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      Trump to announce 25% aluminum and steel tariffs as China’s levies against US come into effect

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      Donald Trump has said he will announce new 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the US on Monday that would affect “everybody’, including its largest trading partners Canada and Mexico, in another major escalation of his trade policy overhaul.Trump’s pre-announcement came as China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced last week, came into effect. The measures target $14bn worth of products with a 15% tariff on coal and LNG, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment and some vehicles.The US president, speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, also said he would announce reciprocal tariffs – raising US tariff rates to match those of trading partners – on Tuesday or Wednesday, which would take effect “almost immediately”. “And very simply, it’s, if they charge us, we charge them,” Trump said of the reciprocal tariff plan.The move on steel and aluminum brought a swift reaction from Doug Ford, the premier of the Canadian province of Ontario, who accused the US president of “shifting goalposts and constant chaos” that would put the economy at risk.Monday’s tariffs would come on top of existing metals duties.The largest sources of US steel imports are Canada, Brazil and Mexico, followed by South Korea and Vietnam, according to government and American Iron and Steel Institute data.By a large margin, Canada is the largest supplier of primary aluminum metal to the US, accounting for 79% of total imports in the first 11 months of 2024. Mexico is a major supplier of aluminum scrap and aluminum alloy.During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, but later granted several trading partners duty-free quotas, including Canada, Mexico and Brazil.Joe Biden extended these quotas to Britain, Japan and the European Union, and US steel mill capacity utilization has dropped in recent years. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that the new tariffs would come on top of the existing duties on steel and aluminum.Trump’s rollout of tariffs has been widely criticised and prompted volatile market reactions and fear of more to come. Beijing has lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organisation, but otherwise has been muted in its response. The tariffs imposed by Trump are far below the level he had threatened during the election campaign, and analysts have said China was prepared for them.Beijing’s actions – which also include investigations into several US companies including Google – were seen by analysts as measured and allowing room for negotiation.Amid wider pushback against Trump’s economic heavy-handedness, French President Emmanuel Macron warned in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he was willing to go “head-to-head” on tariffs with the US president. “I already did so, and I will did (sic) it again.”Macron told CNN that the EU should not be a “top priority” for the US, saying: “Is the European Union your first problem? No, I don’t think so. Your first problem is China, so you should focus on the first problem.”Macron said tariffs would harm European economies but also the US, given the level of economic ties. “It means if you put tariffs on a lot of sectors, it will increase the costs and create inflation in the US. Is it what your people want? I’m not so sure,” he said.He said the EU must be ready to react to US actions, but stressed that the 27-nation bloc should mainly “act for ourselves”. “This is why, for me, the top priority of Europe is competitiveness agenda, is defence and security agenda, is AI ambition, and let’s go fast for ourselves.“If in the meanwhile, we have [a] tariff issue, we will discuss them and we will fix it.”Trump has long complained about the EU’s 10% tariffs on auto imports being much higher than the US car rate of 2.5%. He frequently states that Europe “won’t take our cars” but ships millions west across the Atlantic every year.The European Commission said on Monday it would react to protect EU interests, but said it would not respond until it had detailed or written clarification of the measures. “The EU sees no justification for the imposition of tariffs on its exports. We will react to protect the interests of European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified measures,” the commission said in a statement.Trump has also flagged tariffs against Taiwan’s semiconductor industry – which he has repeatedly and without evidence accused of stealing US business. Taiwan now appears to be scrambling to prevent that happening. This week senior economic officials will fly to the US to meet their counterparts. Taiwan’s government and state-run petroleum company are also reportedly taking steps to buy more US gas and oil to reduce Taiwan’s trade surplus – a key factor cited by Trump in enacting tariffs.Reuters contributed to this article. More

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      ‘What a circus’: eligible US voters on why they didn’t vote in the 2024 presidential election

