President Donald Trump’s moves Friday to reignite his global trade war laid bare the administration’s bubbling frustration with resistance from both corporations and foreign countries unwilling to rapidly bow to U.S. demands.
After weeks of touting post-Liberation Day efforts to calm uneasy markets, Trump vowed to target the European Union with new 50 percent tariffs, declaring that he was no longer interested in reaching a trade deal following days of sluggish negotiations.
“It’s time that we play the game the way I know how to play the game,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I’m not looking for a deal. We’ve set the deal — it’s at 50 percent.”
The White House will also move ahead with fresh 25 percent tariffs on phone manufacturers in an effort to punish tech giant Apple for declining to make its iPhones exclusively in the U.S., Trump said.
The abrupt decisions underscored the intensifying pressure Trumpfaces to cut dozens of trade deals before a self-imposed July deadline that White House officials once suggested the administration would easily meet. The president has reserved much of his ire for the European Union, the 27-country bloc that represents the administration’s biggest trade target — yet also perhaps its most difficult.
“Trump is frustrated that the Europeans aren’t rushing to the negotiating table,” said Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Trump. The president’s actions today are “meant to get them to act.”
The trade threats, which roiled markets in the U.S. and abroad, came after Trump in a pair of Truth Social posts earlier Friday accused the EU of being “very difficult to deal with” and Apple CEO Tim Cook of failing to cooperate by shifting more of the company’s manufacturing to the United States.
The White House has insisted in recent days that its aggressive trade strategy is working, pointing to a preliminary agreement with the U.K. earlier this month as evidence that it could quickly cut favorable trade deals and bolster the economy.
But progress since then has been slow, magnifying concerns that the approach risks destabilizing the financial markets and further damaging Trump’s approval ratings. In a Marquette University Law School poll earlier this week, just 37 percent of Americans said they approved of the president’s tariff policies.
The United States and the EU have one of the biggest and broadest economic relations in the world in terms of trade and investment, and EU leaders have warned on multiple occasions they are prepared to retaliate if a fair deal can’t be quickly struck.
Last year, the United States imported $576 billion worth of goods from the 27 nations of the European Union and exported $367 billion worth of product across the Atlantic. That resulted in a U.S. trade deficit of $208 billion, one of the largest in the world and Trump’s primary motivation for threatening the EU with tariffs.
Trump officials have been locked in trade negotiations with their EU counterparts for weeks, irritating U.S. officials who have complained that the group’s leadership is bogging down the talks.
The “EU has a collective action problem here,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News on Friday, accusing its leadership of keeping member nations in the dark. “Some of the feedback that I’ve been getting is that the underlying countries don’t even know what the EU is negotiating on their behalf.”
He added in a separate Bloomberg TV interview that agreements with “several” trading partners could be struck in the next two weeks, but that Trump’s 90-day pause on some tariffs was “contingent on countries or trading blocs coming and negotiating in good faith.”
Trump’s initial Truth Social threat sought to ramp up the pressure on the EU to strike a deal, coming just hours before U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were set to speak with European Union trade chief Maros Sefcovic.
But later in the Oval Office, the president suggested he’d grown fed up with the process.
“I’m sure now the European Union wants to make a deal very badly,” he said. “But they just don’t go about it right.”
After the call with Trump administration officials, Sefcovic said the EU is “fully engaged, committed to securing a deal that works for both.” He said the countries’ trade is “unmatched,” and “must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s rhetoric is likely to further escalate tensions with one of the U.S.’s biggest and most complex trading partners, just weeks before he is expected to meet with leaders of the Group of Seven nations, which includes the EU as well as European allies like France, Italy and Germany.
A meeting of G7 finance ministers earlier this week concluded with a vague joint statement that only mentioned “trade” once and omitted any mention of tariffs, despite days of discussions centered largely on hashing out the implications of Trump’s trade war.
The U.S. signed onto that joint statement. But Bessent, who represented the Trump administration at the G7 meeting, said Friday that he hoped Trump’s post would “light a fire under the EU.”
The promise of new tariffs on smartphone makers, meanwhile, opens a fresh front in the administration’s multilayered trade war. Trump initially said he would impose new levies on Apple for shifting more of its iPhone production from China to India — defying pressure from Trump to instead move all of its manufacturing into the U.S.
But the president later said the tariffs would apply to a broader range of companies to include “Samsung and anybody that makes that product.”
The Apple CEO had made a concerted effort in recent months to build a close relationship with Trump, speaking with him frequently and pledging in February to invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. Cook was also at the White House this week, Bessent said. But Trump — whose iPhone went off repeatedly while talking with reporters on Friday — has bristled at the tech giant’s plan to move more manufacturing to India, saying last week that he “had a little problem with Tim Cook” over it.
“I said to him, ‘Tim, you’re my friend. I treated you very good. You’re coming in with $500 billion.’ But now I hear you’re building all over India,” Trump said during a stop in Qatar on his trip to the Middle East. “I don’t want you building in India.’”
Underscoring the economic uncertainty caused by the tariff war, financial markets in Europe and the U.S. dropped sharply following Trump’s posts, as investors scrambled to decode the president’s threats and its economic implications.
The White House earlier this month touted a preliminary trade agreement with the United Kingdom to lower tariffs on both sides, and officials have continued to highlight progress in its negotiations with other trading partners. Despite Trump aides’ signals that more deals should be coming soon, the president and his top officials have begun to acknowledge the slow nature of negotiations — suggesting new tariff rates could be coming when the so-called reciprocal tariffs return on July 9 after the president’s pause lifts.
“We have… 150 countries that want to make a deal,” Trump said while in the United Arab Emirates last week. “But you’re not able to see that many countries.”
Doug Palmer contributed to this report.
