Trump Aides Signal New Tariffs on Chips, Calling Exclusions Temporary
The Trump administration signaled on Sunday that it would pursue new tariffs on the powerful computer chips inside smartphones and other technologies, just two days after it excluded a variety of electronics from the steep import taxes recently applied on goods arriving from China.
The push came as President Trump's top economic advisers scrambled to explain their shifting strategy, after having insisted for weeks they would shield no company or industry from any of the fees it has levied in a bid to reset U.S. trade relationships.
The reprieve for technology companies arrived in the form of a Customs and Border Protection rule issued late Friday that spared high-tech imports from Mr. Trump's so-called reciprocal tariffs, including those on China. While the president paused a set of punishing levies on nearly 60 countries last week, his administration has forged ahead with a new 145 percent tax on Chinese exports, which Washington announced after Beijing retaliated against the United States.
The exclusions in the C.B.P. rule covered a wide slate of products, such as computers, smartphones, modems and flash drives, and it represented a major victory for Apple, Nvidia and other U.S. technology giants, which rely on Chinese factories to help manufacture important components and popular devices.
But on Sunday, the Trump administration sought to cast those exemptions in a different light, framing them as only a temporary break while the government prepares more targeted taxes on semiconductor imports in the coming weeks. To Mr. Trump and his top aides, the United States sources too many of its chips from abroad, threatening the nation's national and economic security.
Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser on trade, insisted on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that they were 'not exclusions' at all. Instead, he stressed that the White House still could impose specific tariffs on the computer chips that power countless consumer and military products.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Donald Trump Makes Legal Threat To CNN And The New York Times Over Their Reporting On Iran Intel Assessment
Donald Trump has again threatened news outlets over coverage he dislikes, this time The New York Times and CNN over their reporting on a preliminary intelligence assessment that raised doubts that the U.S. strikes on Iran destroyed their nuclear program. The White House has been on the warpath against journalists over their reporting, even though the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has acknowledged the existence of the intelligence assessment. Trump and his allies have go so far as to accuse CNN and the Times of denigrating the members of the military who carried out the strikes, even though their reporting was not critical of how the mission was carried out. More from Deadline Bill Moyers Dies: Influential Public Media Journalist And Commentator And Former White House Press Secretary Was 91 Peter Bart: Barbara Walters Built A Career On Trust In A Bygone Era Far Removed From Today Pete Hegseth Chides Former Fox News Colleague Jennifer Griffin As "About The Worst" During Defense Secretary's Press-Bashing Briefing Trump has insisted that Iran's nuclear capabilities were 'obliterated.' Per the Times, Trump demanded a retraction and an apology, as his attorney, Alejandro Brito, described the reporting as 'false,' 'defamatory' and 'unpatriotic.' David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, 'No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming.' McGraw wrote to Brito, 'While the Trump administration protests that the assessments were only preliminary — which, by the way, was the second word of our article — and that later assessments may come to different conclusions, no one in the administration disputes that the first assessments said exactly what the article said they did: the destruction caused by the raid was not as significant as the president's remarks suggested.' He added that the 'American public has a right to know whether the attack on Iran — funded by the tax dollars and of enormous consequence to every citizen — was a success. We rely on our intelligence services to provide the kind of impartial assessment that we all need in a democracy to judge our country's foreign policy and the quality of our leaders' decisions. It would be irresponsible for a news organization to suppress that information and deny the public the right to hear it. And it would be even more irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication that dared to report that the trained, professional and patriotic intelligence experts employed by the U.S. government thought that the president may have gotten it wrong in his initial remarks to the country.' CNN also received a legal threat. A spokesperson said 'we can confirm we received a letter and responded to it, rejecting the claims in the letter.' Trump has called for reporters on the stories to be fired, but has singled out CNN's Natasha Bertrand. On Thursday, at the press briefing, Leavitt attacked Bertrand's past reporting. The network has said that they stand behind '100% behind' Bertrand and her work. The president's legal threat is not unusual. He has previously sued the Times and CNN, but the various lawsuits were dismissed. He sued CBS over the way that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. The network has said that the lawsuit is meritless, as do a number of legal scholars, but its attorneys are in settlement talks with Trump's team. CBS parent Paramount Global is seeking administration approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Earlier on Thursday, Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, held a press conference in which he also bashed media outlets for reporting on the intelligence report. 