Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday modifying the tariff rates he first announced in April ahead of a Friday deadline for the new rates on imported goods to go into effect.
The order states that goods imported from every nation on Earth will be subject to a 10% tariff except for goods from the 92 countries listed in an annex that are subject to higher tariff rates. The highest tariff is on goods from Syria, which will be taxed at 41%.
Tariffs on two countries, the United Kingdom and Brazil, are listed at 10%, but a previous order signed by Trump added a further 40% tariff on some Brazilian goods, to punish the country for prosecuting its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for trying to overturn an election he lost and inspiring his supporters to storm the seat of government. Trump’s order excluded many of the most common imports from Brazil from the additional tariff, including wood pulp, metals and airplanes, but left the duty in place for coffee.
Goods from the remote Falkland Islands, which remain a British overseas territory, are also set at 10%.
Following an agreement with the European Union, Americans importing goods from that 27-nation bloc will be hit with a 15% tariff.
The new country-specific tariffs are a sweeping change to the rates unveiled by Trump with a flourish in the Rose Garden on 2 April.
Among major US trading partners, imports from Taiwan will now be subject to a tariff of 20% instead of 32%; imports from Japan will be subject to a 15% tariff, instead of 24%; imports from South Korea will be subject to a 15% tariff, instead of 25%.
The revised rates include a drop in tariffs on goods from: Vietnam, which were set at 46% in April, to 20% now; Indonesia, which was 32% and is now 19%; Bangladesh, which was 37% and is now 20%; Cambodia which was 49% and is now 19%; Laos, which was 48% and is now 40%; Sri Lanka, which was 44% and is now 20%; Thailand, which was 36% and is now 19%; and Lesotho, which was 50% and is now 15%.
Oddly, the rate for the Philippines has increased from 17% to 19%, even though its president, Bongbong Marcos, recently completed a friendly visit to the White House.
The rate for South Africa, a nation whose president dismissed Trump’s claims that its white population was being persecuted, remains unchanged at 30%.
The rate on goods from Serbia dropped only slightly, from 37% in April to 35% now, despite its president’s strong support for Trump. Israel was given a similarly small reduction from 17% in April to 15% now.
Another close ally of Trump, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, saw the tariff rate on goods from his country drop from 26% to 25%.
The rate for imports from Switzerland, which has close ties to the European Union, also increased, from 31% in April to 39% now.
The US politics liveblog is closing but you can continue to follow live coverage of the Trump tariffs news on a new liveblog here. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump signed an executive order to increase tariffs on Canadian goods imported to the US from 25% to 35%, hours after he suggested that a trade deal would be hampered by Canada’s decision to recognize Palestine as a state.
Trump revised the global tariffs he announced, and then paused, in April, to impose a minimum 10% import tax on goods from across the globe, with higher rates on 92 nations listed in an annex. The rates take effect in 7 days.
Joe Biden gave a 20-minute address to an association of Black lawyers, and tore into Trump, saying that the rule of law was at threat “under the pressure we’re under now with this guy we have as president”.
A legal review board recommended that Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer who works in the White House Office of Management and Budget, should lose his license to practice law over his role in Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.
A civil rights arm of the health department referred Harvard University to the department of justice over allegations that Jewish students were discriminated against during protests against Israel’s war on Gaza.
The former president, Joe Biden, just spoke in Chicago at a gala to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Bar Association, the nation’s oldest and largest national association of predominantly Black lawyers, judges and law students.
The 82-year-old, whose mental competency was called into question after a disastrous debate performance last year, leading him to end his re-election bid, spoke fluently and with energy for the most part, if occasionally too quickly, as if determined to assuage the concerns that are still the subject of investigations by the Republican congress.
In a 20-minute address, streamed live by Fox News, Biden offered an impassioned defense of the judges he nominated to the federal bench as president, and of the rule of law itself.
“Judges matter, courts matter, the law matters and the constitution matters” he said, his voice rising. “I think a lot of Americans are starting to realize that, under the pressure we’re under now with this guy we have as president”.
As the crowd reacted to that comment on Trump, Biden shook his head and added: “Oh get ready folks, this is just starting”.
