What Trump Really Wants from Tim Cook

Donald Trump was still a recently canned reality star and an underdog candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 when he first started picking on Apple. “We’re going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries,” he said in a speech at Liberty University.

But that promise never panned out. Not during Trump 1.0. Not during the Biden years.

Now, nearly a decade later, and despite all evidence that American-made iPhones would be unfeasibly, disastrously costly, Trump is at it again. In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump threatened to saddle the Cupertino tech giant with 25 percent tariffs if it fails to manufacture iPhones in the U.S. “I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” he wrote.

It was an about face from the administration’s previously announced plan to specifically exempt smartphones and electronic devices from so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on goods from China, a deal that Apple CEO Tim Cook received no small amount of credit for negotiating.

Trump’s renewed threat came after Cook reportedly rebuffed the White House’s invitation to join the president on his Middle East trip. It also followed shortly after the Financial Times reported that Apple’s manufacturing contractor, Foxconn, is preparing to spend $1.5 billion to build a new plant in India, which will supply components to Apple. While its supply chain is still inextricably tied to China, Apple has reportedly been shifting assembly of a growing number of iPhones to India in an effort to bypass the escalating U.S.-China trade war and the on-again-off-again tariffs that have come with it.

Apple simultaneously announced it would invest $500 billion in the United States in the next four years. But apart from a commitment to manufacture servers in Houston and chips in Arizona, the announcement was light on details about what, exactly, that outpouring of cash will be spent on. Most glaringly, it made no mention of American-made iPhones—and with good reason. At least one analyst has estimated that shifting manufacturing to the U.S. could drive up the cost of an iPhone to $3,500.

But neither Apple’s India workaround nor its vague promises to the U.S. have been sufficient. To Trump, it’s the American-made iPhone that has always been the apotheosis of making America great again. It would not just be a display of the country’s old school industrial strength applied to the most ubiquitous technology of today, it would also be a show of force, exhibiting Trump’s power over one of the most powerful companies in the world and the foreign countries that rely on its business.

The good news for Apple, and for Americans who want to be able to afford iPhones, is that Trump’s thirst for credit can cut both ways. True to his reality show roots, history suggests Trump is always more focused on the fanfare of an announcement than on the follow through.

Recall the ill-fated Foxconn factory in Wisconsin that Trump hailed in 2018 as the “eighth wonder of the world.” By the time it officially fell apart leaving a trail of vacant buildings in its wake, Trump was long gone, and when he returned to campaign in the swing state in 2024, it was as if the whole thing had never happened.

Or remember the time in November 2019 when Cook took Trump on a tour of a Texas plant where an Apple contractor had been making MacBook Pros since 2013. Afterward, Trump announced on Twitter that he had just “opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” Apple let him have it, and it was among the moments that led to Trump’s chummy relationship with Cook—or as he called him Tim Apple— during his first term.

Or think back to January, when OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son joined Trump at the White House to announce Stargate, a $100 billion AI venture that was already in the works long before Trump’s election. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” Altman said at the time.

Apple helped write this playbook, and it would be wise to put it into action now. That may entail, as Dealbook has suggested, unveiling a plan for iPhones that are “assembled in America.” That could leave the lion’s share of the company’s overseas supply chain intact. Such a compromise would hardly hinder China, where Apple has invested eye-watering sums of money to establish its manufacturing base. But it could give Trump a decent photo op, which, if history serves, may be all he really wants.