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Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.In his post, he claimed to have authorised the commerce department and the US trade representative to immediately begin instituting such a tariff.“This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” Trump added.Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick posting on X said: “We’re on it.” Neither Lutnick nor Trump provided any details on the implementation. It was not immediately clear whether the move would target production companies, foreign or American, producing films overseas.Film and television production in Los Angeles has fallen by nearly 40% over the last decade, according to FilmLA, a non-profit that tracks the region’s production. At the same time, governments around the world have offered more generous tax credits and cash rebates to lure productions, and capture a greater share of the $248bn that Ampere Analysis predicts will be spent globally in 2025 to produce content.Politicians in Australia and New Zealand said on Monday they would advocate for their respective film industries, after the president’s announcement.Australia’s home affairs minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to the head of the government body Screen Australia about the proposed tariffs. “Nobody should be under any doubt that we will be standing up unequivocally for the rights of the Australian screen industry,” he said in a statement.New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon told a news conference the government was awaiting further detail of the proposed tariffs. “We’ll have to see the detail of what actually ultimately emerges. But we’ll be obviously a great advocate, great champion of that sector in that industry,” he said.The announcement from Trump comes after he triggered a trade war with China, and imposed global tariffs which have roiled markets and led to fears of a US recession. The film industry has already been feeling the effects of the tariffs, as China in April responded to the announcements by reducing the quota of American movies allowed into that country.China is the world’s second largest film market after the US, although in recent years domestic offerings have outshone Hollywood imports.Former senior commerce department official William Reinsch, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said retaliation against Trump’s foreign movies tariffs would be devastating.“The retaliation will kill our industry. We have a lot more to lose than to gain,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to make a national security or national emergency case for movies. More
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Donald Trump’s cartoon-like chaos leaves US economy on unstable course | Heather Stewart
Ten days reporting from the US – in Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia – gave me a fascinating snapshot of what feels like the slow-motion unravelling of the world’s largest economy.So many conversations featured uncertainty and wariness; and weariness, too, as businesses and consumers weigh up every decision, against the backdrop of the chaos emanating from the White House.Even the president conceded last week that the economy was in a “transition period”, claiming he had warned of this during his campaign. (When challenged, the White House could not come up with any examples of when he had done so.)The problem for Trump and his supporters, many of whom remain staunchly loyal, is that the transition period in question is starting to resemble that felt by the classic Looney Tunes character Wile E Coyote between charging off a cliff into midair and plunging to the ground.So far, the hard data from the US economy is holding up well. Friday’s payrolls report was strong, and the negative first quarter gross domestic product reading, while worrying, was hard to take a clear reading from because of the rise in imports as companies stocked up ahead of tariffs.There is little sign of anything as dramatic as mass job cuts, or a sudden stop in consumer spending – although the recent crop of data mainly relates to the period before “liberation day”.Look at the forward-looking surveys, though, and there are clear signs of anxiety. The long-running Michigan consumer sentiment index just had its steepest quarterly decline since the 1990 recession.Spend any amount of time talking to US consumers and businesses, and it is abundantly clear why: there are so many sources of policy ambiguity as to make the future not just uncertain but completely unknowable.There is a cliche that “markets hate uncertainty”, but in truth the same applies to everyone in the real economy, too: the company wondering what size order to put in and how many people to hire and the family thinking about buying that fridge or booking that holiday.It is not surprising they are uncertain. No one, even inside the administration, can say with any confidence what the tariff rates on imports from specific countries will be in July.Even if the tariff policy was crystal clear, its impact on prices would be hard to gauge – depending, as it does, on how much of the cost companies are willing to bear (or “eat”, as the Americans have it) at the expense of reduced profits, and how much is passed on to consumers.For the moment, as the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has admitted, the tariffs on China, at 145%, are now so high as to amount to an effective trade embargo.Not every company will have the deep pockets and global reach of Apple to be able to bend its supply chain away from China to manufacture products for the US elsewhere (in the iPhone-maker’s