Trump threatens China with additional 50% tariffs effective from Wednesday if it doesn’t withdraw its retaliatory levies
Donald Trump has threatened to raise his tariffs on China by an additional 50% from 9 April if China doesn’t withdraw its (retaliatory) tariffs of 34% by Tuesday.
He also said “all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote:
Yesterday, China issued Retaliatory Tariffs of 34%, on top of their already record setting Tariffs, Non-Monetary Tariffs, Illegal Subsidization of companies, and massive long term Currency Manipulation, despite my warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs, above and beyond their already existing long term Tariff abuse of our Nation, will be immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set. Therefore, if China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th. Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Key events
This is from Hillary Clinton.
The European Commission proposed counter-tariffs of 25% on a range of US goods on Monday in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium, a document seen by Reuters showed.
The tariffs on some goods would come into effect 16 May and others later in the year, on 1 December, the document said.
Bourbon whisky was removed from the original list the Commission was weighing in March.
Per my colleagues’ report, EU member states will vote on Wednesday over a first round of possible retaliation, in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium, announced last month. The bloc vowed to target up to €26bn (£22.3bn) of emblematic US goods, such as Harley-Davidson motorbikes, orange juice and jeans, with tariffs due to come into force from 15 April.
Some countries, notably France and Ireland, have been lobbying for bourbon to be dropped from the list, after Trump threatened 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne.
Mark Sweney
Which Trump-supporting billionaires have lost the most in tariff markets turmoil?
Most of the world’s richest people have their wealth tied up in the stock market – either through investments or specific companies they founded. A recent Guardian analysis found that the world’s 500 richest people lost a collective $536bn in the two days after Trump announced the new tariffs – the biggest two-day loss recorded by the Bloomberg billionaires index.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos saw the biggest drops so far. Musk’s Tesla has been falling ever since Trump took office, and Musk took a highly controversial public role leading the so-called “department of government efficiency”. Tesla’s stock has dropped nearly 40% since the start of the year, briefly going up after reports that Musk was stepping away from his role at the White House, but then going back down after Trump announced his tariffs.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg and Bezos have seen their net worths drop by $27bn and $23.5bn, respectively. Meta dropped about 10% and Amazon about 6.8% since the tariffs were announced.
EU offered ‘zero-for-zero’ deal to US weeks before tariff announcement
Jennifer Rankin in Brussels and Angela Giuffrida in Rome
The EU has said it offered the US a “zero-for-zero” tariff deal on cars and industrial goods weeks before Donald Trump launched his trade war, but that it would not wait to defend itself.
Maros Šefčovič, the EU commissioner for trade, said he had proposed zero tariffs on cars and a range of industrial goods, such as pharmaceutical products, rubber and machinery, during his first meeting with the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, on 19 February.
He said the EU remained open for talks, while suggesting nothing would be concluded soon:
Right now we are in the early stages of discussions, because the US view tariffs not as a tactical step, but as a corrective measure.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU had offered “zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods” and that offer remained on the table.
Callum Jones
Extreme volatility plagued global stock markets on Monday, with Wall Street swinging in and out of the red as Donald Trump defied stark warnings that his global trade assault will wreak widespread economic damage, comparing new US tariffs to medicine.
A renewed sell-off began in Asia, before hitting European equities and reaching the US. It was briefly reversed amid hopes of a reprieve, only for Trump to threaten China with more steep tariffs, intensifying pressure on the market.
Trump-Netanyahu press conference canceled with no explanation given
The scheduled joint news conference with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu has been canceled. No reason was given. The two leaders will instead take questions in the Oval Office from a smaller group of reporters, the White House has said.
Netanyahu has arrived at the White House for his meetings with Trump, making him the first world leader to get a second audience with the US president during his second term.
A senior White House official has told ABC News that the additional 50% tariff that Donald Trump threatened to impose on China earlier would be in addition to the 34% “reciprocal” tariff Trump announced last week set to go into effect on Wednesday and the 20% that is already in place, making for a potential total of a staggering 104% tariff.
Here is my colleague Anna Betts’s story on the latest major escalation in the saga:
Joanna Walters
There have been a number of significant court rulings today in various cases against the Trump administration.
The Washington DC court of appeals paved the way for a likely showdown in the US supreme court after reinstating two federal agency heads fired from their posts in Donald Trump’s all-out assault on the government bureaucracy, the Guardian’s Bob Tait reports.
The court ordered that Cathy Harris and Gwynne Wilcox be restored to the positions with the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) respectively, in a case that has yo-yoed.
Meanwhile a divided federal appeals court set aside a court order that had blocked the government downsizing team, led by Elon Musk, from seizing sensitive data from the Treasury Department, Education Department and Office of Personnel Management, Reuters reports.