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      The 2024 US presidential election had been widely characterized as one of the most consequential political contests in recent US history. Although turnout was high for a presidential election – almost matching the levels of 2020 – it is estimated that close to 90 million Americans, roughly 36% of the eligible voting age population, did not vote. This number is greater than the number of people who voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.More than a month on from polling day, eligible US voters from across the country as well as other parts of the world got in touch with the Guardian to share why they did not vote.Scores of people said they had not turned out as they felt their vote would not matter because of the electoral college system, since they lived in a safely blue or red state. This included a number of people who nonetheless had voted in the 2020 and 2016 elections.While various previous Democratic voters said they had abstained this time due to the Harris campaign’s stance on Israel or for other policy reasons, a number of people in this camp said they would have voted for the vice-president had they lived in a swing state.“I’m not in a swing state, and because of the electoral college my vote doesn’t count. I could have voted 500,000 times and it would not have changed the outcome,” said one such voter, a 60-year-old software developer with Latino heritage from Boston.Having voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he voted in 2020 but left the presidential slot blank “as a Quixotic protest against the electoral college and my preference for Bernie Sanders”, he said.He said he felt “heartbroken” over Joe Biden and Harris’s stance on Gaza. “If I were in a swing state I would always vote for Dems, though,” he added, echoing several others.A 40-year-old carpenter from Idaho who voted in the previous two elections because he then lived in the swing state of Arizona – giving his vote to Clinton and Biden – also said he did not vote this time because he felt his vote did not matter due to the electoral college system.“I didn’t find Harris compelling, just more of the same. Politicians from both parties seem unwilling to make the kind of fundamental economic and political changes that would make a meaningful difference for all people, namely a move towards a more democratic socialist system. That being said if we didn’t have the electoral college I probably would have voted for Harris,” he said.A large number of people said they abstained because no candidate represented working- or middle-class interests and people such as themselves, including several people who voted in the previous two elections but did not vote this time.Some people from swing states said they did not vote because both parties were too similar and did not address concerns of the common voter, among them John, a 29-year-old financial professional from Pennsylvania who is a registered independent, but voted for Clinton and Biden in the previous two elections.“What is the point [of voting]?,” he asked. “Aside from a handful of weaponized issues, the parties are nearly identical. They both hate the poor and serve only their donors.”A number of former Trump and Biden voters said they had not voted in this election as they disliked both candidates, among them Jared Wagner, a 34-year-old from Indiana who works in the trucking industry and said he had voted for Trump in 2016 but had abstained in both the 2020 and 2024 election.“I refuse to put my name on either candidate when I know neither of them are truly the best we have to offer. We need a major overhaul to the two-party system,” he said.
      “As a man with young children I worry about what kind of country they will grow up in. It terrifies me; we deserve better.”John, a 58-year-old from West Virginia, said he had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but had decided that not voting this November “felt most authentic and appropriate”.“I wasn’t apathetic about this election, I followed it closely,” he said. “But most of the candidates and issues left me cold and disinterested and seemed to be simply perpetuating the existing system, especially the status quo of authority and law and order, or rampant human development on the land.“On the presidential level, I was shocked and disgusted that the Harris campaign chose to completely ignore discussing climate change. Fundamentally, this election seemed to have very little to do with my interests and concerns.”Anne, a 65-year-old retired white woman from California, was among various people who said they had voted but not for any presidential candidate.She said she had always previously voted for the Democratic candidate, but could not bring herself to do so this time.