case, India). Instead, many will be scrambling to find substitutes, which may be more expensive or not exist at all. Shortages of some products seem a distinct possibility.At the same time, sharp cuts in federal budgets, many of which have an ideological taint, including Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decimation of the National Institutes of Health, are raising short-term questions about unemployment and much longer-term worries about the US’s world-leading science base.Some of the most heartbreaking conversations I had were about aspects of Trump’s immigration policy: the man who said a Guatemalan friend’s six-year-old son had stopped going to school in case his mum was snatched by the authorities while he was there, and the restaurant manager who said it was becoming harder to hire Latinos because even fully documented workers feared they could face deportation anyway.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThese are first and foremost human tragedies, but clearly they also have an economic dimension. The credit rating agency Fitch warned in a report last week: “Risks associated with mass deportations could include potential worker shortages, production delays and increased wage inflation that hinders revenue growth, weakens profitability and lowers return on investment.”Of course, because the US economy’s abrupt gearshift has been driven by deliberate policy actions, it’s tempting to think: “It doesn’t have to be like this.”Much more of the real economy impact so far results from this widely shared uncertainty – or perhaps it is better to call it fear – than from the specifics of Trump’s policies.Business owners told me that if they just knew what the final tariffs on products from the various countries in their supply chain would be, for example, then over time they could adapt.It is not completely out of the question that a more settled policy position could arrive in the coming weeks.Certainly, Bessent appears to be trying to manoeuvre Trump towards striking a series of “deals” (in effect, promises of concessions in exchange for tariff carve-outs) with key economies.Yet the president appears to have such a love of political drama – and such an inability to choose a course and stick to it – that the unknowability of future policy seems to be the very essence of Trump 2.0.It seemed to be the mighty bond markets, driving up the cost of US borrowing, that checked Trump’s initial “liberation day” drive, prompting the “pause”.But if time drags on with no agreements in sight, the next wave of distress signals are likely to come not from Wall Street but from main street – in soaring prices and empty shelves. How Trump responds then is anyone’s guess. More
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This hockey town in Michigan has deep ties to Canada. Then came Trump’s tariffs
There are few entities that embody the close, fraternal ties between the US and Canada quite like the Saginaw Spirit junior ice hockey team.In a place whose fortunes have been more down than up in recent decades, the Dow Event Center hockey arena in Saginaw, Michigan, comes alive with more than 5,000 fans once these young stars take to the ice. A huge banner depicting the players adorns the main street into the city.Nearly all the players, aged 16 to 20, come from Canada, and stay with local Saginaw families during the regular playing season, which runs from September to April.“They are family, almost literally,” says Jimmy Greene, the Spirit’s vice-president of marketing and community relations, “because players come over here and stay with American families. It’s more than just sport.”One of the top prospects of this year’s National Hockey League entry draft is forward Michael Misa, the Spirit’s 18-year-old Canadian captain. Last year, the Saginaw Spirit won the Memorial Cup of the Ontario Hockey League for the first time. In the season that recently finished, the Spirit played 28 times on Canadian soil.So the fallout from Donald Trump’s tariffs regime on Canadian goods has been felt more keenly in Saginaw than most other communities – as has the fight over the Canadian election, with the US president’s jibes over Canada becoming the US’s 51st state looming over the contest amid a fierce backlash against such comments.“We’ve had this relationship for decades and all of a sudden, in the last couple of months, it’s been uprooted,” says Greene.“Of course, you’re going to be concerned because you just don’t know [what will happen next]. At some point, it’s going to end up costing us. I just don’t know what extent and by how much.”As the largest city in the northern half of Michigan located within a short drive of three Canadian border crossings, Saginaw has closer ties to Canada than perhaps any other community of its size. Canadian companies own close to 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of farmland in the county, and last year, Saginaw established its first sister-city ties with a Canadian counterpart.What’s more, it is a key political bellwether and manufacturing county that helped push Donald Trump over the line in last November’s presidential election, but today the community faces uncertainty around the trade war with Canada.Michigan, with its vast automotive manufacturing industry, is set to be affected by Trump’s trade battle with Canada more than perhaps any other US state.After Trump announced 25% tariffs on Canadian vehicles and parts – with some exemptions – Ottawa responded with its own 25% tariff on certain US automotive products. Canada says the tariffs are unjustified, but on 23 April Trump warned that the tariff figures could go up.While Trump has claimed the US doesn’t need goods produced by its northern neighbor, Canada buys more American products than any other country, at $356bn worth of purchases. Nearly 40% of Michigan’s exported goods go to Canada. In 2023, $1.7bn worth of goods made in the Saginaw metropolitan area were exported, one of the highest amounts for any Michigan city, with much of that sent to Canada.Nexteer Automotive employs around 5,000 people in Saginaw while Means Industries, an automotive parts company headquartered in the city, also has a base in London, Ontario. Repeated calls and emails sent by the Guardian to Saginaw’s chamber of commerce seeking information on specific local industries potentially affected by the tariffs were not responded to.