United States President Donald Trump has said he will impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from the European Union, claiming that the bloc was created to “screw” his country.
Speaking at the first meeting of his cabinet on Wednesday, Trump said a decision on tariffs had been made and would be announced “very soon”.
“It’ll be 25 percent, generally speaking,” Trump told reporters. “And that’ll be on cars and all other things.”
Returning to his regular talking point that the US is treated unfairly in trade, Trump claimed that the 27-member union does not accept US cars and farm products while the US takes “everything from them”.
The EU currently imposes a 10 percent tariff on US vehicle imports, which is four times the tariff applied by the US to European passenger car imports.
The US, however, applies a 25 percent tariff to imported pick-up trucks.
“Look, let’s be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States,” Trump said.
“That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.”
Trump’s comments drew a swift response from the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, which said the world’s largest single market area had been “a boon” for the US.
“The EU will react firmly and immediately against unjustified barriers to free and fair trade, including when tariffs are used to challenge legal and non-discriminatory policies,” a spokesperson said.
“The EU will always protect European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified tariffs.”
Other observers in Europe offered more pointed responses to Trump’s claims.
“Trumps hates the EU,” Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the US, said on X.
“He doesn’t know exactly what it is but he hates it.”
Carl Bildt, Sweden’s prime minister from 1991 to 1994, said that Trump had a “seriously distorted” view of the EU’s history.
“It was actually set up to prevent war on the European continent,” Bildt said on X.
Trump’s latest trade salvo comes amid heightened tensions between Washington and Brussels over his administration’s “America First” approach to international affairs.
On top of stoking trade tensions, Trump has prompted concern about his commitment to Europe’s security and the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with his outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin and verbal attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
With Trump pledging to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine, officials in Kyiv and Brussels fear that the US president is inclined towards striking a peace deal that heavily favours Russia, including by letting Moscow keep Ukrainian land it seized during its invasion.
On Monday, Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz said his country must achieve “independence” from the US because “Americans, or at least this portion of the Americans … care very little about the fate of Europe.”
Merz, who is seeking to form a coalition government after his Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance won the most seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday, said he was not sure that NATO would exist in its current form by the middle of this year, “or whether we will have to establish an independent European defence capability much more quickly”.
In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to assuage concerns about NATO’s future while calling on European governments to invest more in their own defence.
“My reaction is NATO is not in jeopardy. The only thing that puts NATO in jeopardy is the fact that we have NATO Allies who barely have militaries or whose militaries are not very capable because they’ve spent 40 years not spending any money on it,” Rubio said when asked about Merz’s comments.
“These are rich countries, especially in Western Europe,” Rubio added. “They have plenty of money. They should be investing that in their national security, and they’re not.”