WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would sign a memorandum to impose tariffs on countries that levy digital service taxes on US technology companies.
A White House official, providing details of the order, said Trump was directing his administration to consider responsive actions like tariffs “to combat the digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”
“President Trump will not allow foreign governments to appropriate America’s tax base for their own benefit,” the official said.
The memo directs the US Trade Representative’s office to renew digital service taxes investigations that were initiated during Trump’s first term, and investigate any additional countries that use a digital tax “to discriminate against US companies,” the official said.
Trump, asked at the White House if he would sign a tariff order on digital taxes, told reporters: “We are going to be doing that, digital. What they’re doing to us in other countries is terrible with digital, so we’re going to be announcing that, maybe today.”
Trump said last week that he would impose tariffs on Canada and France over their digital services taxes, and a White House fact sheet released at the time said that “only America should be allowed to tax American firms.”
It complained that Canada and France used the taxes to each collect over $500 million per year from US companies.
“Overall, these non-reciprocal taxes cost America’s firms over $2 billion per year. Reciprocal tariffs will bring back fairness and prosperity to the distorted international trade system and stop Americans from being taken advantage of,” said the fact sheet. It gave no further details.
The digital service taxes aimed at US tech giants including Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook, Apple and Amazon have been a source of trade disputes for years.
Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Turkiye, India, Austria and Canada have imposed the taxes, levied on revenues earned from digital services sold within their borders.
The US Trade Representative’s office during Trump’s first term found them to discriminate against US companies in its investigations and readied retaliatory tariffs.
President Joe Biden’s trade chief, Katherine Tai, in 2021 followed up on these probes and announced 25 percent tariffs on over $2 billion worth of imports from six countries, but immediately suspended them to allow negotiations on a global tax deal to continue.
Those negotiations led to a 15 percent global corporate minimum tax that the US Congress never ratified. Talks on a second component, meant to create an alternative to the digital taxes, have largely ground to a halt with no agreement.
Trump on his first day in office effectively pulled the US out of the global tax arrangement with nearly 140 countries, declaring that the 15 percent global minimum tax has “no force or effect in the United States” and ordering the US Treasury to prepare options for “protective measures.”
A new Trump order could allow USTR’S retaliatory duties to be reactivated. They were designed to offset the amount of digital service taxes collected.
In 2021 USTR said it would impose 25 percent tariffs on about $887 million worth of goods from Britain, including clothing, footwear and cosmetics, and on about $386 million worth of goods from Italy, including clothing, handbags and optical lenses.
USTR said at the time it would impose tariffs on goods worth $323 million from Spain, $310 million from Turkiye, $118 million from India and $65 million from Austria. USTR separately suspended tariffs on $1.3 billion worth of French cosmetics, handbags and other goods.
Trump says he will impose retaliatory tariffs for digital taxes, may come Friday
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Trump says he will impose retaliatory tariffs for digital taxes, may come Friday
- Digital service taxes a longstanding trade irritant for US
- Countries including France, Canada, UK have DSTs
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
