Customers purchase iPhone 16s and Apple Watch Series 10 watches during the first day of in-store sales at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City on September 20, 2024. Credit: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump pledged yesterday that he will still apply tariffs to phones, computers, and popular consumer electronics, downplaying a weekend tariff exemption for these products as a procedural step in his overall push to remake U.S. trade. The late Friday reprieve—exempting a range of popular electronics from Trump’s 125 percent tariffs on China and 10 percent flat rate around the globe—is part of a longstanding plan to apply a different, specific levy to the sector, he said. “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook,’” Trump said in a social media post yesterday, issued shortly after he finished his golf game. The exempted products are “just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” and the administration will be “taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN,” he added.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also pledged the products would face a different tariff. “It’s not that they won’t be subject to tariffs geared at re-shoring. They’ll just be under a different regime. It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of potential tariffs,” Greer said yesterday on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.

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