‘Sport right now triumphs over politics’Saginaw is no stranger to economic ups and downs.On a recent Friday afternoon, the downtown area is almost dead. Despite the recent success of the hockey team, there isn’t a sports bar for blocks in any direction as most of Saginaw’s commercial activity is now concentrated around miles of strip malls north of downtown.For Brad Pyscher, an officer at a correctional facility and former union president who, on a recent Saturday afternoon, is manning the Saginaw county Republican party office in one of these strip malls, the tariffs on Canada were something of a shock.“People are concerned, and they hope this works itself out,” he says. “The shock and awe [of the tariffs] really took everyone by surprise.”The 54-year-old says he had voted independent all his life before backing Democrat Barack Obama, and then Trump for president in 2016.“The thing with Trump, whether you like him or don’t like him, there’s transparency,” he says. “I’m drawn to him because he is not a politician.”But Pyscher concedes that Trump could have negotiated with Canada before “hitting them with that shock and awe. I think it’s on purpose, to let the world know he can do it,” he says.“[With] Canada, it should have been negotiated a bit better, a lot better. I’m expecting the deals with Canada to come soon, and we can all put this behind us.”Trump has said one of his main motivations for issuing tariffs on Canada was to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the US. However, reports indicate the opposite may be happening. Last month, $11m worth of cocaine was seized at the Port Huron border crossing, 80 miles (130km) east of Saginaw – on its way into Canada. In December, around 1,000lb (450kg) of cocaine were also seized in a semi-truck attempting to enter Ontario from the same border crossing.Back in the world of ice hockey, Greene of Saginaw Spirit says he feels most people he interacts with have been able to park their political feelings, starting with the organization’s Canadian players, who have been essential to the team’s recent success.“I think we all made a concerted effort, while not to keep [the players] dumb and naive, we did enough to make them feel comfortable in our environment and away from the political stuff. We kept them in a mindset of sport,” he says.But Greene also realizes the strained ties with Canada fueled by the White House’s policies are a very real dynamic.“I’m not immune to the idea that at some point Canada had some hostile feelings towards us, but people have, until this point, been able to park the politics away from sport. I think sport right now triumphs over politics,” he says.“Because we play in Canada, and [because of] the tariffs. I’m more concerned about how they feel about us. Our feelings towards Canada have been and always will be favorable and friendly. I’m concerned not just because of the economic tariffs, but because of the emotions that come from that. I’d be foolish to pretend otherwise.”Saginaw residents are hoping the kind of fraternal ties that were on display across the city last May, when hundreds of Canadian hockey fans from as far away as Saskatchewan descended on the region for the Memorial Cup, won’t become a thing of the past.“Everybody’s been super friendly. You guys have been incredible hosts,” one Canadian hockey fan who drove 11 hours from Quebec for the tournament told local media. More
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Trump’s promised ‘golden age’ for the US economy is off to a chaotic start
Donald Trump promised to usher in a new “golden age” for the US economy – one with lower prices, more jobs and greater wealth. This week, his first quarter report card came in, and the new age is off to a chaotic start.Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter, abruptly turning negative after a spell of robust growth as trade distortions and weaker consumer spending dampened activity.It took the US president all of 43 minutes to distance himself from the dismal reading, released on Wednesday morning.“Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang’,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”By Trump’s telling, any bad numbers are the fault of Joe Biden – but this attribution does not extend to the good ones.March’s strong jobs report demonstrated how “the private sector is roaring back under President Donald J. Trump”, according to a statement issued by the White House. “IT’S ALREADY WORKING,” the president declared the day it was published.But April’s less buoyant jobs report, released on Friday, prompted a more tepid response. He wrote: “Just like I said, and we’re only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!!”So which is it? Is the “golden age” of America well under way? Or will it take a while?Growth in the first three months of the year – no matter how much Trump wants to blame the 19 or so days he was not yet in office – was significantly challenged by the new administration’s