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      Donald Trump moves to end union rights for many government agency employees – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines through this morning.We start with news that president Donald Trump has signed an executive order limiting numerous federal workers from unionising and ordering the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.A memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) references an order from Trump but also provides a fact sheet, setting out the rationale for such a move, The Hill reports.It reads: “President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.”The Hill reports today:
      The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
      In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.
      In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies. The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.
      “Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.
      Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.
      The memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA [collective bargaining agreements].”It has been condemned by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in an email to members, which said the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers”.The AFGE added:
      Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members – and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else.
      AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.
      In other news:

      Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.

      Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

      Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

      Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

      Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.

      Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

      A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine. More

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      US allies worldwide decry Trump’s car tariffs and threaten retaliation

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      Governments from Tokyo to Berlin and Ottawa to Paris have voiced sharp criticism of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on car imports, with several of the US’s staunchest long-term allies threatening retaliatory action.Trump announced on Wednesday that he would impose a 25% tariff on cars and car parts shipped to the US from 3 April in a move experts have predicted is likely to depress production, drive up prices and fuel a global trade war.The US imported almost $475bn (£367bn) worth of cars last year, mostly from Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany. European carmakers alone sold more than 750,000 vehicles to American drivers.France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Thursday he had told his US counterpart that tariffs were not a good idea. They “disrupt value chains, create an inflationary effect and destroy jobs. So it’s not good for the US or European economies,” he said.Paris would work with the European Commission on a response intended to get Trump to reconsider, he said. Officials in Berlin also stressed that the commission would defend free trade as the foundation of the EU’s prosperity.Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, bluntly described Trump’s decision as wrong, and said Washington appeared to have “chosen a path at whose end lie only losers, since tariffs and isolation hurt prosperity, for everyone”.France’s finance minister, Eric Lombard, called the US president’s plan “very bad news” and said the EU would be forced to raise its own tariffs. His German counterpart, Robert Habeck, promised a “firm EU response”. “We will not take this lying down,” he said.Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said Europe would approach the US with common sense but “not on our knees”. Good transatlantic relations are “a strategic matter” and must survive more than one prime minister and one president, he said.The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, described the move as “bad for businesses, worse for consumers” because “tariffs are taxes”. She said the bloc would continue to seek negotiated solutions while protecting its economic interests.The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the tariffs were “very concerning” and that his government would be “pragmatic and clear-eyed” in response. The UK “does not want a trade war, but it’s important we keep all options on the table”, he said.His Canadian counterpart, Mark Carney, said on social media: “We will get through this crisis, and we will build a stronger, more resilient economy.”Carney later told a press conference that his administration would wait until next week to respond to the new US threat of tariffs, and that nothing was off the table regarding possible countermeasures.He would, he added, speak to provincial premiers and business leaders on Friday to discuss a coordinated response.“It doesn’t make sense when there’s a series of US initiatives that are going to come in relatively rapid succession to respond to each of them. We’re going to know a lot more in a week, and we will respond then,” he said.One option for Canada is to impose excise duties on exports of oil, potash and other commodities. “Nothing is off the table to defend our workers and our country,” said Carney, who added that the old economic and security relationship between Canada and the US was over.South Korea said it would put in place a full emergency response to Trump’s proposed measures by April.China’s foreign ministry said the US approach violated World Trade Organization rules and was “not conducive to solving its own problems”. Its spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, said: “No country’s development and prosperity are achieved by imposing tariffs.”The Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, said Tokyo was putting “all options on the table”. Japan “makes the largest amount of investment to the US, so we wonder if it makes sense for [Washington] to apply uniform tariffs to all countries”, he said.Reuters and Agence-France Presse contributed to this report More

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      Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador prison: ‘political theater’