“I did vote for all other down-ballot candidates and initiatives,” she said. “I would have voted for Harris had my vote made a difference, but I could not vote for a president who will continue the complete destruction of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank.”Various people said they did not vote for a presidential candidate in the 2024 election because they had only wanted to cast a positive vote for a candidate rather than merely an opposition one, and that neither candidate had offered a compelling vision for change.Among them was a 62-year-old professional working in process planning from Texas, who said he had voted for the Republican presidential candidate at every election between 1984 and 2016.“In 2020 I voted Libertarian as a protest vote,” he said. “This year I was so turned off by Trump’s low character, economic ignorance, disregard of our national debt, hostility to Ukraine and so on that I was trying to convince myself to vote for Harris. But her economic policy was just a grab bag of voter payoffs and she doesn’t care about the debt either.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“So I did not vote for president. I voted for Senate, congressman, and many other down ballot races. I split my ticket, too. I just no longer want to vote against anyone. I want to vote FOR someone. And none of the candidates for president wanted my vote enough.”A 35-year-old Black male voter from Portland, Oregon, who works at a gas station, said he disliked Kamala Harris but now regretted not voting for her, as he had thought Trump would lose the election.“I did not vote in 2016 or 2020 either because I did not like any of the candidates in those elections either. I last voted in 2012, for Obama,” he said.“I felt both candidates fell well short of the presidential standard, and didn’t feel I could cast a vote for either,” said a 47-year-old engineering manager and registered Republican from Texas.“VP Harris failed to demonstrate she was ethically or intellectually capable of executing the office, repeatedly failing to detail out her policies and generally running her campaign like a popularity contest – ‘collect enough celebrity endorsements, by paying them, and the masses will elect you,’” he said.Trump, he felt, “cares about the US and believes his own ideas will ‘save’ the country – but he’s a terrible human being. I don’t feel he represents a majority of Americans at all, but is more a reaction to some of the issues we face as a country.”Various people who did not vote in other recent elections either said that again this time no candidate was leftwing enough, among them 37-year-old Elly, a mother of four daughters from the midwest.“Bernie Sanders was the last candidate I was excited to vote for,” she said. “This election came down to two parties who have utterly abandoned everyday people and their problems with affordability and worries about climate change, but one party, the Republicans, were savvy enough to pretend they felt the collective pain of the common folks, whilst the Democrats mostly said ‘all is well.’ I couldn’t in good conscience support either side on the national level.”Several people who usually always voted Democrat in the past said the Harris campaign had been overly focussed on progressive identity politics for them to be able to lend it their support this election, such as Simon, a father from California in his 60s who had voted for Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 in protest against Trump, but had abstained this year due to Harris’s embracing of “trans ideology”, among other reasons.“I am not a fan of the Democrats, but I would have voted to keep Trump out of office if there was an economically literate, competent, law and order candidate who was willing to challenge the excesses of ‘woke’,” he said. “The Dems are out of touch on social issues, and have tacked too far to the left to appease a minority of progressives.“I support some policies that would be considered rightwing on immigration, but also investing in social housing, so I’m looking for candidates capable of taking difficult decisions based on rational analysis.”Leigh Crawford, a 56-year-old hedge fund manager from California, who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012, for Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, said he had abstained this time as both candidates were fiscally irresponsible in his view, because he strongly disliked Trump’s anti-immigration and pro-tariffs stance, and because Harris had been “pro-censorship” and “too tolerant of antisemitism”.Several people said they did not vote this time because of a growing disillusionment with the extreme polarization in US politics, including Chris, an architect in his 40s from Tennessee who had voted twice for Obama, and once for Trump in 2016, but had abstained in 2020 and 2024 as he had lost hope in politics.“Skip the debates, what a circus,” he said. “I’m so sick of hearing about politics.“The political system in the US is broken. Things are so polarized, there is no cooperation for the good of the people. There is just so much hate, even in everyday conversation with average people.“There is just so much of this ‘if I don’t win, I’m taking the ball and going home’ mentality. It just causes nothing to get accomplished.” More