In a 2-1 vote, the 4th US circuit court of appeals lifted a stay imposed by a Maryland federal judge that went against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
And Donald Trump asked the supreme court to block a judge’s order that a Salvadoran man whom the government has acknowledged was erroneously deported to El Salvador be returned by the end of today. Federal judge Paula Xinis last Friday ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the US by the end of today. The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration already faces more than 130 lawsuits over Trump’s executive orders.
Interim summary
It’s another day of fast-moving US political news and there is a lot more to come. Our business blog is keeping up with market turmoil from tariffs news but there’s plenty of politics around this too. And Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due at the White House at the top of the hour. Stick with us to catch all the news as it happens.
Here’s where things stand:
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The European Union is “in early stages of discussions” with the US, complicated “because the US view tariffs not as a tactical step, but as a corrective measure,” EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said, adding that “while the EU remains open to and strongly prefers negotiations, we will not weigh endlessly until we see tangible progress”.
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British business tycoon Sir Richard Branson said that US tariffs are a “colossal mistake” and America could “face ruin for years to come” if Donald Trump doesn’t reverse his decision. He added that the widespread adverse reaction so far was “predictable and preventable.”
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Donald Trump this morning abruptly threatened to raise his tariffs on China by an additional 50% from 9 April if China doesn’t withdraw its (retaliatory) tariffs of 34% by tomorrow. In a social media post the US president also said “all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated”.
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The White House has dismissed reports today that Donald Trump is going to pause the implementation of his sweeping tariffs for 90 days as “fake news”. A frenzy erupted when Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, was asked on Fox News whether the Trump administration was considering a 90-day pause and he gave quite a vague answer.
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Britain will fight to secure an economic partnership with the United States while also working to lower trade barriers with key partners around the world in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, prime minister Keir Starmer said today. “Nobody is pretending that tariffs are good news,” Starmer said as he visited a Jaguar Land Rover factory in Solihull, West Midlands.
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At the opening bell of the New York stock exchange stocks slid again. The S&P 500 shares index, the broad measure of US shares, was down 3.4% at the start of trading – bear market territory. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 3.1% and the tech-focused Nasdaq index was down 3.9%.
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Peter Navarro, widely seen as the architect of Trump’s tariff plans, earlier today dismissed tech-billionaire Elon Musk’s push for “zero tariffs” between the US and Europe, calling the Tesla CEO a “car assembler” reliant on parts from other countries.
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Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Ishiba said today that he told Trump in a phone call that his tariff policies are extremely disappointing and urged him to rethink.
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Canada has requested World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute consultations with the US over Trump’s decision to impose a 25% duty on cars and car parts from Canada, the WTO said today.
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Mexico is seeking to avoid retaliatory tariffs against the US but is not ruling them out, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said.
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Donald Trump said on social media today that the US Federal Reserve should cut interest rates. But Kevin Hassett, director of the US national economic council, yesterday denied that the tariffs were part of a strategy to pressure the central bank and said there were would be no such “political coercion”.
EU in ‘early stages’ talks with US, but finalising list of countermeasures after steel and aluminium tariffs
Jakub Krupa
The EU is “in early stages of discussions” with the US, complicated “because the US view tariffs not as a tactical step, but as a corrective measure”, Maroš Šefčovič said.
But the EU trade commissioner said that “while the EU remains open to and strongly prefers negotiations, we will not weigh endlessly until we see tangible progress”.
The EU has prepared a “robust list of countermeasures” on steel and aluminium after receiving feedback from over 600 stakeholders, he said.
After carefully reviewing all of it, we have worked to table a robust list of countermeasures, while balancing the burden across all member states, we will be sending the final list and tariff levels to them later today.
The vote is set for 9 April, with the final list adopted on 15 April, and then duties on products will kick in on that day for the first set of measures, and on 15 May for the remaining ones.
Mexico seeks to avoid retaliatory tariffs against US, but not ruling them out
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday that her government would like to avoid imposing reciprocal tariffs on the US after Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plans, though she said it could not be ruled out.
Photograph: José Méndez/EPA
Mexico, which ships nearly 80% of its exports to the US, was not included on Trump’s list of global, across-the-board tariffs announced on nations last week, which Sheinbaum hailed as a major success.
But it is subject to Trump’s previously imposed tariffs of 25% on steel, aluminum and automobiles, as well as on goods that do not comply with the regional USMCA trade pact.
Reuters reports that Sheinbaum said at her regular morning press conference that economy minister Marcelo Ebrard would continue negotiations with US officials in Washington.
As much as possible we would like to avoid imposing reciprocal tariffs. We won’t rule it out, but we prefer continuing with talks.
Sheinbaum said slapping a retaliatory tariff of 25% on US steel and aluminum shipments “would represent price increases in Mexico.”
“We aren’t ruling it out, but we prefer to continue with dialogue,” she added.
Mexican officials have said US steel and aluminum tariffs are unjustified as Mexico imports more in the sector from the US than it exports to the US.
The nation’s peso and main stock index weakened more than 1% by mid-morning on Monday, part of a market plunge worldwide as Trump threatened to further increase tariffs on China.