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      Human rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up.Noem visited the so-called Cecot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison. The prison, built in 2022 during a brutal government crackdown on organized crime, is where nearly 300 migrants, previously in US custody, were recently expelled and are currently detained.They have been accused of being violent gang members, despite family members of several of the men asserting that they are not.“The Department of Homeland Security secretary’s visit is an example of the fear that Trump’s government wants to instill in immigrants,” attorney Ivania Cruz said on Thursday. Cruz works with the Committee to Defend Human and Community Rights (Unidehc), a human rights organization in El Salvador. “This is precisely what Noem has done — use the Cecot as a cinematographic space,” she added.Noem’s visit to the prison “was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” Vicki Gass said. Gass is the executive director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), a human rights organization based in Washington DC. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”Earlier this month, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision that allows the executive to detain and deport people coming from an “enemy” nation. Despite a federal judge blocking the invocation of the act, shortly after, planes from the US landed in El Salvador, filled with men and women in immigration custody. More than 250 men, mostly from Venezuela, were quickly and forcibly shuffled into the Cecot, where officials shaved their heads and placed them in cells.Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the men were members of transnational gangs. When invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump – without proof – accused the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of having “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. US intelligence agencies contradict Trump’s claims about ties between the gang and the Venezuelan government, the New York Times has reported, and the Venezuelan government has also denied it is connected.News reports across various publications have emerged revealing the identity of the Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador, with family members saying some of the men are innocent. When pressed, the DHS has not provided proof of those men’s purported ties to the gang and they were flown out of the US without a hearing, raising questions about violations of constitutional due process rights.The federal judge in Washington who blocked the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has repeatedly pressed the Trump administration to provide information about their process to conduct the operation, also ordering “individualized hearings” for people Trump wants to expel under the act. In response, the Trump administration invoked “state secrets” privilege, to avoid disclosing any information about the operation.The Salvadorian prison that Noem visited was constructed in 2022, during El Salvador’s “state of exception”, a move by the president, Nayib Bukele, that rounded up thousands of people in an attempt to crack down on criminal gangs. According to Cruz, the human rights attorney, and other organizations, the state of exception violated due process rights, with thousands being caught up in arrests and detention without proof of gang membership.Cruz has been targeted for her work denouncing conditions in the Salvadorian prisons. During the state of exception, her brother was arrested and imprisoned by the Bukele government. Cruz fought for his release and since then, she has taken on a role as a key spokesperson for people who have been wrongfully detained in the prisons.“It is not by chance that the expelled immigrants are from Venezuela, when we know there is a political conflict between the two countries,” Cruz said. “Today it is Venezuelans – tomorrow may be Chileans, then Colombians. It’s an international problem that is provoking conflict.”Noem’s visit came one day before a protest organized by a Salvadorian rights organization, opposing the Central American government’s “arbitrary detentions”.“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said in a video posted on X from the Cecot prison. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”The use of another country’s vast, maximum-security prison to detain immigrants from a third country is unprecedented, especially considering the grave allegations of abuses at this and other Salvadorian prisons.“Amnesty International has extensively documented the inhumane conditions within detentions centers in El Salvador, including the Cecot, where those removed are now being held,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “Reports indicate extreme overcrowding, lack of access to adequate medical care, and widespread ill-treatment amounting to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”According to Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights non-profit in DC, there are two or three huge prisons in El Salvador where the mass incarceration of people has been concentrated. The detention centers in the country have faced extreme allegations of human rights abuses.“The Cecot has a capacity for 40,000 people, that is to say only 30% of the current prison population, the rest of the population is located in other centers, such as the one in Mariona, where torture and other human rights violations have been documented,” Méndez Dardón said.She added: “Unlike the videos edited and produced about Cecot, President Bukele is not showing the world the true reality within the other detention centers, where the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has stated that they have committed torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment.”Reports have described bare metal bunks stacked high like shelving and with no bedding whatsoever.The Trump administration’s practice of denying due process and defying judicial orders “is outrageous and frightening”, Gass, from LAWG, added. “So is forcibly disappearing them to Cecot where prisoners are not allowed to meet with lawyers or their family members, are jammed into overcrowded cells, and never see the light of day.” More

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      Rubio boasts of canceling more than 300 visas over pro-Palestine protests