After reciting his familiar claim to have been inspired by the civl rights movement to become a public defender before entering politics, Biden criticized Donald Trump, without naming him, for disregarding the law. The executive branch, he said, “seems to be doing its best to dismantle the constitution”. He added, “and they’re doing it all too often with the help of a congress that is just sitting on the sidelines, and enabled by the highest court in the nation”. In a break from his prepared remarks, Biden added, of the supreme court, “the rulings they’ve made, my God.”
Biden also accused the Trump administration of working to erase “all the gains we’ve made” and “to erase justice itself”.
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday modifying the tariff rates he first announced in April ahead of a Friday deadline for the new rates on imported goods to go into effect.
The order states that goods imported from every nation on Earth will be subject to a 10% tariff except for goods from the 92 countries listed in an annex that are subject to higher tariff rates. The highest tariff is on goods from Syria, which will be taxed at 41%.
Tariffs on two countries, the United Kingdom and Brazil, are listed at 10%, but a previous order signed by Trump added a further 40% tariff on some Brazilian goods, to punish the country for prosecuting its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for trying to overturn an election he lost and inspiring his supporters to storm the seat of government. Trump’s order excluded many of the most common imports from Brazil from the additional tariff, including wood pulp, metals and airplanes, but left the duty in place for coffee.
Goods from the remote Falkland Islands, which remain a British overseas territory, are also set at 10%.
Following an agreement with the European Union, Americans importing goods from that 27-nation bloc will be hit with a 15% tariff.
The new country-specific tariffs are a sweeping change to the rates unveiled by Trump with a flourish in the Rose Garden on 2 April.
Among major US trading partners, imports from Taiwan will now be subject to a tariff of 20% instead of 32%; imports from Japan will be subject to a 15% tariff, instead of 24%; imports from South Korea will be subject to a 15% tariff, instead of 25%.
The revised rates include a drop in tariffs on goods from: Vietnam, which were set at 46% in April, to 20% now; Indonesia, which was 32% and is now 19%; Bangladesh, which was 37% and is now 20%; Cambodia which was 49% and is now 19%; Laos, which was 48% and is now 40%; Sri Lanka, which was 44% and is now 20%; Thailand, which was 36% and is now 19%; and Lesotho, which was 50% and is now 15%.
Oddly, the rate for the Philippines has increased from 17% to 19%, even though its president, Bongbong Marcos, recently completed a friendly visit to the White House.
The rate for South Africa, a nation whose president dismissed Trump’s claims that its white population was being persecuted, remains unchanged at 30%.
The rate on goods from Serbia dropped only slightly, from 37% in April to 35% now, despite its president’s strong support for Trump. Israel was given a similarly small reduction from 17% in April to 15% now.
Another close ally of Trump, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, saw the tariff rate on goods from his country drop from 26% to 25%.
The rate for imports from Switzerland, which has close ties to the European Union, also increased, from 31% in April to 39% now.
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to increase tariffs on Canadian goods imported to the United States from 25% to 35%.
The White House cited what it called Trump’s power to impose tariffs in response to a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, on the same day that the government asked a federal appeals court to overturn a trade court ruling that the law gave Trump no such power.
The White House claimed that Trump had increased tariffs on Canada because it had failed to act on “the public health crisis caused by fentanyl and illicit drugs flowing across the northern border into the United States”.
However, in the early hours of Thursday morning, Trump had posted on social media that he might not strike a deal with Canada on tariffs as punishment for its decision to recognize the state of Palestine. “Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”
Several commentators suggested that Trump’s statement that he might use tariffs to influence another nation’s foreign policy could become part of the legal case before the appeals court that he was not, in fact, responding to any real emergency.
As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported this month: “The latest data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows an uptick in the amount of fentanyl seized near the American northern border with Canada – but the quantities intercepted remain a tiny fraction of what’s coming from Mexico.”
A legal review board in Washington recommended on Thursday that Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer who currently works in the White House Office of Management and Budget, should lose his licence to practise law over his role in Donald Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 election.
The recommendation from the District of Columbia Bar’s board on professional responsibility has to be approved by DC court of appeals, but it also imposes an automatic suspension unless Clark can convince the court to block his punishment within 30 days.