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      Biden says he was ‘stupid’ not to sign Covid stimulus checks as Trump did

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      Joe Biden has voiced regret for not following Donald Trump’s example by putting his signature on Covid-19-era economic stimulus cheques sent to Americans during a speech about his record on the economy as he prepares to leave office.Five weeks after his vice-president, Kamala Harris, lost the presidential election to Trump, the US president suggested on Tuesday that his failure to put his name on the cheques may have contributed to voters blaming his administration for high prices even when the economy was improving.“Within the first two months of office I signed the American Rescue Plan,” Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based thinktank. “And also learned something from Donald Trump – he signed checks for people, $7,400 for people because we passed the plan. I didn’t – stupid.”Trump was widely criticised after becoming the first president to have his name printed on cheques disbursed by the Internal Revenue Service – America’s federal tax authority – in 2020. The move followed legislation from Congress intended to ease the impact of the economic slowdown that resulted from the first wave of the Covid pandemic.“I’m sure people will be very happy to get a big, fat, beautiful check and my name is on it,” he said at the time.Anecdotal evidence suggested that he may have been given credit by voters that was denied to Biden for his response to the pandemic.Campaigning for Harris, Barack Obama told audiences that some voters had told him that “Donald Trump sent me a check during the pandemic” to explain their support for him.Biden interrupted his speech after about 10 minutes to tell the audience that his teleprompter had broken down, forcing him to speak unscripted. Such a move was notable as during his presidency, critics frequently remarked on Biden’s public appearances for an over-reliance on teleprompter-scripted deliveries, suspected by many as intended to guard against his tendency for verbal gaffes.His attempt at justifying his self-styled “Bidenomics” approach amounted to a rebuff to detractors – both Democrat and Republican – who blamed his administration for failing to counteract inflation and persistently high prices, even while job creation and growth rebounded strongly after the Covid-19 pandemic forced a widespread economic shut down.“We got back to full employment, got inflation back down, managed a soft landing that many people thought was not likely to happen,” Biden said. “Next month, my administration will end, and a new administration will begin. The new administration’s going to inherit a very strong economy, at least at the moment.”During the campaign, opinion polls repeatedly showed concerns over the economy topping voters’ priorities, with many voicing frustration over high fuel and grocery costs. The administration blamed fallout from the pandemic – which prompted the enactment of a $1.9tn stimulus plan early in Biden’s term aimed at reviving the economy – and on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.But Biden suggested Trump might squander his economic legacy by reverting to “trickle-down” economics amid indications that the president-elect intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts, which drastically slashed rates paid by corporations and the rich, while imposing tariffs on foreign imports.“By all accounts the incoming administration is determined to return the country to another round of trickle-down economics … once again causing massive deficits or significant cuts in basic programs,” Biden said.“I believe this approach is a major mistake. I believe we’ve proven that approach is a mistake over the past four years.” More

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      If Trump’s tariffs start a trade war, it would be an economic disaster | Mark Weisbrot

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      “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word,” said Donald Trump last month. Pundits, politicians and financial markets are trying to figure out why, since he announced a week ago that he would impose tariffs on the United States’s three biggest trading partners: 25% for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China.One theory is that tariffs can be a beautiful distraction. Trump, more than any previous US president, has fed on distractions for years, both to campaign and to govern. He can move seamlessly from one distraction to the next, like a magician preparing for the opportune moment to pull a coin from where it appears to have been hidden behind your ear.Although he still has seven weeks before he takes office, he could use a distraction that can start sooner. He has run into problems with cabinet and other appointments that require Senate confirmation. Of course he could easily find people who would do his bidding and be acceptable to a Senate with a Republican majority. But that would defeat the main purpose of nominating people who seem indefensible: to force Republican senators to display the abject subservience that Trump needs to be public, in order to ensure his unwavering dominance within his party.This is no small part of his governing strategy; it involves a big takeaway from the failures of his first term, from his point of view. The lesson is: loyalty to Trump first. Violators will be banished. And with small margins in the Senate and the House, things could begin to unravel if this core imperative goes unenforced.But the days before Trump actually takes office could also be the best time for him to use the threat of tariffs to begin bullying foreign governments for things that might benefit his allies, donors or himself. Other governments besides the three that he named are trying to figure out what they can offer Trump to avoid the economic disruption of tariffs. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, who does not see Trump as a friend, has urged the EU to negotiate with him, rather than adopt a retaliatory, eg tariff, response.Trump’s two offered pretexts for the tariff threat – migration and drugs, in this case fentanyl – are not credible. About 18% of the undocumented people encountered by border patrol over the past year have been from Venezuela and Cuba, two countries that have been devastated economically by sanctions imposed by the US government. If reducing immigration were really Trump’s concern, he would not have deployed sanctions that have driven millions of people from their homes to the US border; and he could end these sanctions in January by himself.Broad economic sanctions are a form of economic violence which targets civilians in order to achieve political ends, including regime change. US congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, made this clear in a letter that he wrote to Joe Biden asking for the sanctions on Venezuela to be dropped. The Trump sanctions in Venezuela in 2017 killed tens of thousands of civilians during the first year, and many more in the years that followed, including under Biden.As for fentanyl, about 75,000 people died from overdoses of this drug in 2023. But it’s difficult to see how Trump’s tariffs could help solve this problem. It’s a glaring example of how more than four decades of a failed “war on drugs”, based on criminalization of use and supply-side intervention, have made things worse. In this case the drug war has led to an innovation – fentanyl – that is vastly more powerful than heroin, much cheaper to produce, more addictive and easier to transport, distribute and produce.There is general agreement in the economic research on the effects of Trump’s trade and tariff wars in his first term as president, in which he placed tariffs on about $380bn of US imports. The overall impact on living standards for US workers and most Americans is found to be negative, with the cost of the tariffs being absorbed by US consumers. Employment overall did not increase, and may have fallen due to the negative impact of retaliatory tariffs.The economic research looking at the expected impacts of tariffs that Trump has talked about going forward also finds the impact on the US economy to be negative. And there is potential for much more damage if other countries respond with more retaliatory tariffs than they did in 2018-2020.Meanwhile, the productivity of Trump’s tariff offensive in generating distractions remains high. On Sunday he took a shot at the so-called Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and other economic powers: “We require a commitment from these countries,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”None of these things will happen while Trump is in office. Nor will threats like this deter the majority of the world, when it is ready, from replacing a system of global governance that is overwhelmingly run by one country with help from the richest people in other rich countries. Our current system is one in which the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar-based financial system bestows upon the US government gives the president the power to destroy whole economies with the stroke of a pen.But this is a longer story; for Trump it’s just another threat and another distraction in the post-truth world that he, as much as anyone, helped create. But he will need more than distractions to take this country further down the road toward de-democratization, which is what brought to him and his party the power that they now have.

      Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy More

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      What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’? | Rebecca Solnit

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      In the aftermath of the election, the working class was constantly invoked and rarely defined – invoked as a badge of authenticity, as the people who really matter, as the salt of the earth, the ones politicians should woo or be chastised for failing to woo sufficiently. Who exactly is in this category? I asked around, and the definitions didn’t just vary – they wobbled, clashed and blurred.The more nebulous something is, the more it can mean anything useful to the speaker or writer. I thought of Alice Through the Looking Glass:
      ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
      ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      When a word means whatever you choose it to mean, it becomes a cudgel for your cause, while it fails to do what I want words to do, which is to describe the world in ways that make things more clear and coherent.So what is the working class? Is it income levels or education, when some who work in the trades earn splendid annual incomes and some white-collar work mires people in poverty? Is it the kind of work or the status of being an employee, when the person who works for a construction company may go on to become a contractor herself?A Marxist told me it’s about whether or not you own the means of production, but this theoretical contractor, like many a construction worker, owns a F250 pickup truck and a lot of tools and maybe a garage workshop, just as many farmers own or inherit land.Someone else said it meant being paid by the hour, rather than salaried, but lawyers and legal experts bill (lavishly) by the hour. And more and more people work in the gig economy or are otherwise casual labor seen as self-employed or as subcontractors, not employees. Someone else insisted it’s about whether or not you have unearned income, but many a union person or employee of a big firm has a stake in a pension fund invested in the stock market.Another criterion was education levels, though quite a few people’s time in college netted them little but debt to be paid off via pink- or blue-collar work. In California, our public universities claim a lot of first-generation students, but the community college system defines that as people whose parents did not go to college at all, while the University of California system defines it as anyone whose parents didn’t graduate from college. The California State University system, meanwhile, has wobbly definitions: “In one scenario, 31% of CSU students are considered first generation; according to another definition, 52% are.”What’s clear about first-generation students is that some who grow up in blue-collar families become white-collar professionals and thereby have a foot in both worlds and sometimes an identity in tension with their current status. A lot of us worked entry-level jobs before entering a profession – before I was 21 I supported myself as a salesperson, a dishwasher, a data processor and a waitress. Upward economic mobility is central to the American dream and the draw for immigrants; downward mobility, debt peonage and destitution have been at the heart of the American nightmare set up by Reaganomics and the other forces creating a super-elite and a desperate underclass.One thing that’s been dismally obvious since 2016 is that by working class some speakers really mean white men, and imagine that group in nostalgic terms, as hardhat wearers and factory workers or as red-blooded rural Americans, even though much of the lower-income population is not white or male or rural. It’s janitors and nail salon workers and hotel maids, casual labor and delivery people and home healthcare aides.I’m not arguing that the working class doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of workers we would probably all agree belong to this class – but the borders and thereby the definitions are blurry, and the frame is too often invoked for other agendas.The idea that the working class is white men too readily becomes a justification for politics that pander to white male prejudices and entitlements, since white men are the single most right-leaning demographic. Framed that way, it often seems to mean: shut up about rights for women and non-white people. Meanwhile about 92% of Black women, a great many of whom meet most of these definitions of working class, voted for Kamala Harris, which is a reminder that talking about class without talking about gender and race flattens out a complex terrain (the same goes, of course, for talking about gender or race without the other two).Harris mostly spoke about the middle class, which many identify with whether or not they fit some of these criteria for the working class; I don’t think her rival used the term “working class” at all but pandered to white racism, misogyny and transphobia, each of which can fracture solidarity and even the perception of common ground, including economic common ground.In the end, all that’s clear is that we had an election in which the party that was supposed to be elitist was not the party whose candidate was a billionaire, the one put back in office in no small part through the machinations of the richest man in the world because they agreed on an economic agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and further impoverishing the poor.“Elite” is another nebulous word that pretends that somehow human rights are an upscale product like designer handbags or that the majority of us in this country – if you add up women, Bipoc, queer and trans people, immigrants, etc – are a special interest group. In this framework, the 26% or so that is white and male is imagined as the majority, perhaps because they once owned and ran nearly everything.White male grievance is a powerful force that cuts across class, as exemplified by the habitual whining of the billionaires. Those billionaires also own too many of the means of information production, from Twitter and Facebook to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Those and other means encouraged people to perceive themselves by many criteria that don’t include class or economics, but do include a lot of kinds of resentment.This was part of a package deal, of a whole lot of people getting a lot of misinformation about the sources of their problems and the potential solutions, which encouraged many of them to vote against their own and their economic peers’ self-interest. The lack of clarity about what the working class is is only one part of the ongoing problem of misinformation and missing information.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Mexican president claims ‘no potential tariff war’ with US after call with Trump

