cut were cut — we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan.”
That was news to Erik Svendsen, the director of the division that oversaw the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention branch, who told ABC News in an interview that the work was completely stopped. Svendsen had not received any indication it would be reinstated or continued through another part of the CDC.
Kennedy did not respond to a question about when jobs would be reinstated. ABC News has reached out to HHS for more details on which roles, if any, have been asked to return.
It would not be the first time that jobs were reinstated after DOGE cuts. In the first round of firings, targeted at probationary workers, hundreds of CDC and Food and Drug Administration employees were later brought back.
“And one of the things that President Trump has said is that if we make mistakes, we’re going to admit it and we’re going to remedy it, and that’s one of the mistakes,” Kennedy said.
But even as he acknowledged that his department cut people mistakenly, Kennedy has maintained, including in comments earlier Thursday, that no front-line work or essential services were affected by the massive restructuring he’s overseeing.
“The cuts in all of our agency are not affecting science,” he said. “Front-line enforcement jobs and health delivery jobs are preserved.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump reacted for the first time on Thursday to the fallout from his tariff announcement, which included markets nosediving and foreign leaders threatening retaliation.
Trump had no public events on his schedule a day after his dramatic unveiling of severe tariffs against virtually all U.S. trading partners, but he did take a single question as he left the White House Thursday afternoon for a trip to a golf event in Miami.
“Markets today are way down … How’s it going?” a reporter asked the president.
“I think it’s going very well,” Trump responded. “It was an operation. I like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would exactly be the way it is.”
Trump continued to project confidence and said nations to be affected are now trying to see if they can “make a deal.”
“The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see is there any way they can make a deal.” Trump said. “They’ve taken advantage of us for many, many years. For many years we’ve been at the wrong side of the ball. And I’ll tell you what, I think it’s going to be unbelievable.”
Earlier Thursday, other Trump administration officials were deployed to deal with the fallout on the morning news shows.
Many of them, though, had insisted the tariffs weren’t up for bargaining.
“The president made it clear yesterday, this is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on CNN.
He’s always willing to pick up the phone to answer calls, but he laid out the case yesterday for why we are doing it this and these countries around the world have had 70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to,” Leavitt added.
“I don’t think there’s any chance that President Trump is gonna back off his tariffs,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on the network.
World leaders are weighing their response to Trump’s historic levies, some of which go into effect on April 5 and others on April 9.
China, which is going to be hit with a whopping 54% tariff rate, urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel its unilateral tariff measures and properly resolve differences with its trading partners through equal dialogue.”
Domestically, stocks plunged in early trading on Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 3.75%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq declined 5.75% and the S&P 500 tumbled 4.4%.
Vice President JD Vance, before the market selloff, acknowledged that Trump’s massive new tariffs will mean a “big change” for Americans. Trump, ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, had admitted there could be some short-term pain.
“President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. He promised it. And now he’s delivering. And yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it, but we needed a big change,” Vance told “Fox & Friends.”
Leavitt, too, defended the policy as Trump “delivering on his promise to implement reciprocal tariffs” during an appearance on CNN.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump. This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term,” she said.
Neither Vance nor Leavitt directly addressed the increased costs economists say U.S. consumers are all but certain to face or how they would help Americans.
“What I’d ask folks to appreciate here is that we’re not going to fix things overnight,” Vance said. “We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it’s not going to happen immediately.”
Asked about negative business reaction, Lutnick told CNN, “they’re not counting the factories” that he claimed would be built in the U.S. as a result.
“Let Donald Trump run the global economy. He knows what he’s doing,” Lutnick said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Pentagon’s independent watchdog has announced it has agreed to a request from top senators and is launching a probe into the use of the commercial messaging app Signal by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior Trump administration officials to discuss a future U.S. military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.
Last week, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., sent a letter to DOD acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins requesting an expedited inquiry into that Signal discussion.
“The purpose of this memorandum is to notify you that we are initiating the subject evaluation,” Stebbins wrote in a memo to the offices of the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense. “We are conducting this evaluation in response to a March 26, 2025 letter I received from the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, requesting that I conduct an inquiry into recent public reporting on the Secretary of Defense’s use of an unclassified commercially available messaging application to discuss information pertaining to military actions in Yemen in March 2025.”
“The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business. Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements,” Stebbins added in the memo.
“We may revise the objective as the evaluation proceeds. We plan to perform this evaluation in accordance with the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency ‘Quality Standards for Inspection and Evaluation,'” he said.
Last week, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed he had been added to a Signal text group that appeared to include senior Trump administration national security officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance, discussing plans to strike against Houthi targets in Yemen in mid-March.
Senior Trump administration officials including Hegseth pushed back on The Atlantic’s description of the conversation and argued no classified war plans had been discussed.
