Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Donald Trump has said he will impose tariffs of 25 per cent on all steel and aluminium imports into the US, threatening to unleash turmoil in commodity markets and ignite trade wars across the global economy.
US officials said the tariffs were a response to “foreign players” who were “surging exports” of the metals to the country and “undermining US producers of steel and aluminium”.
Trump officials said the tariffs would apply to all US imports, and that no exclusions would be granted for particular products. The tariffs would begin on March 4, according to one person familiar with the plan.
Although the move is designed to protect domestic steelmakers, they will probably affect US allies — including Canada and Mexico — and could sharply raise costs for any American manufacturers that import the metals.
The US president’s tariff announcement comes three weeks after his return to the White House and marks an escalation of his protectionist agenda. It follows his announcement of new levies on the US’s two closest trading partners, Mexico and Canada. Those are due to take effect at the start of March.
Trump also said he intended to impose reciprocal tariffs on countries that had levies on US goods within the coming days.
The US president imposed tariffs of 25 per cent on all steel imports and 10 per cent on aluminium imports in 2018, during his previous trade war, before negotiating carve-outs for some countries.
Joe Biden, who inherited Trump’s metals tariffs when he came to office in 2020, struck deals with the EU, UK and Japan that allowed them to export a certain amount of their steel and aluminium to the US duty-free.
On Monday, US officials said those agreements would in effect all be nullified, and tariffs would be put on all steel and aluminium imports from all countries.
Officials also said Trump would eliminate the product exclusion process, calling it a “loophole”.
“We had a product exclusion process that got completely out of control in the Biden years and there have been literally hundreds of thousands of exclusions approved, and millions of metric tons of steel and aluminium as a result have not been properly tariffed,” said a White House official.
“President Trump is hereby ending the product-exclusion process,” the official added.
The latest directive risks triggering immediate retaliation from the EU, which responded to Trump’s tariffs in 2018 by imposing levies of its own on €2.8bn worth of US goods, including bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
The EU lifted those tariffs as part of the Biden-brokered agreement in 2021.
Metals prices rose in the US on Monday ahead of Trump’s announcement as traders moved to secure supplies, with a closely watched contract for aluminium up about 10 per cent and the premium for US copper futures over those in London hitting their highest level since 2020.
