The tariff exemptions on smartphones and other electronics that cheered investors and consumers after being announced Friday may only be temporary — with President Donald Trump continuing to implement his vision to re-center global production in the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday.
Temporary Nature of Tariff Exemptions
“He’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs which are coming in probably a month or two,” Lutnick told Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week.” “So these are coming soon.”
The president jolted the global economy in early April when he launched sweeping 10 percent tariffs on nearly every country in the world, with much higher rates imposed on the countries whose trade surpluses with the U.S. he cast as exceedingly egregious. Amid continued market turmoil, Trump paused many of the tariffs for 90 days last week. The administration is now working on trade deals with select allies — and has just roughly three months for talks with countries around the world to make complicated deals.
While many of Trump’s tariffs are negotiable, Lutnick said the technology levies were temporarily removed Friday precisely because they aren’t.
Focus on American Production
“So this is not, like, a permanent sort of exemption. He’s just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries,” Lutnick told Karl on Sunday.
Semiconductor tariffs — as well as a tranche on pharmaceuticals, are about bringing production back into American soil.
“We need our medicines and we need semiconductors and our electronics to be built in America,” Lutnick said. “We can’t be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need. We can’t be relying on China for fundamental things that we need — our medicines and our semiconductors need to be built in America.”
Criticism and Response
Speaking after Lutnick, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) panned Trump’s tariff strategy. “There is no tariff policy,” she told Karl on Sunday. “It’s just all chaos and corruption.”
Warren is among the Senate Democrats who last Friday urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate unproven insider trading allegations against the president and his associates surrounding his mercurial tariff measures and the markets’ response.
“What did Donald Trump tweet out all in caps? ‘I will not back down.’ How many hours was that? 24 hours, 30 hours, before he turned around and backed down,” Warren said.
“They talk about an emergency. They’ve got a 10 percent tariff on basically every country in the world everywhere. What’s the emergency that we have with Belgium or the emergency we have with South Korea?”