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      The US state department is undertaking a widespread visa-review process, revoking hundreds of visas and placing hundreds more under scrutiny, targeting mostly foreign nationals engaged in pro-Palestine activism, according to official statements.The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, confirmed the scale of the crackdown, announcing that he has canceled visas for more than 300 people he called “lunatics” connected to campus pro-Palestine protests in the US, with promises of action to continue daily.Asked by reporters during a visit to Guyana in South America to confirm reports of 300 visas stripped, Rubio said: “Maybe more than 300 at this point. We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”One recent example of the policy’s implementation has been US immigration authorities detaining Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University on a Fulbright scholarship, in broad daylight by masked agents in plainclothes.Her arrest and visa revocation came after she voiced support for Palestinians in Gaza in an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas”, a justification being denounced as a direct assault on academic freedom and the erosion of free speech and personal liberties.In addressing her case specifically, Rubio said: “We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”But the visa-revocation campaign is just part of a broader, more aggressive deportation enforcement strategy that extends far beyond protest-related actions.The Trump administration has simultaneously implemented other restrictive measures, including pausing green card processing for certain refugees and asylum seekers and issuing a global directive instructing visa officers to deny entry to transgender athletes, of which there are very few.In a statement to Fox News, the state department claimed that it had “revoked the visas of more than 20 individuals”, and said hundreds more were under consideration under the banner of what they call “national security concerns”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Overall, we continue to process hundreds of visa reviews to ensure visitors are not violating terms of their visas and do not pose a threat to the United States and our citizens,” the statement said.The state department did not return a request for comment on whether these revocations were student visas, work visas or otherwise. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

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      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Donald Trump is moving fast and breaking things, but that may result in a better US | Simon Jenkins

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      “Move fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto in launching Facebook 20 years ago. It seemed the antithesis of management-school custom and practice. But it worked, to be imitated after a fashion by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other digital tycoons with similar success. Donald Trump is now seeing if it works in government.The smart money in Washington was that after the fiasco of Trump’s first term, his second would see a more emollient president, one careful of his reputation. He would reach out, consult, become a peacemaker, in his desperation to become a Nobel president like Barack Obama.How wrong that has proved. Trump is doing what few leaders dare do. He is being a cultural revolutionary, a Mao Zedong, a grandiloquent system smasher. He wants to reorder Washington’s role in the US and the US’s role in the world. He knows that he may have just two years before “the system” – the electoral cycle, the judiciary and state governments – blocks his path. If he truly wants revolution he must break things, and fast.The historian Arthur Schlesinger said the US needed occasional shocks to wipe away the cobwebs, the bureaucracy and the dirt of an ever more cumbersome union. Should it get out of hand and disaster threaten, the constitution was designed to pull the country back from the brink. Thus it rid itself of Richard Nixon, but not before his radicalism towards China achieved the US’s exit from Vietnam. Might this apply to Trump?Already a dose of the so-called new realism has torn through Nato’s cobwebs. Trump simply does not regard Russia as a threat to the US and western Europe. It is merely obsessed, as it has been throughout history, with its frontier states, with the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and the “stans”, nations that Trump has little interest in defending. Yet ever since the end of the cold war – and during most of it – Nato’s rationale has relied on a thesis, a conventional wisdom, that Russia is set on the conquest of western Europe. If Keir Starmer really thinks, as he appears to, that Russia’s assault on Ukraine threatens Britain, Trump’s message is that Britain should pare down its welfare state and rearm quickly. American taxpayers are not going to be taken for that ride.It was indeed a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against exaggerating the Russian threat to sustain Nato, which was already the biggest and richest military establishment the world had ever seen. The defence lobby demanded deterrence to be infinite. Trump has called that bluff. To him the US’s defence is just that: to guard its own borders. So should be Europe’s. It is hardly an outrageous view. No one was screaming for war when Russia invaded Georgia or Ukraine in 2014. It is one thing to disagree with this argument, another to dismiss it as 1939-style appeasement, as western defence lobbyists have done.Meanwhile, on the subject of borders Trump is hardly out on a limb. The US gains about 150,000 Mexican immigrants a year, to join the 11 million already there. Mexico and Canada bombard the US with imports, as does China. To Trump, Americans should pay for their goods what it costs Americans to make them. If they want Chinese cars they can donate 25% of the price to the government as a tariff. As for fentanyl, the way to get countries such as China to stem the flow and the deaths that follow is again with tariffs, massive tariffs. Sometimes in diplomacy only force talks – force backed up with uncertainty.Almost every president comes to Washington promising to cut the bureaucracy. Thus did Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. The reality is that an activist president breeds bureaucrats. The power of the centre in a democracy attracts more power. Trump knows he has no time for a long fight. It is Musk and the chainsaw or it is nothing. Education is not a federal function but a job for the states. So shut the US Department of Education. Ditto USAID. Also slash the state department. Raid the Treasury. Sure, things will get broken, but it is no worse than doing nothing. That is what cultural revolution means.Trump and his administration’s actions have been in many respects appalling. To renege on Joe Biden’s aid to Ukraine in mid-battle, to call Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator, to insult Canada, to threaten Greenland, to stop famine relief to Africa, to propose a Gaza beach resort, to bully lawyers, to leak security meetings, all beggar belief. Trump and his team are like playground thugs in their crudity and rudeness.But this is the sound of things breaking. It illustrates why Washington develops a defensive “swamp”, to guard against inexperienced presidents. As it is, the chance of Trump succeeding in his radicalism is small. You cannot stage much of a revolution in two years.There will be a counter-revolution. Greenland is unlikely to be an American Ukraine. Tariffs will come back down. The Democrats will recover their nerve. Many of Trump’s “broken things” will be patched together. But in among the chaos are challenges to convention that were overdue. Nato could become realistic. A forever war in Ukraine – or wider – could be avoided and Russia readmitted to the community of nations, as China was after Nixon.This is at least possible. More to the point, the US may review its role in the world, a role that has meant a quarter of a century of moral belligerence, with appalling cost and slaughter. It should revert to being what it is, another nation among nations. That may even be the result of someone moving fast and breaking things.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      US wine importers and bars nervously wait for tariff decision: ‘It’s a sad situation’

