President Donald Trump is recommending the implementation of a 50% tariff on imports from the European Union starting June 1, he announced Friday.
The news comes days after Bloomberg reported that the EU sent new proposals to the United States in an effort to advance trade negotiations pertaining to currently paused reciprocal tariffs on the bloc.
“Our discussions with them are going nowhere,” Trump said Friday, while calling out trade barriers like value-added taxes as a driver of a “totally unacceptable” trade deficit between the U.S. and the EU.
In 2024, the U.S. had a trade deficit of $236 billion with the EU, per data from the United States International Trade Commission.
The EU has been one of many countries stuck in the proverbial crosshairs of Trump’s tariff-heavy trade policy.
The president applied a 20% tariff to imports from the bloc as part of his reciprocal tariff policy announced April 2, although that rate was lowered to 10% as part of a 90-day pause slated to end July 9. Trump has also threatened to tariff specific goods from the EU, including wine and champagne.
The EU has been preparing its own countermeasures to U.S. duties but paused implementation until July 14 “to give negotiations a chance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in early April. The planned retaliatory measures would target imports worth roughly $107 billion (95 billion euros at the time of the announcement), the commission said earlier this month.
