By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
President Trump is back on the tariff offensive threatening to impose a 50% tariff on the European Union and taking questions in the Oval Office about it.
00:11 Donald Trump
I’m not looking for a deal, I mean we’ve set the deal, it’s at 50%, but again there is no tariff if they build their plant here.
00:21 Speaker A
And that’s talking specifically about Apple. I want to bring in Yahoo Finance’s Washington correspondent Ben Werschkul now to talk about what we just heard. Well, I guess what we heard earlier from the president and then what we just heard from the president, Ben.
00:33 Ben Werschkul
Yeah, yeah, we heard a lot from the president today on this. It’s sort of been a lot of focus here in Washington on taxes for a few days, but we’re back we’re definitely back on tariffs and that came in two social media posts from Trump that happened about 20 minutes apart. On the European Union you you saw some of those comments from Trump there and he did underline that he is looking to do this. Uh the deadline of this also has gotten a lot of attention which is June 1st, which is in just a week’s time and this is a straight 50% tariff on the European Union that he says he’s looking to impose. His comments this afternoon did double down on it as you mentioned but he also I would argue gave some glimmers of what might be on on negotiations over the next week. He talked about things like lawsuits against US companies. The digital service tax has always been a big issue for Trump in terms of whether that could that could sort of alleviate some of these tariffs. He also did directly say delays could be in the offing depending on whether companies are looking to move to the United States from Europe as part of this. So there are there are avenues of this of Secretary Benson also talked about how this move today might be about lighting a fire under the EU is how he put it. So that so there’s definitely levels of of negotiations that Trump is clearly aiming to set off here. But again this is a deadline that’s just in a couple days. And the global reaction here has been real shock especially at this 50% level. That’s higher than most people thought. Um he was even thinking about it’s higher than I would note we have on China at the moment. So this would if if this goes forward this would be a tariff level higher than we have on our chief adversary. Europe is our is is a close ally in a on a lot of fronts. And so the global reaction has been there and it comes after a week where there has been optimistic chatter on tariffs that that obviously all reversed today.
03:02 Speaker A
Can I ask you Ben you know Trump talks about a deal with the EU and he wants a good deal. Do we know what a good deal might look like for Trump?
03:22 Ben Werschkul
Yeah, I think we do have some glimmers of that with the UK deal that we had a couple weeks ago. There’s certain areas where Trump is willing to move others where he’s not. I think there’s I think any sort of purchases. Clearly I think that’s going to be a big part of the conversation. I do think a lot of these EU laws that really do get under Trump’s skin, the digital service tax that that does impact US tech companies is something he’s long railed against and it is a kind of way to to change things without without getting at some of the deeper issues between the Europe Europe and the United States like like value added taxes which is another issue on the table that’s a lot harder to change. It’s a lot easier to sort of let up some lawsuits on on tech companies than then do this. So there’s there’s elements here of what it’s going to be but again this is clearly an attempt to kind of make a lot of negotiations happen in a hurry and so we have about one week to kind of see how it see how it pans out in the immediate term.
04:41 Speaker A
All right, Ben, I know you were busy today, plenty of headlines. Thank you sir, appreciate it.
04:47 Ben Werschkul
Thanks much.