Trump Threatens 50% Tariff on EU Goods

At the end of what was a quiet week in trade talks, President Donald Trump has suggested a 50% tariff on the European Union.

In a Truth Social post Friday morning, Trump said that the 27-nation bloc “has been very difficult to deal with” in trade discussions. A few days earlier, Bloomberg reported that the EU submitted a proposed trade agreement to the White House that included slowly reducing import taxes on both countries to zero on some agricultural products and industrial goods.

However, it appears Trump was not satisfied with the proposal, taking issue with the EU’s existing “Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies [sic].”

“Our discussions with them are going nowhere!” the president wrote in his social post.

If a trade agreement cannot be reached, the EU has said it would ramp up its tariffs on U.S. goods, planning to add more than $108 billion in goods with additional tariffs in retaliation to tariffs Trump announced last month.

The U.S. has only reached an agreement with one of the hundreds of countries that the White House says are interested in making trade deals. Earlier in the month, the United Kingdom, which left the EU in 2020, agreed to reduce its tariffs on American cars in exchange for the U.S. removing tariffs on British aluminum and steel, among other terms.

The 90-day deadline that Trump has set for trade negotiations ends July 9.