What Trump’s transatlantic trade war would mean for Europe

Steel workers walk to the main factory of struggling steel producer Thyssenkrupp as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the steelworks ahead of the German federal Bundestag elections later this month in Duisburg, Germany, Tuesday, February 4, 2025.

US President Donald Trump has promised to slap sweeping tariffs on the European Union’s US-bound exports. The move would hammer major manufacturers already tangled up in Washington’s threatened tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico, but ultimately it will be ordinary consumers around the world who will be paying the price.

“The European Union is…” US President Donald Trump shakes his head, disgust etched into his features. Behind him on the runway, the engines of Air Force One are roaring. “It’s an atrocity, what they’ve done.”

What Europe had done, Trump told reporters Sunday night, was commit the cardinal sin of not buying more American products. He evoked a yawning trade deficit between the US and the EU, first describing it as $300 billion and then as $350 billion in the space of two sentences. According to the US government’s own official estimate, the US-EU goods and services deficit was just over $131 billion as of 2022.

“They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing – and we take everything from them,” he said. Now, he warned, the 27-nation bloc would “definitely” face US tariffs.


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