Trump to announce 25% aluminium and steel tariffs as China’s levies against US come into effect – US politics live
Trump to announce 25% aluminum and steel tariffs as China’s levies against US come into effect
Helen Davidson
Donald Trump has said he will announce new 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the US on Monday that would affect “everybody’, including its largest trading partners Canada and Mexico.
Trump’s pre-announcement came as China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced last week, came into effect. The measures target $14bn worth of products with a 15% tariff on coal and LNG, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment and some vehicles.
The move on steel and aluminum brought a swift reaction from Doug Ford, the premier of the Canadian province of Ontario, who accused the US president of “shifting goalposts and constant chaos” that would put the economy at risk.
Monday’s tariffs would come on top of existing metals duties.
The largest sources of US steel imports are Canada, Brazil and Mexico, followed by South Korea and Vietnam, according to government and American Iron and Steel Institute data.
The US president, speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, also said he would announce reciprocal tariffs – raising US tariff rates to match those of trading partners – on Tuesday or Wednesday, which would take effect “almost immediately”.
“And very simply, it’s, if they charge us, we charge them,” Trump said of the reciprocal tariff plan.
You can read Helen Davidson’s report in full here: Trump to announce 25% aluminum and steel tariffs as China’s levies against US come into effect
Key events
Trump targets consumer protection bureau with order for employees to stop work
Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have been ordered to stop all work and not come into the office by Russell Vought, a top White House official and Project 2025 architect who was recently named the bureau’s acting head, Reuters reports.
The email to employees comes as the Trump administration, with the help of Elon Musk, targets agencies across the government that it believes are wasting government funds, or are at odds with its administration’s policies. Here’s more on the offensive against the CFPB, a longtime target of conservatives including Musk, from Reuters:
The move, which followed a weekend decision to shutter the agency’s Washington headquarters, idled a federal agency of nearly 2,000 workers entrusted with enforcing consumer financial laws nationwide.
“Employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks,” Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought said in an email to all staff.
The move underscored tumult at the federal regulator since Vought, a longtime budget hawk and architect of the right-wing policy manifesto known as Project 2025, which called for the CFPB’s abolition, took control of the agency on Friday.
The Trump administration’s efforts to neutralize the agency escalated rapidly over the weekend as billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gained full access to CFPB computer systems and Vought ordered a stop to all oversight of consumer financial companies.
Musk has publicly vowed to destroy the CFPB. The agency could otherwise regulate one of his planned business ventures with payments giant Visa.
Donald Trump’s new battery of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports may cause economic turbulence for industries worldwide, but they’re not yet having much of an effect on US markets.
Wall Street will begin trading in about three minutes, and stock futures point to major indices like the S&P 500 and Dow Jones industrial average making slight gains at the open.
That said, the mood is not so cheery elsewhere. Follow our business blog for the latest as the world reacts to Trump’s trade threat:
Donald Trump will sign more executive orders at 1pm today, but the press is not invited, the White House said.
They also did not reveal what those orders will cover. On Friday, the president ordered the establishment of the White House Faith Office, which is meant to coordinate outreach with houses of worship nationwide.
Ontario’s Super Bowl foray could not be better timed. In an interview with Fox News broadcast before the big game, Donald Trump repeated his desire to see Canada made America’s 51st state.
Here’s the clip:
Viewers of the Super Bowl were treated to advertisements for many things in between play, including something not often exhibited during the annual sports/entertainment ritual: the province of Ontario.
No doubt heeding Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the US-Canada relationship, the province bought itself some Super Bowl ad time to remind Americans of the importance of their good relationship with Canada’s most-populous province. The Toronto Sun has the footage:
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s director of management and budget, once said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. He’s now in a position to make good on that promise, the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports:
If federal employees are feeling traumatized right now, Russell Vought, the new head of the office of management and budget (OMB), probably has something to do with it.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought’s words, delivered at an event hosted by his thinktank, Center for Renewing America, were striking. They reflected a view, long-espoused by Vought, that the government should be brought to heel by a sweepingly powerful executive branch.
Now the head of the office of management and budget – the powerful agency in the executive branch that oversees federal agencies and administers the budget – Vought is positioned to help Donald Trump do just that.
Patrick Wintour
Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, reports:
Donald Trump’s proposed “land grabs” mean the US is no longer perceived as “an anchor of stability, but rather a risk to be hedged against”, the organisers of the Munich Security Conference have said in their pre-summit report.
The report, which takes as its theme the shift from a US-led, unipolar post-cold war era towards a multipolar world in which no single ideological outlook dominates, will form the backdrop to this year’s conference.
Since his inauguration, the US president has mooted acquiring land for the US in Greenland and Panama, and suggested Canada could be a 51st US state. The signals from Washington increasingly indicate that the US no longer wants to be the guardian of the liberal international order, but it is far from clear which other countries may be willing and able to provide much-needed global public goods.
The report’s authors suggest a US withdrawal from a global leadership role has implications beyond issues of war and peace: “Without global leadership of the kind provided by the United States for the past several decades, it is hard to imagine the international community providing global public goods like freedom of navigation or tackling even some of the many grave threats confronting humanity.”
Read more from Patrick Wintour here: Trump’s proposed ‘land grabs’ mean US now seen as a risk, says Munich security report
Muted reaction from China after Trump announces another set of tariffs
There has been muted direct reaction from China to Donald Trump’s pre-announcement of another wave of tariffs on steel and aluminium.
The New York Times reports than in its daily briefing, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said “Let me stress that protectionism leads nowhere. Trade and tariff wars have no winners.”
The largest sources of US steel imports are Canada, Brazil and Mexico, followed by South Korea and Vietnam, although China dominates global production volumes.
Trump’s pre-announcement came as China’s retaliatory tariffs to his first wave of new charges came into effect. The measures target $14bn worth of products with a 15% tariff on coal and LNG, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment and some vehicles.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees US relations and arms control, said on Monday that the outlook for Russia-US talks on nuclear strategic stability did not look promising. The US has been pressing for three-way talks involving China, but Russia has said it wants Britain and France also included in any new arms control talks.
European Commission says Trump’s tariff proposals are unjustified
A European Commission spokesperson has said that all of Donald Trump proposed tariff measures are unjustified.
“We believe that none of the potential measures outlined by the U.S. administration to date are justified,” Reuters reports the spokesperson said at a daily briefing.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to impose trade tariffs on goods originating from Europe, and some European manufacturers fear the impact on supply chains of tariffs Trump has already imposed on China. On Sunday the US president pre-announced a new round of 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium.