'You cheer against Trump so hard, in your DNA and in your blood, cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes,' Hegseth said to the journalists at the Pentagon. He said that he was 'urging caution about premising an entire stories on biased leaks to biased publications to make something look bad. How about we take a beat, recognize first the success of our warriors, hold them up, tell their stories, celebrate that, wave an American flag, be proud of what we accomplished.' Best of Deadline 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Soundtrack: From Griff To Sabrina Carpenter 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
CNN
33 minutes ago
- CNN
Dem Sen Briefed On Iran: I Don't Think Trump 'Was Telling The Truth' - Erin Burnett OutFront - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
Dem Sen Briefed On Iran: I Don't Think Trump 'Was Telling The Truth' Erin Burnett OutFront 48 mins A democratic senator says Iran's nuclear program was not obliterated after receiving a closed door intelligence briefing. Republicans are coming to Trump's defense. Plus, Zoran Mamdami joins to discuss his stunning victory against Andrew Cuomo in New York City.
New York Times
42 minutes ago
- New York Times
Your Phone Is Stolen. Your Laptop Gets Lost. Here's What to Do.
Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter By Dave Gershgorn Dave Gershgorn is a writer covering monitors, laptops, and tablets. He is a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation. Updated June 26, 2025 On a humid August night in Ferguson, Missouri, about 10 years ago, my phone was stolen. I was working as a photojournalist covering the protests against Michael Brown's killing, and amidst the bustle of the packed street, my phone was snatched out of my lap. I chased after the thief, but as we made a turn off the boulevard, and the streetlights grew sparse, I gave up. My phone was gone. That had never happened to me before, and I felt completely lost. I was far from my home in New York, I had no way to communicate with my family and friends and no way to get up-to-date information about what was happening around me, and I didn't have my saved travel plans or airline ticket home — or even any music. And suddenly all of that information was in someone else's hands. After I returned home, I bought a new phone and set it up from scratch. I still had my photos and contact data saved in Apple's iCloud, but to this day, I don't know everything I might have lost. A decade later, it's much easier to recover a phone — and all the personal information on it. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each built location-tracking services, which allow you to track your device's last known location on a map in real time. Google added an AI-powered feature to Android phones that is designed to detect when your device has been snatched and locks the phone screen to make it harder for a thief to access your data. Although these tools give you options if your device is stolen, they don't ensure that your data is completely protected. Dave Lewis, global chief information security officer at identity security company 1Password, told Wirecutter that the average criminal might not be able to circumvent facial recognition or a fingerprint reader and will most likely flip the device to someone else for parts. 'But for an attacker with any sort of technical savvy, if they have physical access to the device, it's game over,' Lewis said. Today, I would do things differently, taking a few steps before my device is stolen as well as after. This is what I'd do. Explore all articles 1. Enable your device's Find My device-tracking tool. Finding your phone is easier if you have its Find My location-tracking feature enabled. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have versions of this tool, which allows you to locate your device on a map, display a message on its lock screen, or play a sound on it remotely so that you can try to find it if it's nearby. We also recommend turning on a feature in iOS called Stolen Device Protection, which requires the person unlocking your phone to verify their identity with Face ID or Touch ID, wait an hour, and then verify again before being able to change sensitive information such as account passwords. Google has made a similar feature, called Identity Check, available for some Android phones. 