(WASHINGTON) — For decades, Donald Trump has used a signature phrase to show his contempt for countries he says cheat and take advantage of the U.S.: “They’re ripping us off.”
He used those very words again Wednesday as he capped off his long-standing personal grievance by announcing sweeping tariffs in the Rose Garden.
From trade deals to NATO security procedures, Trump has claimed that the U.S. has been given less return value, resources and, ultimately, respect for the amount of money, political will power and other resources that America has given the world.
While Trump’s rhetoric has gone well beyond the norms of traditional international diplomacy, his views have been shared by other U.S. leaders for a long time, according to Paul Poast, an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Chicago.
“He’s saying the quiet part out loud,” Poast told ABC News. “You can go all the way back to [President Harry] Truman, where U.S. leaders have made that comment, that the U.S. has been doing more than its fair share. He’s just using an extreme version of a complaint made.”
While Trump’s unprecedented approach has made headlines and seen pushback from world leaders from allies, including Canada and Mexico, the two nations he’s previously targeted with tariffs, Poast said it was too early to tell if the continued tough talk will affect international relations but he noted the rest of the world is taking notice.
US being ‘laughed at’ Trump has long blasted other countries for what he claimed are unfair practices toward the U.S. and its businesses. In 1987, he took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and other major newspapers arguing that the U.S. needed to scale back its support of Japan at a time when that country’s economy was dominating Americas.
“Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore,” he wrote.
Two years later, Trump continued his criticism of Japan along with Saudi Arabia and West Germany in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer where he argued for taxes and tariffs.
“America is being ripped off. And I’ll tell you what. We’re not going to have an America in 10 years if it keeps going like this. We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country. And nobody’s doing it,” he said.
The phrase would be repeated for years and amplified on the 2016 campaign trail, during his first term, his first and second reelection campaigns and now in his current term.
[“With] great consistency, actually, because I’ve been talking about it for 40 years, but because I saw what was happening 40 years ago,” the president said Wednesday during his tariff announcement.
Poast said that Trump’s grievance is derived from the perceived value of their exports versus imports, which he said can be oversimplified.
To the average American, seeing more foreign-based products versus U.S. made goods gives an appearance that there is an imbalance, but when it comes to foreign relations and the economy — the impact is more nuanced, he said.
“The U.S. trade policies always included limited import, and we are getting a lot from other countries economically,” Poast said.
Regarding the intangible benefits to support such as the economic aid, the military, assistance and political backing, the arguments about being “ripped off” get more obtuse, according to Poast.
“I think during the Cold War it was easier to convince people to spend it. You had a key figure you’re trying to stop Russia from winning and spreading communism,” Poast said. “Now it’s much harder to have that argument because of how divided we are.”
In many cases, trade deals and agreements also have come with benefits to the U.S. such as military bases, reduced rents for U.S.-based offices and other reimbursements, he added.
Nonetheless, Poast said that U.S. presidents of all political backgrounds have pushed allies to do more when it comes to trade and support, and many times come up short of their negotiations.
“The big difference is that Trump gets angry and starts name calling, whereas someone like [President Barack] Obama would be like ‘I’m not mad, I’m disappointed,'” Poast said.
Trump’s rhetoric during his first term did appear to make strides with one nation: Japan.
Then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was well-versed with Trump’s war of words toward his country, curried favor with the president shortly after he won the 2016 election.
“He was like, ‘I need to show Trump the value of cooperating with Japan and I need to convince him that we are important,'” Poast said of Abe. “And it worked to the point where Trump came around and invited him to the White House, and Trump visited him in Japan and they had a strong partnership.”
Trump mentioned his dealings with Abe in his Rose Garden unveiling.
“They all understand they’re ripping us off,” he said.
“Shinzo Abe, he was a fantastic man … I went to him and I said, ‘Shinzo, we have to do something’ — trade is not fair.’ He said, ‘I know that. I know that,'” Trump said Abe responded.
Countries such as France, Germany and China have not been as flattering to Trump compared to Japan during his administrations in the public eye, but they have continued to negotiate trade and foreign policy plans, but rarely gave Trump everything he wanted.
“When it comes to his demands, this is the question always ask for Trump. What extent is he making demands and trying to be a deal maker?” Poast said. “It’s the idea that you come out with the outrageous idea and then negotiate down.”
Trump’s second term, however, has seen the president push through with his proposals, including the worldwide tariffs and increased calls for the takeover of Greenland, Canada and Panama.
The talk has resulted in more verbal pushback from world leaders calling out Trump for his rhetoric.
“We have to accept that the U.S. is not the single global power anymore, and other countries are now adjusting,” Poast said.
Poast said it doesn’t know if Trump’s tactics will set a new norm for international relations but did note that the political polarization of the international community and the magnified scope of the world stage has shifted the conversations and visible tensions.
