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When it comes to tariffs Trump officials can’t get their message straight

    President Donald Trump with Apple CEO Tim Cook, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, far left, in 2019.Jay Janner/TNS/ZUMA

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    The Trump administration’s only consistency with its tariff policy has been its inconsistency.

    On April 2—a day President Donald Trump dubbed “Liberation Day”—the president announced a baseline 10 percent tariff, but rates much higher than that on countries all over the world. The methodology used to calculate the seemingly haphazard rates was generally considered by economists to be dubious. Then, as the bond market appeared to be teetering, Trump abruptly changed course on some tariffs at the end of last week, first announcing a 90-day pause of the most draconian tariffs for most countries while dramatically increasing them to 125 percent for China. Friday evening he then exempted nearly two dozen different electronics—including smartphones, computers, and various other electronics made in China—from the tariffs completely.

    On Sunday, some of his key economic advisers took to the news shows, but in their attempts to further clarify the situation before the markets open Monday, they only added to the confusion. They insisted that the new exceptions the White House announced Friday night were not, in fact, meaningful carve-outs.

    Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may have offered the most head-scratching comments when he told Jonathan Karl of ABC’s This Week that the new exceptions the White House announced were actually just temporary, and that they would be reinstated “in the next month or two.”

    “Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to reshore, to be built in America,” Lutnick told Karl. “This is not, like, a permanent sort of exemption,” Lutnick added. “[Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries.”

    This is not the first time Lutnick and Trump appear to be reading from different scripts. Last month, the Commerce Secretary famously guaranteed tariffs would not lead to a recession, even as Trump said he could not make such a guarantee. But if tariffs will be reimposed on electronics coming from China, experts say American consumers could expect to see prices for products like Apple iPhones rise. Indeed, before Friday’s exemption for electronics was announced, Apple had arranged to have 1.5 million iPhones weighing 600 tons airlifted to the US from India to avoid paying the higher tariffs facing China.

    Meanwhile, on Face the Nation on CBS, US Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer said the same thing to host Margaret Brennan. “It’s not really an exception—that’s not even the right word for it,” he said. “It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to another bucket of potential tariffs.” Earlier last week, Greer said that the president had “been clear” that he did not intend to make exceptions on tariffs.

    As CNN host Jake Tapper told Trump’s economic adviser, Kevin Hasset, “It’s a contradictory message. I understand you’re saying that this was the plan all along, but it seems like nobody told Lutnick and Greer.” Hasset disagreed. “I don’t think it was rushed or disorganized at all,” he insisted.

    Peter Navarro also doubled down on the claim that the Friday night announcement from the White House did not constitute a reversal, telling Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, “The policy is no exemptions, no exclusions.” But Welker pointed out, “Even the White House called it an exclusion.” Further adding to the confusion, Navarro, Greer, and Hasset all claimed on Sunday that Trump would be using Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to investigate whether importing the same electronics he said will be exempt from tariffs on Friday could threaten national security. A White House official also confirmed this story to Politico.

    Democrats seized on the apparent about-face, arguing that the exceptions were intended to benefit Trump’s tech bro friends. In a post on X, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “The companies that make the high-tech products, that profit off the cheap labor in China, they’re giving money to Donald Trump,” noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a similar observation on X, noting, “Looks like [Cook’s] getting a big return on his investment.” On CNN, Warren told Tapper, “Investors will not invest in the United States when Donald Trump is playing red light, green light with tariffs and saying, oh, and for my special donors, you get a special exception.”

    Meanwhile, a new poll out Sunday from CBS/YouGov shows that three-quarters of Americans believe tariffs will increase prices in the short term, and nearly half believe they will increase prices in the long term. A majority of Americans—65 percent—also believe the tariffs will make the US economy worse in the short term and 58 percent oppose new tariffs on imported goods. Most also believe that Trump is only using them for negotiations and will remove them later.



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