The Trump administration on Sunday signaled to pursue new tariffs on powerful computer chips within smartphones and other technologies. This is just two days after excluding various electronic devices from the steep import taxes recently applied to goods arriving from China.
This push came as President Trump's top economic advisers scrambled to explain their changing strategies. It's after weeks of insisting that they wouldn't protect the company or industry from any of the fees they collected to reset US trade ties.
The technology company's grace arrived in the form of customs and border protection regulations issued late Friday, sparing high-tech imports from Trump's so-called mutual tariffs, including China. The president suspended a series of taxes that punished penalties in nearly 60 countries last week, but his administration has advanced a new 145% tax on Chinese exports.
The exclusion of the CBP rule covers a wide range of products including computers, smartphones, modems, flash drives, and represents a major victory for Apple, Nvidia and other US technology giants.
But on Sunday, the Trump administration cast these exemptions into a different perspective, trying to frag them as a temporary break, but the government has prepared a more targeted tax on semiconductor imports in the coming weeks. For Trump and his top aides, the US procures many of the chips from overseas, threatening the country's national and economic security.
Peter Navarro, a senior White House advisor to trade, claimed that he “doesn't rule out” NBC's “meeting encounters.” Instead, he emphasized that the White House could impose certain tariffs on computer chips that drive countless consumers and military products.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on ABC's “this week” that Trump could announce new tariffs “next month or two months” targeting drug imports as well as semiconductors. He added that the government could act to begin investigating the semiconductor industry soon next week, and that the government could set the stage for imposing new tariffs on national security reasons.
This approach appears to reflect the process of bringing Trump's tariffs on certain other products and sectors, including the high fees he levied on foreign cars and auto parts.
And Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNN's “coalition status” that some of these high-tech imports “always are” subject to tariffs other than those widely imposed on the country in response to trade practices.
“Semiconductors are an important and important part of many defense equipment,” Hassett added, “I don't think it's really surprising.”
US trade official Jamieson Greer said CBS's move to “facing the people” “not that it is not subject to tariffs, but that it “facing the people” of semiconductors, which are being carried out under a “different regime.”
The potential for new tariffs has threatened to cast another pole on the tech industry, despite major lobbying groups representing Intel, Nvidia and other tech companies encouraging trade transactions that ultimately lower trade barriers worldwide.
“The massive disruption created by this constant newsflow from the White House is dizzy for the industry and investors, creating great uncertainty and disruption for businesses looking to plan their supply chains, inventory and demand.”
Ultimately, new taxes on chip imports could make it more expensive for US companies to produce smartphones and other devices, reducing profits and increasing prices for American consumers. In particular, in the case of Apple, the TAT TIT between the US and China caused the tech giant to lose more than $770 billion at the start of Trump's trade war.
Since then, the two countries have continued to retaliate against each other, whipping financial markets around the world in the face of sustainable and costly standoffs. US consumers appeared to be in a hurry to buy a new iPhone last week.
Tripp Mickle and Anna Swanson I contributed to this report.