“I think any adjustment that does happen will be less with Trump and his rhetoric but the changing power structure in the world system. We are living a world that is more multi-polar and we will see more shifts. Trump did not create that he may be more of a product of that and make light of that,” he said.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer; Photo credit: Jacob M. Langston for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The White House has fired a handful of National Security Council staffers following a Wednesday meeting with far-right political activist Laura Loomer, who made recommendations to President Donald Trump about who he should fire, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Loomer met with Trump Wednesday, shortly before his tariff announcement in the Rose Garden, the sources said. Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance and the head of personnel Sergio Gor were involved in the meeting. Rep. Scott Perry was also present, but he was scheduled to meet with Trump about a variety of different topics, the sources added.
“NSC doesn’t comment on personnel matters,” NSC spokesman Brian Hughes said in a statement.
The New York Times was first to report on Trump’s meeting with Loomer.
“Out of respect for President Trump and the privacy of the Oval Office, I’m going to decline on divulging any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump. It was an honor to meet with President Trump and present him with my research findings, I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security,” Loomer told ABC News in a statement.
Loomer has frequently spread misinformation. In July, she falsely claimed in a social media post that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency after landing at Joint Base Andrews — a claim for which there was no evidence.
She had also started unsubstantiated claims about family members of Judge Juan Merchan in Trump’s New York hush money case, including that his daughter posted a fake photo of Trump in jail on social media, which the court has denied. It prompted Trump to share Loomer’s posts and spread the rumors.
Loomer accompanied Trump to several campaign events last fall — a move that prompted criticism from some Republicans at the time.
While it’s not clear whether any of the recent firings are directly related to national security adviser Mike Waltz and his staff’s use of the messaging app, Signal to communicate about sensitive topics, it comes as Waltz has had to privately defend himself and his staff to the president and other senior White House staffers.
The day after the inauguration, the Trump administration purged more than 150 NSC staffers because the new administration wanted to make sure the the goals of the NSC aligned with Trump’s agenda. Firing the nonpolitical staffers, who typically serve two-year stints on the council, has left the NSC severely understaffed and lacking subject matter experts from across government.
(WASHINGTON) — The White House on Thursday was standing firmly behind President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff rollout despite markets nosediving, businesses recoiling and foreign leaders threatening retaliation.
While Trump had no public events on his schedule a day after his dramatic Rose Garden announcement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance were deployed to deal with the fallout on the morning news shows before the market selloff began.
Vance acknowledged that Trump’s massive new tariffs, which will impact virtually all U.S. trading partners, will mean a “big change” for Americans, who Trump earlier had said would feel some short-term pain.
“President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. He promised it. And now he’s delivering. And yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it, but we needed a big change,” Vance told “Fox & Friends.”
Leavitt, too, defended the policy as Trump “delivering on his promise to implement reciprocal tariffs” during an appearance on CNN.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump. This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term,” she said.
Neither Vance nor Leavitt, though, directly addressed the increased costs economists say U.S. consumers are all but certain to face or how they would help Americans in the short term.
“What I’d ask folks to appreciate here is that we’re not going to fix things overnight,” Vance said. “We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it’s not going to happen immediately.”
U.S. stocks plunged in early trading on Thursday hours after Trump’s announcement of a minimum 10% tariff on all countries and more targeted “kind reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of nations he accused of treating the U.S. unfairly in trade relations.
Asked about negative business reaction, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later told CNN, “they’re not counting the factories” that he claimed would be built in the U.S. as a result.
Meanwhile, world leaders are weighing their response to Trump’s historic levies, some of which go into effect on April 5 and others on April 9.
China, which is going to be hit with a whopping 54% tariff rate, urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel its unilateral tariff measures and properly resolve differences with its trading partners through equal dialogue.”
The White House, though, says the tariffs aren’t up for debate.
“The president made it clear yesterday, this is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency. He’s always willing to pick up the phone to answer calls, but he laid out the case yesterday for why we are doing it this and these countries around the world have had 70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to,” Leavitt said on CNN.
“They have ripped off American workers. They have taken our jobs overseas. The president is putting an end to that,” Leavitt continued.
“He is not backing off,” Lutnick said.
President Trump on Wednesday, as he spoke in the White House Rose Garden, had a message for targets of the plan.
“If they complain, if you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America because there is no tariff if you build your plant, your product in America,” Trump said.
“I don’t concede on something that I believe to be unconstitutional. I can’t. I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. So, we’re going to find a path through this. We’re working on that,” Johnson said Wednesday. “I talked to everybody who voted against the rule, and we’ll work it out. So, we got time to do it, and those conversations continue.”
Earlier this week, nine Republicans sided with Democrats to torpedo a procedural rule that included language to kill Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s bipartisan discharge petition on proxy voting for new lawmaker parents.
