President Donald Trump resumed his on-off obsession with tariffs by announcing a 25 per cent tariff on all foreign-made cars and trucks, effective for the rest of his administration.
He also singled out Ireland’s pharmaceutical industry in forecasting the overall renaissance of American domestic manufacturing through his tariff policy.
“We are going to be doing tariffs on pharmaceuticals in order to bring our pharmaceutical industry back,” Mr Trump said in the White House on Wednesday.
“We don’t make anything here in terms of drugs, medical drugs, medicines. It’s in other countries – largely made in China, a lot of it made in Ireland. Ireland was very smart. We love Ireland. But we are going to have that,” he said at the outset of a wide-ranging discussion on what he sees as the rehabilitative effects of tariffs for the US economy.
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Speculation that the announcement would be accompanied by EU-related tariff impositions were at least delayed until the scheduled date of April 2nd. Earlier, EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, said he expected the US to impose tariffs of roughly 20 per cent on imports from the EU. This level of tariffs would pose significant threats to Ireland by hitting the competitiveness of products made here on the US market.
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The tariffs on cars, meanwhile, will ratchet up trade tensions with the EU as it will hurt car industries such as those in Germany. EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen said she regretted the announcement and the EU would consider it alongside other moves which the US has said it would make. EU states are expected to retaliate against the US move, leading to the threat of a damaging tit-for-tat trade war.
Last night Mr Trump described the latest move as a “very modest” imposition of auto-related tariffs, and stated that it marked “the beginning of liberation day in America”.
“We are going to charge countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth. They have taken so much out of country. Friend and foe – and frankly friend has often times been much worse than foe.
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“And this is very modest. What we are going to be doing is a 25 per cent tariff on all cars not made in the United States. If they are made in the United States, there is absolutely no tariff.”
Turning to Howard Lutnick, his commerce secretary who has also spoken several times of the trade surplus in goods that Ireland runs with the United States, Mr Trump hinted that the tariffs that many trading partners have been bracing for may be less severe than originally feared.
The Trump administration has already backed down on ferocious tariff threats to its border trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
“It’s going to be reciprocal,” he said of the April 2nd announcement, which will target all countries with tariffs which, he promised, would be “somewhat conservative”.
“I think people are going to be impressed. We are going to be very fair, very nice. We have not been treated nicely by other countries but we are going to be nice so I think people will be pleasantly surprised. But it is going to make our country very rich. Because we are the piggy bank that everybody steals from, and they have been doing it for many decades. It is going to have a very positive effect on everybody – including those other countries.”
The latest tariff announcement had a predictably oppressive effect on stock markets: the S&P was down more than 1 per cent by midafternoon, ahead of Mr Trump’s press conference while many auto stocks fell by 2 per cent. The US car import value was worth $219 billion in 2024, according to USA car import data, when 7.68 million units were imported.