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      As the threat of exorbitant US tariffs on European alcohol imports looms, a warehouse in the French port city of Le Havre awaits a delivery of more than 1,000 cases of wine from a dozen boutique wineries across the country.Under normal circumstances, Randall Bush, the founder of Loci Wine in Chicago, would have already arranged with his European partners to gather these wines in Le Havre, the last stop before they are loaded into containers and shipped across the Atlantic. But these wines won’t be arriving stateside anytime soon.After the Trump administration threatened on 13 March to impose 200% tariffs on alcoholic products from Europe, many US importers like Bush have halted all outgoing shipments from Europe.The 1,100 cases of his wine, from family-owned producers in his company’s modest European portfolio, have already been paid for. But due to the tariff threat, they will remain stranded at their respective domaines at least until 2 April when the Trump administration is expected to reveal a “reciprocal tariff number” for each of its global trading partners.The newfound uncertainty around tariffs has many restaurant owners, beverage directors, liquor distributors and wine importers on edge in recent weeks. The only certainty among the trade professionals interviewed is that a 200% tariff would be catastrophic for the wine and spirits industry globally. And while most believe the actual number will end up much lower, everyone agrees that even modest tariffs would send shock waves throughout the entire food and beverage ecosystem, weakening distribution channels and further driving up already astronomical prices.“What scares me is how these hypothetical tariffs would affect [the many] European-themed restaurants like French bistros, Italian trattorias and German beer halls,” said Richard Hanauer, wine director and partner with Lettuce Entertain You. The Chicago-based group owns, manages and licenses more than 130 restaurants and 60 brands in a dozen different states and Washington DC. Hanauer predicts that concept-driven eateries that rely on European products would have to source wine and spirits from other regions because “the consumer is not going to accept the markup”.Even though Trump has been known to walk back dubious claims about tariffs before, the wine and spirits industry is taking this recent threat very seriously. Most American importers, such as Loci’s Bush, are adhering to the US Wine Trade Alliance’s (USWTA) guidance issued in mid-March warning its members to cease wine shipments from Europe. Without guarantees that any potential tariffs would come with a notice period or exemptions for wines shipped prior to their announcement, the organization had no choice but to advise its constituents to halt all EU wine shipments.“Once the wine is on the water, we have no power,” said Bush. “We’re billed by our shippers as soon as the wine arrives.”Tariffs are import taxes incurred by the importer and paid as a percentage of the value of the freight at the point of entry upon delivery. Since shipments from Europe can often take up to six to eight weeks to arrive, firms like Loci face the predicament of not knowing how much they will owe to take delivery of their products when they reach US ports.“We’ve had many US importers tell us that even a 50% unplanned tariff could bankrupt their businesses, so we felt we had no choice,” said Benjamin Aneff, president of the USWTA, of the organization’s injunction. “It’s a sad situation. These are mostly small, family-owned businesses.”Europe’s wineries can also ill afford to be dragged into a trade war with the United States. According to the International Trade Center, the US comprises almost 20% of the EU’s total wine exports, accounting for a total of $14.1bn (€13.1bn) of exported beverage, spirit and vinegar products from the EU in 2024.Many independent importers still recall Trump levying $7.5bn of tariffs on exports from the EU during his first presidency, which included 25% duties on Scotch whiskey, Italian cheeses, certain French wines and other goods. These retaliatory measures, which took effect in October 2019, resulted from a years-long trade dispute between the US and the EU over airline subsidies.