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      Claudia Sheinbaum has said her “very kind” phone conversation with Donald Trump, in which they discussed immigration and fentanyl, means “there will not be a potential tariff war” between the US and Mexico.The president of Mexico spoke to reporters on Thursday following Trump’s threat earlier in the week to apply a 25% tariff against Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10% tariff against China, when he takes office in January if the countries did not stop all illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling into the US.Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, claimed that during the phone call with Sheinbaum she had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”.During her Thursday address Sheinbaum clarified she did not agree to shut down the border.“Each person has their own way of communicating,” Sheinbaum said. “But I can assure you, I guarantee you, that we never – additionally, we would be incapable of doing so – proposed that we would close the border in the north [of Mexico], or in the south of the United States. It has never been our idea and, of course, we are not in agreement with that.”She added that the two did not discuss tariffs, but that the conversation with Trump had reassured her that no tit-for-tat tariff battle would be needed in future.On Monday this week, Trump threatened to impose a 25% percent tariff on Mexico until drugs, including fentanyl, and undocumented immigrants “stop this Invasion of our Country”. He declared that Mexico and Canada should use their power to address drug trafficking and migration and, until they do, “it is time for them to pay a very big price!”The following day, Sheinbaum suggested Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own.On Wednesday, however, the conversation between Sheinbaum and Trump was “very kind”, the Mexican president said. She said she told Trump of the various migration initiatives her government has undertaken, including providing resources and support to central American countries and to migrants arriving in Mexico. Potential immigrants “will not reach the northern border, because Mexico has a strategy”, Sheinbaum said.Trump “recognized this effort” by the Mexican government, Sheinbaum added.She also said Trump expressed interest in the government-driven programs to address fentanyl addiction and overdoses in Mexico. And she raised the problem of American-made weapons entering Mexico from the US to be used by drug cartels.Sheinbaum further added that she encouraged Trump to stop the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela, since “people suffer and it leads to the phenomenon of migration”.Asked by a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that quoted anonymous Trump-aligned sources discussing a “soft invasion” of Mexico by deploying the US military inside the country against drug trafficking groups, Sheinbaum dismissed the idea, calling it “entirely a movie”.“What I base myself on is the conversation – the two conversations – that I had with President Trump, and then, at the moment, the communication we will have with his work team and when he takes office,” Sheinbaum said. “We will always defend our sovereignty. Mexico is a free, independent, sovereign country – and that is above everything else.” More