Clarke was charged with “attempted dishonesty and attempted serious interference with the administration of justice” for offering, as a justice department official in late 2020, to send a letter to the state of Georgia saying that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”
As Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time, and Richard Donoghue, his deputy, told the January 6 committee, after they told Clark that there was no such evidence, they learned that Trump was considering a plan to make Clark the acting attorney general and have him send the letter.
Around the same time, according to handwritten notes taken by Donoghue , Trump pressed Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.”
As the review board’s ruling explains, at an Oval office meeting on 3 January 2021, Clark argued to Trump that he should be appointed acting attorney general, and promised to “conduct nationwide investigations that would uncover outcome-determinative election issues in just a few days.”
When his superiors Rosen and Donoghue objected to what the called that “completely unrealistic” proposal, Trump suggested that he might as well “give it a shot”.
Rosen and Donoghue later testified that they then told Trump that if he made Clark attorney general, there would be mass resignations of justice department leadership, the White House counsel and other attorneys in that office.
In his testimony to the January 6 committee, Donoghue recalled that Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told the president “that letter that this guy wants to send, that letter is a murder-suicide pact. It’s going to damage everyone who touches it, and we should have nothing to do with that letter.”
Trump then abandoned the scheme to appoint Clark, saying it would not be worth “the breakage”.
Clark spent much of Thursday thanking supporters like Steve Bannon for denouncing the move to strip him of his ability to practise law.
Florida will fly official flags at half-staff on Friday in honor of the late wrestler Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis announced on Thursday.
DeSantis referred to Bollea as “a great Floridian”. The announcement made no mention of that fact that the wrestler, who spoke in support of Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention, had his contract terminated by World Wrestling Entertainment Inc in 2015, after audio was published of a racist tirade in which he used the n-word.
At the end of a brief exchange with reporters following his announcement on the new sports and fitness council, Donald Trump was asked about Gaza by a reporter, specifically if he agrees with Marjorie Taylor Greene that “what is occurring there is a genocide”.
Trump dodged the question. “Oh its terrible what’s occurring there, yeah”, the president said.
He then repeated his complaint that “nobody said thank you” when the United States donated money to feed the people of Gaza, and his false claim that the recent donation of $30 million was $60 million.
The president also reiterated the Israeli talking point that the blame for hunger in Gaza lies with Hamas and not Israel, which has blocked humanitarian deliveries for months, and imposed a chaotic new system of distribution which has led to more then 1,000 Palestinians being killed by live fire from Israeli soldiers.
“We gave it to people that are in theory watching over it”, Trump said of the financial donation. “We wanted Israel to watch over it. Part of the problem is Hamas is taking the money and they’re taking the food.”
Aid groups have identified Israel’s blockade as the cause of the starvation in Gaza, and its decision to replace a functioning UN-run distribution system with a dysfunctional system run by Israel and private military contractors working for the newly created, US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Donald Trump introduced new members of the president’s council on sports, fitness and nutrition on Thursday and announced that he was “officially restoring the presidential fitness test” at the White House on Thursday.
Trump was joined by several of the new council members, including the golfers Bryson DeChambeau and Annika Sörenstam, WWE wrestler Triple H, and current and former NFL players Harrison Butker, Nick Bosa and Lawrence Taylor.
When he introduced the WWE star Triple H as someone who has “been my friend for a long time”, Trump looked at the wrestler, who was standing next to him, and appeared not to recognize him, continuing to look around the room for him.
When Trump invited Taylor to speak, the former New York Giant linebacker said that he was glad to serve, although he was not sure why he was chosen or “what we’re supposed to be doing.”
During his first term in office, in 2017, the New Yorker reported that Trump was largely against exercise. “Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy”, the Washington correspondent Evan Osnos wrote at the time.
Reuters reports the administration has sent a letter to Harvard University informing the university it has referred been referred to the Department of Justice, to address the allegations of antisemitic discrimination.
In the letter from the HHS’ director of the Office of Civil Rights – Paula Stannard –writes that the office “has no choice but to refer the matter to DOJ” after Harvard “has chosen scorched-earth litigation against the Federal government.”
Stannard was referring to the university’s lawsuit after the administration attempted to freeze more than $2bn in research funding.
Immediately after the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee travel to Gaza on Friday they will brief the president and approve a plan for aid and food distribution in the region, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today.
This comes after an extensive meeting that Witkoff and Huckabee had with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu today.