The vote has thrown the House into disarray and paralyzed the chamber, leaving Johnson to find a way to break the impasse. The vote also called into question Johnson’s ability to control Republicans’ razor-thin majority.
House Republican leaders, including Johnson, had said they would take the unprecedented step to block Luna’s petition on proxy voting, which gives both mothers and fathers the ability to vote remotely up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child.
After the vote, Johnson said because it failed, “we can’t have any further action on the floor this week.” The rule that lawmakers voted on included language to block proxy voting — as well as other pieces of legislation.
“The reason that I said that the agenda was taken out for the week is because it was, it was all in one rule. We could have run the SAVE Act, but the rest of it would have to have been done in a different rule. And I had a big group of House Republicans who did not want to support a rule until we took care of the proxy voting situation,” he claimed.
Johnson said he is “actively working” to accommodate young mothers serving in Congress.
“While I understand the pure motivations of the few Republican proxy vote advocates, I simply cannot support the change they seek,” Johnson wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “The procedural vote yesterday was our effort to advance President Trump’s important legislative agenda while disabling a discharge petition that would force proxy voting and open a dangerous Pandora’s box for the institution.”
“To allow proxy voting for one category of Members would open the door for many others, and ultimately result in remote voting that would harm the operation of our deliberative body and diminish the critical role of the legislative branch,” he added.
Johnson said that he wants a room for mothers to nurse right off the House floor even though there is currently one in the basement of the Capitol. He said leaders are also looking at allowing the use of government money for members to fly their infant babies to D.C. with their mothers and fathers.
“We want to accommodate mothers who want to serve in Congress, and we’re the pro-family party, so we’ll do that, but we can’t do something that violates the Constitution or destroys the institution you serve,” he said.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s sweeping new set of tariffs impact friend and foe alike, but also on the list are uninhabited islands while some glaring omissions include Russia and Iran.
Trump on Wednesday unveiled “kind reciprocal” tariff rates on certain nations that the administration’s deemed the worst offenders in trade with the U.S., in addition to a minimum 10% baseline tariff on all U.S. trading partners.
“If they complain, if you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America because there is no tariff if you build your plant, your product in America,” Trump said as he announced the policy at the White House.
“Likewise, to all of the foreign presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, ambassadors and everyone else who will soon be calling to ask for exemptions from these tariffs, I say terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers, don’t manipulate your currencies,” Trump added.
At the top of the list is China, which will be hit with a whopping 54% tariff rate once the additional levies are put into effect. High levies are also being placed on the European Union, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, India and more.
Israel is also a target of “reciprocal” tariffs, despite moving ahead of Trump’s announcement to cancel all remaining tariffs on American imports (which there were very few of thanks to the Israel-United Staes Free Trade agreement that has been in place since the 1980s).
Israel, though, still got hit with a 17% rate. The Israeli government is already pushing back on the Trump administration’s calculation that Israel somehow charged a 33% tariff to the U.S., with one official calling it “puzzling.”
What else is on Trump’s list
British Indian Ocean Territory — The only inhabitants of the United Kingdom territory located in the Indian Ocean are American and British military personnel and contractors stationed at a joint defense facility.
Heard and McDonald Islands — Australian external territory of mostly barren Antarctic islands; uninhabited with no imports or exports.
Norfolk Island — This is another Australian external territory, but for some reason the Trump administration has set the reciprocal tariff rate at 29%. That is far above the 10% for Australia and other external territories. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already expressed confusion over the area’s inclusion, as there is very little trade between the U.S. and the tiny island, which has a population around 2,000.
Svalbard and Jan Mayen — These are remote territories of Norway in the Arctic Ocean. The new tariff rate is just 5% less than it is for greater Norway, though an Mayen also has no permanent population.
Réunion — The island is considered to be an overseas department and region of France, has similar status to its counterparts in metropolitan France and doesn’t have its own bilateral trade agreements. It is generally treated by the U.S. as a part of France but the administration is setting the tariff rate for the island at 37% instead of the European Unions’s 20 % rate.
What is notably not included on Trump’s list
Russia — Moscow was omitted from the list and the White House has been claiming this is because sanctions preclude any meaningful trade. This is false. Trade has fallen dramatically between the U.S. and Russia since the onset of the war in Ukraine but last year the U.S. imported around $3 billion in goods from Russia (many times the dollar amount between the U.S. and many of the small island territories that did make the list).
Belarus, Cuba and North Korea — The White House made the same argument as it did for Russia for why they are not on the list, but in these countries’ cases, there is much less trade with the U.S. Although it is still on par or surpasses trade with some of the island territories.
Iran — There’s not a whole lot of trade between the U.S. and Iran because of the many sanctions against the country, but amid the Trump administration’s effort to impose “maximum pressure” against the regime, it’s notable that Tehran is only getting hit with the baseline 10% tariff.
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