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      Trump’s tariff threat sets stage for bitter global trade war

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      Donald Trump’s threat to impose steep tariffs on goods imported into the US has set the stage for a bitter global trade war, according to trade experts and economists, with consumers and companies warned to brace for steep costs.The president-elect announced on Monday night that he intended to hit Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs on all their exports to the US – until they reduce migration and the flow of drugs into the country.As officials in the three countries scrambled to respond, Keith Rockwell, a former director at the World Trade Organization, predicted that Trump’s move could spark a trade war. “The United States exports hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods to these countries,” he said. “Anyone who expects that they will stand pat and not retaliate has not been paying attention.”China promptly suggested that both sides would lose from an escalation in economic tensions. “No one will win a trade war or a tariff war,” Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister, and Dominic LeBlanc, its public safety minister, touted the country’s “balanced and mutually beneficial” economic ties with the US.Hours after Trump issued the announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, economists at ING released research that estimated his broader campaign proposals on trade – including a universal tariff of between 10% and 20% on all goods imported from overseas, and a 60% tariff on all goods from China – could cost each US consumer up to $2,400 each year.“This potential increase in consumer costs and inflation could have widespread economic implications, particularly in an economy where consumer spending accounts for 70% of all activity,” James Knightley of ING said.It is unclear whether Trump, who has described “tariff” as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, will follow through on this plan. Tariffs – levies paid for by the company importing foreign goods – are not popular with voters, even Trump’s voters. A Harris poll conducted for the Guardian found 69% of people believe they will increase the prices they pay.And while he threatened universal tariffs while campaigning for the White House, this proposal – a 25% duty on all goods from Mexico and Canada, and a 10% duty on China, on top of existing duties – is more targeted.“Trump’s statements clearly herald the dawn of a new era of US trade protectionism that will sweep many US trading partners into its ambit,” said Eswar Prasad, former head of the IMF’s China division. “Such tariffs will have a disruptive effect on US as well as international trade, as countries around the world jockey to soften the blow of US tariffs on their own economies and try to find ways to evade the tariffs.”On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies claimed such measures would help strengthen the US economy and “make America wealthy again”. Many economists took a different view, warning that sweeping tariffs would increase the price of goods for US consumers, and risk prompting other nations to retaliate, hitting US businesses exporting goods to the world.But in his announcements on Tuesday, Trump did not focus on the economic benefits has claimed tariffs would bring. Instead, he blamed Mexico and Canada for “ridiculous Open Borders” he alleged were prompting an immigration crisis, and China for “the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl” arriving in the US – and pledged to impose tariffs on these countries until they addressed his concerns.“Trump apparently sees tariffs as a tool with broad uses in tackling a variety of malign external factors that have adverse effects on the US economy, society and national security,” noted Prasad, now a professor of trade policy at Cornell University.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump, wrote on X that the president-elect “is going to use tariffs as a weapon to achieve economic and political outcomes which are in the best interest of America”, in a bid to deliver on his “America First” policy strategy.Making such announcements on social media “is a great way for Trump to effect foreign policy changes even before he takes office”, Ackman claimed.As Trump builds out his broader trade strategy, Rockwell, formerly of the WTO, said a 10% universal tariff would me “more manageable” than 20%. “But if you raise it 20%, that creates a different dynamic,” he said. “You’re going to see much, much less demand for these products coming in.“There will also be, without any doubt, retaliation,” he added. European officials “have got their list drawn up”, he said. “It’s the most closely guarded secret in Brussels, but it’s drawn up.”Countries will hit back with tariffs on “political pinch points”, Rockwell predicted. Under the last Trump administration, the European Union targeted US exports including Harley-Davidson bikes, Levi’s jeans and Kentucky bourbon. More