plans to overhaul the world economy. US goods imports surged 41% as companies scrambled to pre-empt tariffs, while consumer spending on durable goods fell 3.4% as sentiment came under pressure.And the first quarter figures raised troubling questions about the second. Activity weakened largely as firms braced for the lion’s share of Trump’s tariffs, which he only unveiled in early April. How those firms, and their customers, ultimately respond to those tariffs – and the confusion around them – is widely expected to have a greater impact on growth.Trump’s erratic rollout of 10% tariffs on goods from much of the world, and 145% on China, “have altered the picture dramatically” since the end of the first quarter, Oliver Allen, senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, observed. “Any support to spending from pre-tariff purchases will unwind soon now that substantial new tariffs have been imposed.“Consumers’ spending will also be weighed down by a hit to confidence and real incomes from higher prices, while intense uncertainty will put the freeze on business investment, and exports – especially to China – will suffer.”It is too soon to say whether tariffs, which the administration insists will revitalize the US economy, will, in fact, set the stage for a recession: two consecutive quarters of contraction. On Trump’s watch, the landscape shifts rapidly from one day to the next, let alone during an entire quarter.Trump is right, to a point: most of his tariffs are not to blame for the stunning reversal of growth in the first quarter. The US only hiked duties on China and imposed its blanket 10% levy on many other countries last month, days into the second quarter.The foundations of a potential Trumpcession were not laid in the early months of the year by the tariffs themselves, but by his administration’s execution of them.From repeated jerks and jolts around sweeping duties on Canada and Mexico to announcing “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of nations which were ultimately imposed for less than a day, widespread confusion and uncertainty is now embedded into the world’s largest economy. Businesses inside it and out are not happy.Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, has coined an interesting term for this playbook of threats, theatrics and social media broadsides. “President Trump creates what I would call ‘strategic uncertainty’ in the negotiations,” he told a press briefing on Tuesday. “As we start moving forward, announcing deals, then there will be certainty. But certainty is not necessarily a good thing in negotiating.”However useful Trump and his officials find “strategic uncertainty” during trade negotiations, it has different consequences for those paying bills they were repeatedly assured would swiftly fall, trying to grow a business in a market with leaders locked in a war of words with the White House, or planting a crop without knowing what the economic realities will be by the harvest.Trump returned to office after winning the backing of rural and lower-income voters in significant numbers last November. He needs to preserve his base if Republicans are to maintain power in Washington during his second term.Polling suggests these groups are concerned. A PBS News/NPR/Marist survey, published this week, found 48% of rural voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy. The same was true for 57% of voters with a household income of less than $50,000.As apprehension grows, the US president has sought to play down the risks. In one of the more peculiar moments in another bizarre week, he appeared to play down the threat of empty store shelves.“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, y’know,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”China has “ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which – not all of it, but much of which – we don’t need”, he continued.It is typically up to the American consumer, not their president, to decide what they do and don’t need to buy. For a man whose fortune and image are built around conspicuous consumption, the comments seemed very off-brand. “Skimp on the Barbie” read the front page of the often Trump-friendly New York Post. It is still early days for Trump. But already the Biden “overhang” argument is wearing thin. It will be up to US voters, not their president, to deliver a verdict on his handling of the economy. More
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One hundred days in, Donald Trump faces a problem: he can rage, but he can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland
He says it’s the “best 100-day start of any president in history”, but you can file that along with his boast about crowd sizes and his claim to have won the 2020 election. In truth, the first three months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been calamitous on almost every measure. The single biggest achievement of those 100 days has been to serve as a warning of the perils of nationalist populism, which is effective in winning votes but disastrous when translated into reality. That warning applies across the democratic world – and is especially timely in Britain.Start with the numbers that matter most to Trump himself. A slew of polls appeared this week, but they all told the same story: that Trump’s approval ratings have collapsed, falling to the lowest level for a newly installed president in the postwar era. He has now edged ahead of his only rival for that title: himself. The previous low watermark for a president three months in was set by one Donald Trump in 2017.Back then, 42% of Americans approved of the way Trump was doing his job. The latest Ipsos survey