Businesses and officials in Canada, Mexico and China were bracing for word on Saturday on promised tariffs after days of trying to persuade President Trump not to go ahead with them.
White House officials said on Friday that Mr. Trump would order on Saturday a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada, along with a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Friday, Mr. Trump said he would impose the levies as punishment for Canada, Mexico and China allowing drugs and migrants to flood into the United States. He insisted that the tariffs would not fuel inflation and suggested that he would move ahead with them regardless of any last-minute concessions from the other nations.
Mr. Trump is spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and had no public events listed on his schedule on Saturday.
The president is expected to eventually sign an executive order putting the tariffs into effect and could do so retroactively. But the lack of clarity surrounding what, exactly, Mr. Trump planned to impose created even more uncertainty for global businesses on Saturday morning.
U.S. stock markets closed lower on Friday amid anxiety among investors about the fallout from the tariffs.
Lobbying groups for industries such as retail and agriculture, which could be among the hardest hit by retaliation from America’s trading partners, were scrambling for information about the levies but remained in the dark.
Mr. Trump said that the new tariffs would be on top of existing ones on products from Canada, Mexico and China, although oil imports could face a lower 10 percent tariff.
Democrats were poised on Saturday to point to the tariffs as an early example of Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the economy, arguing that he was already taking steps that would raise prices on consumers.
A new analysis from the Budget Lab of Yale estimated that the proposed tariffs could raise annual costs on households by roughly $1,300.
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