President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the first trade deal following his blitz of tariffs, as the U.S. and the United Kingdom agreed to an accord amid Trump’s growing trade war with China and other countries.
Speaking from the Oval Office on Thursday morning, Trump said “the deal includes plans that will bring the United Kingdom into the economic security alignment with the United States that’s the first of its kind.”
The trade largely created a framework for issues to be discussed and finalized over the coming months. Trump said, “The actual deal is a very conclusive one” and that “everything’s been approved.”
“With this deal, the U.K. joins the United States in affirming that reciprocity and fairness is an essential and vital principle of international trade,” Trump said. “The deal includes billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports, especially in agriculture, dramatically increasing access for American beef, ethanol and virtually all products produced by our great farmers.”
Trump said the U.K. would “eliminate numerous non-tariff barriers that unfairly discriminated against American products.” He added, “They’re opening up the country — their country is a little closed — and we appreciate that.” The deal means the U.K. will “fast-track” U.S. goods through customs.
The U.S. is the sovereign nation’s biggest foreign market — it took more than 30% of U.K. goods exported last year.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the trade deal will maintain the universal 10% tariff but will open U.K. markets to roughly $5 billion worth of U.S. exports, including beef, ethanol, and machinery. He also stated that the existing 25% U.S. tariff on automobiles will be lowered to 10% for the first 100,000 vehicles and that a British airline is expected to announce a $10 billion order for Boeing (BA) aircraft later today.
“They’ve agreed to open their markets, and that will add $5 billion of opportunity to American exporters,” Lutnick said. “We still have a 10% tariff on, which will produce $6 billion in revenue for the United States.”
Some British officials were reportedly surprised by the president’s announcement of a deal given how negotiations had been going, although U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer praised the Trump administration’s negotiating team on a call on speakerphone during the president’s announcement.
Starmer said this was a “fantastic, historic day” that would protect and create jobs and open market access and that it would be the start of a “better relationship than ever before.” Starmer cautioned, however, that not everything had been set in stone.
“We can finish ironing out some of the details,” he said.
U.S. stocks opened higher Thursday ahead of the unveiling of the U.K. trade deal.
The president’s tariffs have rocked global markets since his “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2. Since then, Trump has walked some tariffs back, paused some, and implemented higher ones (notably, a 145% levy on all goods imported from China still stands.) The U.K. has been subject to the 10% universal tariff Trump implemented in early April as well as the 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports that the president imposed in mid-March.
The New York Times (NYT) first reported the planned trade deal, which Trump then confirmed in a post on his Truth Social site, saying this “should be a very big and exciting day” for the two countries. In a subsequent post, Trump said the agreement would be a “full and comprehensive one that will cement the relationship … for many years to come.”
He wrote that this is the “FIRST announcement” — he said, “Many other deals, which are in serious stages of negotiation, to follow!”
Trump has hinted at a number of deals for a while now, with his administration suggesting it’s in active negotiations with the U.K., India, South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. The most important negotiations, however, will likely be with China, which has imposed 125% reciprocal tariffs of its own on goods imported from the U.S.
The president said in late April that he had talked with Chinese President Xi Jinping “many times,” but Chinese officials have pushed back against that, with one spokesperson calling that “fake news.” Another spokesperson said around that time that, “At present, there are absolutely no negotiations on the economy and trade between China and the U.S.”
However, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are set to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Switzerland on Saturday.
In late April, the president said in an interview with Time that he’s made 200 deals regarding trade and tariffs — although he wouldn’t say which countries he’d negotiated with. There are, however, only 195 countries in the world.
Trump told Time that he would announce the deals “over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.” Peter Navarro, the president’s senior trade adviser, previously said there could be “90 deals in 90 days” — but 36 days later, there has been just one: this, with the U.K.
CNN (WBD) said Thursday morning that its reports suggest that the Trump administration has seemed desperate to get a deal done to show that the U.S. economy is doing well. But job growth has slowed, recession fears are heightening, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “my gut tells me that uncertainty about the path of the economy is extremely elevated.”
In his first term, Trump had talked about a possible U.K. trade deal and was a vocal supporter of Brexit. He said this week that the U.K. had been wanting to “make a deal very badly.”
“I think that United Kingdom, like every other country, they want to, they want to go shopping in the United States of America,” Trump said during a swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Thursday morning, after posting about the U.K. trade deal, the president posted on Truth Social that “The Golden Age of America is coming!”
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