President Trump threatened to revive his global trade wars Friday morning, adding a fresh dose of chaos to trade relationships that had calmed somewhat in recent weeks.
The president had focused his attention on a trip to the Middle East and a tax bill on Capitol Hill. But on Friday, Mr. Trump returned to tariffs, saying he would apply a steep tax to European exports starting in just over a week and warning Apple that its iPhones, which are manufactured outside of the United States, would face a 25 percent tariff.
The posts roiled stock markets and renewed risks to the global economy, as similar announcements made by the president have in recent months. If enacted, economists said the tariffs would pose significant costs for Apple, one of the world’s most valuable companies, and rupture U.S. trade with the European Union, the largest trading relationship in the world by some measures.
The president wrote on Truth Social Friday morning that discussions with the European Union “are going nowhere” and that he is recommending a 50 percent tariff on European imports as of June 1.
“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,” Mr. Trump wrote. He claimed the bloc’s trade barriers, taxes, corporate penalties and other policies had contributed to a trade imbalance with the United States that was “totally unacceptable.”
In an earlier social media post, the president also targeted Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, who visited Mr. Trump at the White House last week. The president wrote that iPhones sold in the United States should be “manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else.”
U.S. markets opened sharply lower, with the S&P 500 index falling more than 1 percent as trading began. Apple shares dropped about 3 percent. In Europe, carmakers’ shares were the worst hit. Shares in Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz fell about 4.5 percent, and shares in Volkswagen and Porsche were down more than 3 percent.
Estimates by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German economic research institute, showed that the tariffs would lead to a 20 percent drop in exports from the European Union to the United States in the short term, as well as a more than 6 percent increase in prices in the United States.
Mr. Trump announced tranche after tranche of tariffs in his first 100 days, only to pause some of the taxes last month to try to negotiate trade deals with other governments. His approach has injected volatility into global financial markets and caused uncertainty among companies that depend on trade,
The Trump administration has been holding trade talks with over a dozen governments, including the E.U., to try to reach some kind of trade agreement before many tariffs are set to snap back into effect in early July. But some foreign officials say the Trump administration has not made their demands clear and that they are hesitant to make big concessions when Mr. Trump could slap tariffs on them again at any time.
Speaking on Fox News on Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that trade offers from Europe had “not been of the same quality” that the United States had received from other countries and that he hoped the president’s threats would “light a fire under the E.U.”
The European Union’s trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, was expected to hold a call with Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, on Friday. European officials declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s social media posts until after that call, according to a spokesperson for the European Commission.
Officials from the 27-nation European Union have been negotiating for weeks with their American counterparts, hoping to reduce a 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump has applied to countries globally and to reduce or avert the sector-specific tariffs he has imposed or proposed on products like cars and pharmaceuticals, which could be especially painful for the bloc.
Mr. Bessent, who met with top finance officials from the world’s wealthiest economies in Canada this week, also claimed on Fox News Friday that the member countries making up the European Union “don’t even know what the E.U. is negotiating on their behalf.”
When E.U. negotiators visited Washington a few weeks ago, they took along a term sheet: a brief summary of what officials are willing to offer and talk about in a bid to secure a deal. Such sheets are something the White House prefers in negotiations. The E.U. had shared its term sheet with representatives from the European member states before the trip, diplomats said.
European offers have included reducing tariffs on industrial goods to zero, if America does the same, and increase purchases of American energy. Sabine Weyand, a senior negotiator, and other European trade officials have recently visited Washington to negotiate with their American counterparts.
Those meetings have yielded few breakthroughs and little sense of direction, according to European Union officials and diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations.
European officials often fret that they do not have a clear sense of what their American counterparts want, or of who has decision-making power within the Trump administration, outside of the president.
Amid slow progress, the European Union has continued to prepare countermeasures that would hit back with higher tariffs on a range of American goods, including machinery, clothing, soybeans and, potentially, bourbon. The goal has been to prod America to negotiate.
But the European approach has won the bloc few fans in Washington.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and one of the bloc’s key contacts in Washington, said this week that some places have been challenging to negotiate with, including the European Union.
“There are some countries that are impossible, like the European Union,” Mr. Lutnick said at an Axios event on Thursday. “It’s just very difficult.”
In another interview Thursday night on NewsNation, Mr. Lutnick said, “The world is working the way Donald Trump thinks it’s going to work. And anybody who bets against Donald Trump is just going to feel the pain of getting it wrong.”
“Look, the President knows the art of the deal,” Mr. Lutnick said, adding, “We’re just not going to get ripped off anymore.”
Mr. Trump’s approach could have other economic ripple effects. Hours before Mr. Trump threatened to sharply increase tariffs on Europe, Xi Jinping, the president of China, held a telephone call with Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, continuing Beijing’s recent efforts to coax European governments away from Washington.
Mr. Xi offered China as a reliable economic partner to Germany and the European Union, and said both sides should continue expanding cooperation in areas like automobiles, machinery and chemicals as well as advanced technology.
In four days in early April, after Mr. Trump announced tariffs of up to 145 percent on products made in China, Apple lost $770 billion in market value. But in the month that followed, its value rebounded to more than $3 trillion.
Apple has promised to spend more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years. Much of that money was already planned to be spent in the country, but Apple has said it will buy 19 billion artificial intelligence chips made in the United States and begin manufacturing A.I. servers in Houston. It didn’t say anything about producing iPhones, iPads or Macs in the United States, which has become a sore point with Mr. Trump.
During his trip to the Middle East last week, Mr. Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook.” He said he spoke to Mr. Cook and “said to him, ‘Tim, you’re my friend. I treated you very good. You’re coming in with $500 billion.’ But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.”
Apple’s ability to manufacture iPhones, iPads and other devices in the United States faces huge challenges, including access to a labor force skilled in the precise manufacturing process the company uses to build its devices. Some analysts have estimated moving manufacturing to the United States could more than double the consumer price of an iPhone.
In China, Apple and its component suppliers are all clustered together around assembly plants longer than football fields. Thousands of engineers and other employees working for Foxconn, a major supplier, and other firms live nearby, often in dormitories. It is an interlinked logistical infrastructure that has been built up over years and would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in the United States.
“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Mr. Cook said in 2017. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It’s that vocational expertise that is very deep.”
Apple has said that people from more than 50 countries and regions contribute to making its products. AirPods and Apple Watches are assembled in Vietnam. Some iMacs are made in Ireland. Components are manufactured in China.
Apple assembled nearly every iPhone in China a few years ago, but it has been gradually moving production out of the country as trade tensions and costs there rise. By the end of this year, an estimated 25 percent or more of iPhones will be made in India.
On Friday, a top Federal Reserve official warned about the economic consequences of Trump’s new tariff threats, saying they are “really scary for the supply chain.”
Austan Goolsbee, the president of the Chicago Fed, told CNBC that the proposed import taxes raise the risk of higher prices and lower growth, a shock that would make the central bank’s job more difficult.
Mr. Goolsbee added that the uncertainty had made it difficult for businesses to continue to invest. Quoting a chief executive of a construction company the Fed had spoken to recently, he said, ‘We’re now in a ‘put your pencils down’ moment.’”
“If every week or every month or every day there’s going to be a new major announcement, they just can’t take action until some of those things are resolved,” he said.
Tony Romm, Maggie Haberman, Tripp Mickle, Alan Rappeport, Patricia Cohen and Colby Smith contributed reporting.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London.
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