2. Set your device to automatically create backups. Unless the phone's data is backed up, security experts told us that it's nearly impossible for the average person to retrieve information from their phone once it's already lost or stolen. If your phone is lost or stolen, you'll still be able to access data on Instagram or even your to-do list app, since most apps store information in the cloud and send it to your phone when you need it. But all the little things that make your phone yours, such as your settings and backgrounds, the way you arrange your apps, and anything you might have saved locally in your Files app, can be saved only if you've backed them up beforehand. Both iOS and Android let you schedule regular automatic backups of all your apps and settings, which is absolutely essential. If you have a recent copy of your backup and don't need any of the information on the phone, you can remotely wipe all the data off it without losing too much. Otherwise, you're stuck trying to find and recover your phone. 3. Encrypt and back up your laptop. It can be particularly challenging to recover data from a stolen or lost laptop, since you're far more likely to have saved files to its hard drive rather than storing them in the cloud. By encrypting your hard drive, which is an option in both macOS and Windows, you can prevent attackers from extracting that data with their own tools if they don't have your password. We also recommend backing up your important files to an external hard drive that you store in a safe location, so you can recover your photos and documents even if your laptop is gone for good. 4. Use a password manager. A password manager is an essential service that we recommend to improve your online security. (We recommend 1Password or Bitwarden.) It works by creating and autofilling unique passwords for all of your accounts, and in turn you need to remember and safeguard only the master password to the password manager. Your data stays encrypted until the master password is entered, and you can deauthorize the device if it's stolen or lost to remove the potential of your passwords being accessed altogether. 5. Turn off message previews and lock Control Center access. If anyone looking at your phone can see messages as they pop up, that means thieves can also see two-factor authentication codes. That gives the thief an opportunity to crack into any accounts that send you a code when you log in. iOS and Android both give you the ability to hide message previews until your phone recognizes your face. (If you mark your phone as lost in the Find My feature, that automatically turns off message previews remotely.) You can also turn off certain features of the lock screen, such as the Control Center, which gives quick access to Wi-Fi and other settings, until the phone has been unlocked by facial recognition. Share this article with a friend. Prevention, as they say, is the best cure, but life doesn't always unfold so neatly. If your phone, tablet, or laptop gets lost or stolen right this moment, don't panic. Here are the things you should do. 1. If your device was stolen, report the theft. Immediately after your device is taken, report it stolen to the police. If the missing device is a phone, report it to your cell carrier. Many carriers require you to give a previously established PIN to verify your identity and will then freeze your number (for more details, see information from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) until you add a new phone. The carrier will then block the old phone's unique serial number from connecting to its network. 2. Remotely lock down the device. If you enabled the Find My feature prior to the loss or theft, both Apple and Google give you options to remotely lock down your device. For an iPhone, you can visit Find Devices and mark the item as lost. For an Android phone, navigate to the Secure device setting in Google's location-tracking tool. Locking down the device makes it harder for thieves to access your Google account, pay using saved cards, or see alerts. 3. Revoke access to apps and remove multi-factor authentication. If a thief has your phone and is able to unlock it somehow, you should limit their ability to receive one-time passwords for your bank, for instance, or use applications that are permanently logged in. We recommend removing your phone as a multi-factor authentication device if you haven't turned off message previews as recommended above, if you have an easy-to-guess password, or if your cell phone line isn't frozen yet. Ronnie Manning, chief brand advocate for security key maker Yubico, separately recommends making a list of your most sensitive accounts, such as Google or Facebook accounts that you use to log in to other accounts, and then revoke your device from those accounts if it's stolen. You can usually find these settings under names like 'Account Access' or 'Security.' 4. Erase the device. With the Find My feature enabled before loss or theft, both Apple and Google will allow you to wipe data such as apps and photos from your stolen or lost phone while still being able to track it. Note that you should only wipe the device's data using the Find My feature, not fully remove the device from your Apple or Google account — that would allow the thief to set it up as new. Now, it's time to get a new phone or laptop. Luckily, we have some recommendations. This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.
