President Trump indicated he was ready to broaden his trade war on Friday, saying that he would announce reciprocal tariffs on other countries next week.
Such a measure would raise the levies the United States charges on imports to match what other countries charge on American products, a move that could trigger new trade fights.
Speaking to reporters before a meeting with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan at the White House, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would restore fairness to trading relationships and eliminate U.S. trade deficits.
Making trade more reciprocal, Mr. Trump said, would ensure “that we’re treated evenly with other countries; we don’t want any more, any less,” he added.
It’s the latest indication that Mr. Trump is willing to use tariffs broadly and unsparingly. He has already imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China, in addition to the levies on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods in his first term.
Over the past week, the president came within hours of imposing sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico, America’s largest trading partners, saying those countries were sending drugs and migrants to the United States. He ultimately paused those measures for 30 days after the countries offered him some concessions.
Mr. Trump did not say which countries he would target with reciprocal tariffs. He said that tariffs on Japan were an option if the U.S. trade deficit with that country didn’t fall to zero. But he also claimed that the roughly $68 billion trade deficit could be eliminated by Japan purchasing more oil and gas.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump indicated he had the European Union in his sights, saying that the bloc would “definitely” face tariffs and “pretty soon.” Mr. Trump has often criticized the European Union for charging a higher tariff on American cars that the U.S. does for European ones, as well as for running a trade surplus with the United States.
Mr. Trump floated proposals in both his first term and his 2024 campaign of making trade more reciprocal by matching the tariff rates that other countries impose on American products.
He has also said in recent days that he planned to impose tariffs on a variety of critical industries, like copper, steel, aluminum, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. On Friday, he also said that tariffs on foreign cars are “always on the table.”
At a subsequent news conference Friday with Mr. Ishiba, Mr. Trump said that he prefers a reciprocal tariff to a “flat” tariff, which would be a blanket levy on all imports from around the world.
“I think that’s the only fair way to do it,” Mr. Trump said.
Asked if Japan would retaliate if the United States imposed tariffs on its exports, Mr. Ishiba demurred. “I am unable to respond to a theoretical question,” he said.
Also on Friday, the president signed an executive order that would temporarily walk back part of his measure against China, by allowing low-cost products from the country to once again come into the United States tariff free.
The order reverses, at least for now, a decision that Mr. Trump made last Saturday, when he signed an order eliminating so-called de minimis treatment for goods from China. The de minimis provision had allowed products under $800 to come into the United States without being subject to tariffs and with less information given to customs. Trump officials had said the administration was ending the exemption on goods from China because it was providing a conduit for fentanyl and the materials to make it to flow into the United States.
The brief elimination of the exemption meant that hundreds of thousands of packages coming into the United States each day from China were suddenly subject to tariffs and requirements for much more information.
The swift change sowed confusion among retailers and shippers. Many sellers on e-commerce platforms were taken by surprise. The U.S. Postal Service temporarily stopped accepting packages from China on Wednesday, though by Thursday morning it said it would once again accept them.
In the executive order Friday, the president said that de minimis treatment would continue to be available for goods from China for now, but that it would cease once the secretary of commerce notified him that systems had been put “in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue.”
Shipping companies like FedEx and UPS have done steady business as a result of the de minimis measure and have fought to preserve it. The executive chairman and founder of FedEx, Frederick Smith, visited the White House for meetings Thursday, according to Reuters. It is not clear who he met with.
Timothy Brightbill, a trade expert at the law firm Wiley Rein, said that the order “appears to concede, at least for now, that the United States does not have the systems in place it would need to collect tariffs on the enormous and growing number of de minimis shipments each year from China.”
Mr. Brightbill said he expected that the Commerce Department, as well as Customs and Border Protection, which processes imports, would make it a priority to ensure that these new tariffs can soon be collected. “Both the administration and Congress want to fix this loophole,” he said.
Kim Glas, chief executive of the National Council of Textile Organizations, said getting rid of de minimis would change the behavior of companies by moving them away from the system of shipping millions of small packages because it would eliminate the incentive to do so. That, she said, would alleviate the burden on Customs and Border Protection.
“It no longer will make financial sense for importers to import everything in small individual packages,” Ms. Glas said in an interview early Friday. “So what this will do — and this won’t happen overnight, but it will happen — is a lot of the packages will go back to being transported via ship and freight in larger containers destined for the U.S. market, which will make C.B.P.’s job easier.”
Alan Rappeport and Jordyn Holman contributed reporting.