for the Washington Post/ABC News has Trump at just 39%. This, remember, is meant to be the honeymoon period, yet Trump is 10 points behind where Joe Biden stood at this point, 30 points behind Barack Obama and 44 points behind Ronald Reagan. Remember: US presidents tend to get less, not more, popular as time goes on.Perhaps most significant is that Trump is weak even in those areas where he’s meant to be strong. Confidence in his ability to handle immigration has tumbled and the same is true, even more critically, of his management of the US economy. On the latter, just 37% back Trump, a depth he never plumbed during his first term, even as the economy seized up under Covid. For the first time since 2001, a majority of Americans believe their economic situation is getting worse.With good reason. Because the economic data is almost as troubling for Trump as his poll numbers. This week, official figures showed that the US economy contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year, further fuelling fears of a recession. Trump wasted no time in blaming the shrinkage on Biden, who was in charge for just 20 days of the first three months of 2025, an argument only slightly weakened by the fact that the last quarter with Biden in charge saw growth of 2.4%.It’s a precipitous drop, and the cause of it is hardly mysterious. Economists agree that the culprit is Trump’s tariffs, which prompted a surge in imports, as companies scrambled to buy in goods from abroad before the president’s on-again-off-again levies kicked in. Because those imported goods and services are not produced in the US, they’re subtracted from the headline GDP figure. Hence the contraction. Meanwhile, the chaos and volatility unleashed by Trump’s tariff policy has dented consumer confidence, now down to its lowest level since the recession of 1990, leaving Americans hesitant to spend money amid so much uncertainty. Even though the latest job numbers look healthy, analysts say the underlying picture is alarming. As Bloomberg reports, “corporate investment plans and expectations for growth and jobs have all plummeted – and the key reason is Trump’s trade war.”Trump knows that the warnings from retail giants Walmart and Target, of empty shelves as supplies from heavily tariffed China dry up, have cut through. He addressed that anxiety this week, but in a way that should make even Trump’s admirers, those who usually praise his ability to connect with ordinary folk, worry that he’s losing his touch.Asked about potential shortages of toys at Christmas, Trump said, “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Bit late in his career for Trump to don the saffron robes and preach a Zen flight from consumerist materialism. His two-toys remark – which strangely did not feature as one of his campaign pledges in 2024 – has already cast him as the Grinch set to ruin Christmas.“BE PATIENT!!!” he urges on his social media platform, as he insists that the vertiginous downward slide of the stock market either doesn’t matter or is all Biden’s fault. But the whiff of desperation is strong as Trump begins to see why the one idea he actually believes in and has believed in for decades – tariffs – is an object of near-universal contempt among economists. Yes, tariffs may have succeeded in persuading Apple to shift manufacturing away from China. But those jobs are not about to move to the US. Apple has announced instead that it will assemble its US-bound iPhones in India. Better restitch those red baseball caps with a revised slogan: make India great again.By now, you’ll recall, Trump was meant to have ended the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, indeed he promised to do that by 21 January. But after a brief ceasefire, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has resumed, the Trump administration having apparently lost interest. As for Ukraine, Trump got to brag of a breakthrough this week, with an agreement that gives the US a stake in Ukraine’s mineral wealth. But it’s far from the deal he sought.The case he always made was that the US had to be reimbursed for the billions it had given Ukraine in military support under Biden – plucking the entirely bogus figure of $350bn out of the air. But this week’s arrangement includes no such payback. On the contrary, the deal is one Kyiv can look on with quiet satisfaction. It seems the Ukrainians could smell Trump’s need to have something to shout about in time for his 100th day, and they leveraged that eagerness to their advantage.As for his expansionist threats to gobble up Panama, Greenland and Canada, the only concrete result those have brought is defeat in Canada’s general election for the pro-Trump Conservatives and a back-from-the-dead success for the Liberal party that vowed to defy him. Such is Trump’s narcissism that he even boasted about that, citing it as evidence of how much he matters in the world. As he put it, just before Canadians voted: “You know, until I came along, the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” he mused. “I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call.”The promise was that this second Trump term would be different, that the chaos and churn of Trump 1.0 would be gone. But on Thursday, we were back to the good old days, with the firing of his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, partly for his accidental admission of a journalist into a Signal group chat that discussed attack plans for Yemen, partly for advocating a tougher stance on Vladimir Putin, and partly for earning the hostility of far-right conspiracist Laura Loomer, who has the ear of the president.So it’s fair to say the 100 days have not gone as Trump would have wished. And thanks to those serial failures, you can see the first, small signs that his power to terrify is fading. Witness the handful of senate Republicans who voted with Democrats against his tariff policy. And note how the reliably rightwing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is now a fierce critic, slamming Trump as a “bully” and denouncing tariffs as “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades”. For a few short hours, even Jeff Bezos seemed ready to take a stand, amid reports that Amazon was about to itemise the cost of tariffs to US customers, before the company backed down.Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Trump’s conman promises and delusional dreams of turning the clock back were always bound to fail. This is the nature of nationalist populism, whether it wears a red cap in Michigan or a turquoise rosette in Runcorn. It is expert at turning grievance, division and nostalgia into votes. But when it comes to governing, it will always fail. It offers an outlet for complaint – and has no answers at all.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More
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Apple quarterly earnings beat Wall Street expectations amid Trump trade policy chaos
Apple’s second-quarter financials came in slightly higher than Wall Street’s expectations on Thursday.The tech giant reported revenue of $95.4bn, up more than 4% over last year, and earnings-per-share of $1.65 per share, up more than 7%. Analysts had predicted revenue of $94.5bn and earnings of $1.62. The company, worth $3.2tn, has beaten Wall Street’s expectations for the previous four quarters.Investors have been keeping their eyes on Apple as it prepared to report its financial results . The tech giant has been working to calm nervous analysts after Donald Trump levied sweeping tariffs on countries around the world that are likely to complicate supply chains for consumer electronics. Since the beginning of the year, Apple’s stock has slumped 16%.In early after-hours trading, the company’s stock dropped by more than 5%, likely due to its services division reporting revenue that missed Wall Street’s expectations, despite growth over last year. The division covers iCloud subscriptions and revenue from various licensing deals. Sales in China also missed estimates.Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, remained positive, however, saying that the company was reporting “strong quarterly results, including double-digit growth in Services”.The iPhone maker is heavily reliant on Chinese manufacturing for its phones, tablets and laptops. Days after Trump instituted soaring tariffs on China, at one point as high as 245%, the president said he would make an exception for consumer electronics.Cook spoke to senior White House officials around this time, according to the Washington Post. It was after these conversations that Trump announced his exception for consumer electronics. Apple’s stock rose 7% in the days after the announcement.However, it is unclear how lasting the reprieve may be. Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, has called the exemption “temporary”, and even Trump later said on social media that there’s been no “exception”.The president has repeatedly said he wants to see more manufacturing in the US. In February, he met with Cook to discuss investing in US manufacturing. “He’s going to start building,” Trump said after the meeting. “Very big numbers – you have to speak to him. I assume they’re going to announce it at some point.”JP Morgan estimates costs would skyrocket for Apple if it moves production to the US, saying in a note this week that it could “drive a 30% price increase in the near-term, assuming a 20% tariff on China”. JP Morgan and other analysts have said Apple could continue to move more of its manufacturing to India, which only faces a 10% tariff.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionApple chartered jets to airlift some $2bn worth of iPhones from India to the US earlier this month to boost inventory in anticipation of price hikes from Trump’s tariffs and panic-buying by worried consumers. This comes as investors have expressed concerned about decreasing iPhone sales in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market. During its last earnings in January, Apple reported that iPhone sales fell by 11.1% in China in the first quarter and missed Wall Street’s expectations for iPhone revenue.In the short term, however, analysts say the tariff confusion could benefit Apple with people panic-buying its products in fear that prices will rise. “What remains to be seen in the longer term is how much of any increased cost will be passed on to consumers,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, principal analyst for Forrester. “And if [consumers] will absorb these price increases without pulling back on demand for Apple products.” More
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We’ve never seen a more error-prone, incompetent presidency | Moustafa Bayoumi
