Mandelson ‘looking forward' to bringing down more US tariffs
On Friday, Donald Trump's press secretary insisted that the president will stand firm on the blanket 10% tariff on most UK imports into the US, telling reporters that he is 'committed' to the levy.
The deal announced on Thursday cut taxes on car imports of 100,000 a year from 27.5% to 10%, and also reduced tariffs on steel and aluminium through quotas. The baseline 10% rate for other goods remains in place but officials are still trying to negotiate on it.
Lord Mandelson told Newsnight: 'I'm very pleased with what we've achieved. It's taken many months of very tough negotiation, and it's also a platform going further and opening up more trade opportunities.'
He added: 'We're going to negotiate further and bring down further tariffs and remove further barriers to trade between us, that's what we're committed to, and I'm looking forward to doing that.'
Karoline Leavitt told a White House press briefing that the US president is 'committed to the 10% baseline tariff' imposed in April 'not just for the United Kingdom, but for his trade negotiations with all other countries as well'.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told reporters on Thursday that the UK's conversations with the US about 'those wider tariff lines and the 10% reciprocal tariff' were continuing.
It comes as Sir Keir Starmer did not rule out the possibility of changes to the digital services tax as part of any future trade agreement and said that discussions on other aspects are 'ongoing'.
It imposes a 2% levy on the revenues of several major US tech firms. Previous speculation suggested that the UK could revise the measure as part of a deal.
Speaking to broadcasters on board HMS St Albans during a visit to Norway, Sir Keir said: 'The deal that we signed off yesterday doesn't cover that.
'That's predominantly focused on steel and aluminium, and reducing those tariffs on car manufacturing and reducing the tariffs there, and then future-proofing for pharmaceuticals, three really important sectors, and that, as I say, will be measured in thousands and thousands of jobs that will be protected, saved and will thrive as a result of this.
US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer held a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in February (Carl Court/PA)
'On digital services, there are ongoing discussions, obviously, on other aspects of the deal, but the important thing to focus on yesterday is the sectors that are now protected that the day before yesterday were very exposed.'
Lord Mandelson said that digital services were brought up during the negotiations for this week's agreement, and told the BBC that 'what they suggested wasn't acceptable to us, so it's not in the deal'.
The deal on Thursday is the first struck by the US since the new tariffs were unveiled last month, and comes after weeks of transatlantic talks.
Sir Keir told the Independent that he has 'struck up a good relationship' with the president.
'I am the sort of person that tries to have constructive and positive relations with people,' he said.
Kemi Badenoch has said she is 'concerned' about the prospects of the UK going on to strike a full free trade agreement in the wake of Thursday's agreement.
Speaking to reporters during a visit in Essex on Friday, the Conservative leader was asked whether she thought Thursday's deal was a success.
'It's not a huge success at all,' she said. 'It's not even a trade deal, it's a tariff deal, and we are in a worse position now than we were six weeks ago.
'It's better than where we were last week, so it's better than nothing, but it's not much.
'One of the things that concerns me is that we will probably now not get a comprehensive free trade agreement.'
