Trump rolls again some extra tariffs as his ‘Liberation Day’ plans proceed to face scrutiny: Live updates

The Trump administration is racing to explain its decision Friday to exempt large parts of the electronics trade from the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff agenda.

The White House has framed its tariffs as a way to crack down on China and reshore lost U.S. manufacturing, but the Friday move effectively preserves the status quo on a major area of U.S.-China trade, where U.S. tech companies like Apple design their products in America but make them overseas.

“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Politico on Saturday. “That’s why the President has secured trillions of dollars in U.S. investments from the largest tech companies in the world, including Apple, TSMC, and Nvidia. At the direction of the President, these companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”

Donald Trump said this week tariffs will soon be announced on the pharmaceutical industry.

The policy could impact access to heparin, a widely used blood anti-coagulant that’s made in China.

“If China retaliates with restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, that would be a serious concern,” Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Washington Post.

The Trump administration has pursued it’s aggressive tariff policy with the goal of bringing manufacturing jobs that moved overseas back to the U.S.

However, some argue that this reshoring won’t be a positive development, and that the U.S. should instead focus on supporting the kind of high-tech manufacturing that’s stepped in to replace it.

“The textile industry is dead,” Adolphus Jones, 71, a retired textile mill worker from Union, South Carolina, told The New York Times.

The region was once a hub for such manufacturing, where workers were paid low wages and suffered lung conditions from particle exposure. After such work was outsourced, the state has worked to attract companies in the bioscience and renewable energy industries, and credits a large BMW factory with lifting the area’s fortunes once again.

“Why would you want to bring it back here?” Jones said of the region’s textile industry, which has moved to places like China and Vietnam. “Truthfully, why would the younger generation want to work there?”

Trump officials spent much of the last week trying to explain and justify the president’s ever-evolving tariff policy.

They painted a picture of the blunt-force measures remaining in place without exceptions and bringing high-tech manufacturing back to the U.S.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Face the Nation the tariffs would wrench electronics factories back from China, giving jobs to U.S. technicians and mechanics who would aid these highly automated assembly lines.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going to be automated,” he said.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, for his part, testified in the Senate this week that, “The President has been clear that he’s not doing exemptions or exceptions in the near term.”

By Friday, however, U.S. officials were announcing that key electronics like smartphones and semiconductors would be exempt from Trump’s tariffs.

Learn more:

New Jersey’s U.S. Senate delegation is calling on Donald Trump to investigate the death of 14-year-old Amer Rabee, a New Jersey teen Israeli soldiers fatally shot last week in the West Bank.

“As New Jersey’s senators, we are calling for a thorough and transparent accounting of the facts and circumstances around Amer Rabee’s death and the actions of Israeli security forces,” Cory Booker and Andy Kim wrote in a letter to the president Friday. “We appreciate the difficult and dynamic nature of the situation, but also underscore our expectation that such an inquiry is possible and should be pursued when an American has died.”

Rabee’s family insists he was out picking almonds with friends, while the Israel Defense Forces claims he was a “terrorist” threatening civilians.

Here’s more detail on what happened.

While Trump has ordered the military to take control of land near the U.S.-Mexico border, the details of how it will work are still undetermined.

Officials are still working to determine how to execute the plan or how long troops could detain migrants before turning them over to Border agents, according to the New York Times.

There could also be signs to warn migrants that they are entering a military reservation if they cross the border into the U.S.

If you read one thing today…

Richard Hall writes:

Donald Trump has made an art form of selling his failures as triumphs, and this week’s capitulation on tariffs was his Mona Lisa.

Continue reading…

Trump has ordered the U.S. military to take control of some federal lands. Most notably, the military will be taking over the Roosevelt Reservation.

That is a stretch of land that runs along the U.S.-Mexico border in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

It stretches about 600 miles and is 60 feet wide.

The area was created in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt to keep the stretch “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.”

Businessman and Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary has emerged as one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters in his trade war against China.

In an appearance on CNN this evening, he called for 400% tariffs on China to force President Xi Jinping to the negotiating table — and not just regarding trade.

He reiterated the point, saying it was a “game of chicken” between the two nations, claiming that millions of workers might rise up against Xi if they lose their factory jobs if the U.S. stops buying Chinese goods, with no market to replace it.

O’Leary went on to say that the U.S. is not in a recession — no matter what others say.

Here’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink saying that we might already be in one:

Reacting to the news that Donald Trump has authorized the military to occupy and take jurisdiction over public land along the southern border, Rep. Greg Casar has accused the president of wanting to change the dominant story of the week — that of the tariffs debacle.

In a presidential memorandum released on Friday evening, Trump says it will be a “phased implementation” that begins on a “limited sector of federal lands” chosen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but it can be expanded at any time.

Casar, a Texas Democrat, wrote on X: “Trump wants to shift the news off his tariff economic disaster, so he’s deploying the military into our own country and targeting immigrants.”

He added: “Insane, an abuse of our military, and true to form.”