As we pass the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term, it’s time to take note of a key element of how this administration governs: by mistake. I’m being serious. Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error”.On 11 April, for example, the White House’s taskforce on antisemitism sent Harvard University a letter detailing a laundry list of actions that Harvard would have to undertake if the university wanted to avoid having over $2bn of multiyear federal grants frozen by the government. But the actions were extreme and would have resulted in the end of Harvard’s intellectual independence. Days later, Harvard wrote back: “Nah, I’m good,” they told Trump’s people. (More precisely, they wrote that the university is “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.)Harvard’s response garnered much popular support against a bullying Trump administration, including a photo caption in the Onion that read: “Nation Can’t Believe It’s On Harvard’s Side.” Then, a few days later, several unnamed officials told the New York Times that the Trump administration’s letter, which had been signed by three officials from the administration and sent on official letterhead from an official email account, had been sent to Harvard by mistake. Oops.Maybe it was sent in error, which frankly still speaks poorly of this administration, but it’s also possible that as the wind began blowing favorably in Harvard’s direction, some in the administration were looking for a way out of the trap they had set for themselves.But that’s hardly the only error this administration has admitted to, nor is it the worst, not by a long shot. Kilmar Ábrego García, an Salvadorian man who lived in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 12 March and deported three days later to El Salvador, despite having a deportation protection order forbidding him from being sent there. In a 7 April court filing, Robert Cerna, the acting Ice field office director, admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”.Did owning up to this error result in the return of Ábrego García? Absolutely not. Trump’s administration continues to this day to defy the courts while doubling down on its own failures. During a recent Oval Office meeting between the US president and Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, White House aide Stephen Miller disputed even the existence of an error, despite all the evidence. “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty,” Miller said, presumably referring in his tortured English to the fact that the administration fired Erez Reuveni, a career justice department attorney who represented the government in court during the Ábrego García case. The lesson here? You’re better off shooting the messenger than correcting your own mistake.If those errors aren’t enough evidence to constitute a philosophy of error, there’s still plenty more. What about the official notice the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent to some Ukrainian refugees in the United States. More than 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the United States under a program titled “U4U” that began under Joe Biden’s presidency. On 3 April, some Ukrainians, it’s unclear how many, received a notice telling them: “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” referring to their legal status to stay in the country. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice,” the email said. Then it warned its recipients: “Do not attempt to remain in the United States–the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”This would unquestionably be a terrifying communication to receive. When CBS News, which first reported the story, asked DHS about the notice, the government replied: “A message was sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. The U4U parole program has not been terminated.” Sorry!Or how about the time when Nicole Micheroni, a US-born American citizen and immigration lawyer received an email from the Trump administration telling her to self-deport. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email read. “If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Oops! They did it again.Or what about using the messaging app Signal to plan a bombing campaign, and then adding a journalist to this top-secret chat? Who hasn’t made this mistake before! And then done it again!How about the widely accepted fact that the calculation the administration has used to determine their outrageous and misguided tariff policy is just plain wrong. The American Enterprise Institute, a center-right thinktank, looked into Trump math and found that it inflates the tariffs that Trump assumes countries are levying on the US by four times. Then again, who cares!Remember when they told us that the US government was sending $50m of condoms to Gaza? The aid was actually sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza and was earmarked for HIV and tuberculosis prevention. No condoms were part of the aid. Asked about the error, Elon Musk said: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” but then he repeated part of the lie by saying: “I’m not sure we should be sending $50m worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”There are plenty more mistakes (tariffs on penguins, anyone?), but you get the point. Trump constantly complains about the existence of some shadowy “deep state”, when in reality he and his entire administration ought to be in a deep state of shame, considering the constant stream of errors and blunders that constitute their rule. No wonder Trump’s job approval rating at the 100-day mark is at a piddly 42%, the second lowest of any president in the last 80 years, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist News poll. (The lowest? Trump in his first term, by a single point.)People on the right often view Trump as some sort of political genius. Michael Moore, on the other hand, once labeled Trump an “evil genius”. But all I see is a man and an administration who use mistakes to cover up evil practices and use evil practices to excuse mistakes. That’s not genius. It’s dangerous. And if we don’t understand “rule by error” and how to dismantle it, we will all be doomed to live out its mistakes.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More