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      Trump’s cabinet isn’t as anti-Wall Street as voters might want to believe | Robert Reich

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      Will anything stop Trump?He’s got control over both chambers of Congress, a tractable supreme court, a political base of fiercely loyal Magas, a media ecosystem that amplifies his lies (now including Musk’s horrific X as well as Rupert Murdoch’s reliably mendacious Fox News) and a thin majority of voters in the 2024 election.He doesn’t worry about another election because he won’t be eligible to run again (or he’ll ignore the constitution and stay on).Of course, there are the midterm elections of 2026. But even if Democrats take back both chambers, Trump and his incipient administration are aiming to wreak so much damage on America in the meantime that Democrats can’t remedy it.The Republican-controlled Senate starting 3 January won’t restrain Trump. Yes, Trump overreached with his pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Apparently even Senate Republicans can’t abide alleged sex trafficking of girls for drug-infested sex parties, but this is a very low bar. (Gaetz denies any wrongdoing.)So, as a practical matter, is anything stopping Trump?Yes, and here’s a hint of what it is: on Friday, Trump picked Scott Bessent to serve as US secretary of the treasury.Bessent is the man Elon Musk derided only a week ago as the “business-as-usual choice” for treasury secretary, in contrast to Howard Lutnick, whom Musk said would “actually enact change”.Musk’s view of “change” is to blow a place up, which was what Musk did when he bought Twitter.Over the last two weeks, Musk has convinced Trump to appoint bomb-throwers Robert F Kennedy Jr to health and human services and Pete Hegseth to defense and to put Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of cutting $2tn from the federal budget.But Bessent is the opposite of a bomb-thrower. He’s a billionaire hedge fund manager, founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management, and a protege of the Maga arch-villain George Soros. (He’s also gay, which the Maga base may not like, either.)Why did Trump appoint the “business-as-usual” Bessent to be treasury secretary? Because the treasury secretary is the most important economic job in the US government.Trump has never understood much about economics, but he knows two things: that high interest rates can throttle an economy (and bring down a president’s party) and that high stock prices are good (at least for Trump and his investor class).Trump doesn’t want to do anything that will cause bond traders to raise long-term interest rates out of fear of future inflation and he wants stock traders to be so optimistic about corporate profits they raise share prices.So he has appointed a treasury secretary who will reassure the bond and stock markets.Stock and bond markets constitute the only real constraint on Trump – the only things whose power he’s afraid of.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut wait. What about Trump’s plan to raise tariffs? He has floated a blanket tariff of 10% to 20% on nearly all imports, 25% on imports from Mexico, and 60% or more on Chinese goods.Tariffs of this size would increase consumer prices and fuel inflation – driving interest rates upward. (The cost of tariffs are borne by American businesses and households, rather than foreign companies.)Tariffs could also invite retaliation from foreign governments and thereby dry up export markets for American-based corporations – in which case the stock market would tank. (The last time America raised tariffs on all imports – Herbert Hoover’s and congressmen Smoot and Hawley’s Tariff Act of 1930 – the Great Depression worsened.)In short, tariffs will rattle stock and bond markets, doing the exact opposite of what Trump wants.So Trump has appointed a treasury secretary who will soothe Wall Street’s nerves – not just because Bessent is a Wall Street billionaire who speaks its language but also because Wall Street doesn’t really believe Bessent wants higher tariffs.Bessent has described Trump’s plan for blanket tariffs as a “maximalist” negotiating strategy – suggesting Trump’s whole tariff proposal is a strategic bluff. Wall Street apparently thinks tariffs won’t rise much when other countries respond to the bluff with what Trump sees as concessions.Instead, Wall Street expects Bessent to be spending his energies seeking lower taxes, especially for big corporations and wealthy Americans, and helping Musk and Ramaswamy cut spending and roll back regulations.It’s a sad commentary on the state of American democracy when the main constraint on the madman soon to occupy the Oval Office is Wall Street.I suppose we should be grateful there’s any constraint at all.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More