President Donald Trump defended his plans to hit U.S. companies with tariffs for making products overseas as stocks slumped on the latest tariff threats.
After singling out Apple and CEO Tim Cook in a social media post Friday morning, Trump said his tariff plans wouldn’t be limited to the California-based company, but all phone makers.
“It would be also Samsung and anybody that makes that product. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair,” the president told reporters Friday afternoon. “So if they make that product now, again, when they build their plant here, there’s no tariff, so they’re going to be building plants here. But I had an understanding with Tim that he wouldn’t be doing this. He said he’s going to India to build plants. I said, ‘that’s OK to go to India, but you’re not going to sell into here without tariffs,’ and that’s the way it is.”
Trump also said he was confident that Apple could build its iPhones in the U.S. at prices American consumers would be willing to pay.
“They can. A lot of it, a lot of it’s so computerized now. These plants are amazing, if you look at them, but they can do that,” Trump said. “But we’re talking about the iPhone, you know, the iPhone, if they’re going to sell it in America, I want it to be built in the United States.”
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives called American-made iPhones a “fairy tale” on Friday, saying it would take five to 10 years to shift production and cost more than Americans would be willing to spend.
“The pressure from Trump on Apple to build iPhone production in the US as we have discussed, this would result in an iPhone price point that is a non-starter for [Apple] and translate into iPhone prices of ~$3,500 if it was made in the US which is not realistic in our view,” Ives said.
Trump stood firm on his position when asked if his comments to Walmart to “eat the tariffs” was an acknowledgement that U.S. companies will bear the cost of his trade policies.
“No, no, no. Sometimes the country will eat it, sometimes Walmart will eat,” the president said. “And sometimes there’ll be something to pay something extra.”
A tariff is a tax on imported goods. The importer pays the tax to the federal government and can either absorb the loss or pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.
Trump said Walmart and other retailers can afford it.
“They have to take out some of their profit, make a little bit less money, but I don’t want the consumer to pay,” the president said.
Walmart reported a net profit margin below 3% in its most recent earnings call. On that call earlier this month, the world’s largest retailer said Trump’s tariffs were too high and too broad for it to absorb on its own. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told shareholders that tariffs will increase consumer costs no matter how hard the giant retailer tries to keep them down. McMillon also said about two-thirds of the products the company sells in the U.S. are made, assembled or grown in the U.S.
Trump also said his tariffs are helping American companies, not hurting them.
“They’re not hurting, they’re helping because they’re creating jobs in America, we’re creating tremendous amounts of jobs in America like you’ve never seen,” he said. “We’re having investment in America. We’re not getting ripped off by every country in the world. We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world.”
Trump announced a slate of higher tariffs on April 2, but suspended them seven days later. Trump said the 90-day pause was designed to give his trade team time to make deals with foreign countries to reduce the U.S. trade deficit. Trump kept a 10% baseline tariff on foreign imports and a 25% tariff on foreign-made passenger vehicles and auto parts. Trump has also kept a 30% tariff on imports from China after trade talks earlier in May.
Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.
Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.