“We were hit with duties in late 2019. But we negotiated with a lot of our suppliers, so we were able to stave off any significant price increases,” said André Tamers, the founder of De Maison Selections, a fine-wine importer with a large portfolio of French and Spanish wines and spirits. But because the Covid-19 pandemic hit shortly thereafter, Tamers admitted, it was difficult to gauge the impact of the first round of Trump tariffs. The Biden administration eventually rescinded the measures in June 2021.To pre-empt any potentially disastrous news on the tariff front, many restaurants and bars are ramping up inventory purchases to the extent that their budgets allow. “We made some large commitments for rosé season,” said Grant Reynolds, co-founder of Parcelle, which has an online wine shop as well as two bars and a bricks-and-mortar retail outlet in Manhattan. “To whatever we can reasonably afford, we’ve decided to secure those commitments sooner than later so that we can better weather the storm.”The same is true for many cocktail-focused bars around the country, which are looking to shore up supplies of popular spirits that could end up a victim of tariffs, including allocated scotches and rare cognacs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If it becomes very apparent that these tariffs are going to go live, we could be looking at dropping close to $100,000 on inventory just to insulate ourselves because it will save us so much money over the next six months,” said Deke Dunne, beverage director of Washington DC’s award-winning cocktail bar Allegory. “It will have to be a game-time decision, though, because the last thing I want to do is to buy up a lot of inventory I don’t need.” Hanauer said that he’s seen some vendors offering wine buyers heavy discounts and incentives to stockpile cases of European products to prepare for the possibility of onerous tariffs.One bar owner feeling a little less panic compared with his industry counterparts is Fred Beebe, co-owner of Post Haste, a sustainability-minded cocktail bar in Philadelphia. Since it opened in 2023, Post Haste eschews imported spirits of any kind; the bar is stocked exclusively with US products from east of the Mississippi River. “We always thought it would be advantageous to have our producers close to us for environmental reasons and to support the local economy,” said Beebe, “but we didn’t necessarily think that it would also benefit from fluctuations in distribution or global economic policy.”Instead of serving popular European liquor brands such as Grey Goose vodka or Hendrick’s gin, the bar highlights local craft distillers such as Maggie’s Farm in Pittsburgh, which produces a domestic rum made from Louisiana sugar cane. After the recent tariff threats, Beebe says, the decision to rely on local products has turned out to be fortuitous. “I feel really bad for anyone who is running an agave-based program, a tequila or mezcal bar,” said Beebe. “They must be worried constantly about whether the price of all of their products are going to go up by 25% to 50%.”On the importing side, there is agreement that this is an inopportune moment for the wine industry to face new headwinds. Wine consumption has steadily declined in the United States in recent years as gen Z and millennial consumers are turning to cannabis, hard seltzers and spirits such as tequila, or simply embracing sobriety in greater numbers.“Unfortunately, the reality is that wine consumption was already down before this compared to what it was five years ago,” said Reynolds. “This obviously doesn’t help that. So, with more tariffs, you would start to see a greater shift of behaviors away from drinking wine.”But despite slumping sales and the impending tariff threats, niche importers like Tamers say they have little choice but to stay the course. “You leave yourself vulnerable, but if you don’t buy wine, then you don’t have any wine to sell. So, it’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “Our customers are still asking for these products, so there’s not much else we can do.”Aneff hopes that commonsense negotiations will lead to both parties divorcing alcohol tariffs from other trade disputes over aluminum, steel and digital services.“I do have some hope for a potential sectoral agreement on wine, and perhaps spirits, which would benefit domestic producers and huge numbers of small businesses on both sides of the Atlantic,” he said. “I can’t think of anything that would bring more joy to people’s glasses than ensuring free trade on wine.” More