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The Guardian
26 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity
Donald Trump's frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say. For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life. During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden's disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden's fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election. Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK. Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: 'The other thing I say to Europe: we've – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They're killing us. They're killing the beauty of our scenery.' Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales 'loco' and that wind energy 'kills the birds' (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the amount killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines). The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump 'digressing without thinking – he'll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative', said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine. For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a 'stable genius' and bragging about 'acing' exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia. But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president's fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct. Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forget that others had also contributed. Trump claimed the US gave $60m 'two weeks ago'. He added: 'You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything. 'Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.' Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as 'connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza'. The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's claimed $60m donation. Segal said another characteristic of Trump's questionable mental acuity is confabulation. 'It's where he takes an idea or something that's happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.' A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT. Trump recalled: 'I said: 'What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.' I said: 'What kind of a student?' And then he said: 'Seriously, good.' He said: 'He'd correct – he'd go around correcting everybody.' But it didn't work out too well for him.' The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump's uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT. 'The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it's told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he's remembering it,' Segal said. 'This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.' Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump's rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as 'the weave' – also drew scrutiny. The White House removed official transcripts of Trump's remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to 'maintain consistency'. It is worth reading Trump's remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis. At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, 'What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?' He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding: Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn't come out. They have a restrictor. You can't – in areas where you have so much water they don't know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn't uh, the shower doesn't, you think it's not working. It is working. The water's dripping out and that's no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it's really not. It's horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You're washing whole – water barely comes out it's ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can't just change it.' 'Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump's performance,' Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September. He added: 'If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.' At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room. After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from 'the vaults', Trump said. 'Look at those frames, you know, I'm a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,' and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china. As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued: Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they're if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they'll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don't think they're allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don't think they made movies from here. You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: 'You can't do that. You have to have a medallion.' They said, 'What's a medallion?' I said: 'I'll show you.' And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes. And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it's been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can't paint it, if you paint it it won't look good because they've never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office. Er, they've tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they've never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won't look right.' The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump's mental fitness. 'The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as 'experts'. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden's mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump's mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,' said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. So do his political allies. 'As President Trump's former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,' said congressman Ronny Jackson. In April, Trump's White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president 'exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state'. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal. That report hasn't stopped people from questioning Trump's mental acuity. 'What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone's baseline and function,' John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June. 'If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.' Gartner, who during Trump's first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: 'I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we'll see. 'But the point is that it's going to get worse. That's my prediction.'
The Guardian
26 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Sydney Sweeney's Republican voter registration revealed amid jeans ad controversy
Sydney Sweeney registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Donald Trump won a second US presidency, it has been revealed, as the public continues fixating on a new jeans ad campaign featuring the actor and a pun about her genes. The Euphoria and White Lotus star registered to vote in Florida on 14 June 2024 – shortly after buying a mansion in the Keys – and listed her party affiliation as Republican, according to publicly available records reviewed by the Guardian on Sunday. That was about two weeks after Trump, another registered Republican Florida voter, was convicted in New York City of criminal falsification of business records and before he secured a return to the White House in November's presidential election. It was also about two years after Sweeney, 27, faced criticism from some US media consumers after she was photographed at her mother's birthday party where several of the guests were seen wearing hats that called to mind those which bear Trump's Make America Great Again (Maga) slogan. The native of Spokane, Washington, subsequently issued a statement on social media pleading with the public to 'stop making assumptions'. 'An innocent celebration … has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention,' Sweeney's statement added at the time. Sweeney has not addressed her Florida Republican voter registration, the existence of which went viral on social media on Saturday and was later reported on by traditional news outlets. The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company's denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle's campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, 'Sydney Sweeney has great genes.' In one video, 'genes' is crossed out and replaced with 'jeans'. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body's composition 'is determined by … genes'. 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,' Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts. Some social media users dismissed the campaign as tone deaf, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse. One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying 'it's literally giving … Nazi propaganda'. US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on 'woke' advertising, invoking a term some use to criticize DEI measures. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on social media that criticizing Sweeney's collaboration with American Eagle was 'cancel culture run amok'. Nonetheless, many have judged backlash to Sweeney and American Eagle's collaboration as exaggerated and overblown. American Eagle's stock has reportedly risen in the wake of its Sweeney-centered campaign. A statement from the company on Friday defended the campaign, saying: ''Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.' That outcome cut a stark contrast with the 2023 Bud Light advertisement involving trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. A conservative-organized boycott against Bud Light substantially drove sales down. The brand lost its place as the US beer market's top seller. And Bud Light's owner, Anheuser-Busch, sought to distance itself from Mulvaney in a statement which blamed the promotion on an 'outside agency without … management awareness or approval'. 'No one was trying to cancel Sydney Sweeney,' said a post on the X account Wu Tang is for the Children, which counts on more than 270,000 followers. 'And no one cares if she's Republican or not.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Inside Ukraine's effort to produce more of its own weapons to fight Putin as Trump's support flip-flops
On Tuesday, Donald Trump gave Vladimir Putin a new deadline – agree to a ceasefire in the Ukraine war or face fresh sanctions. It appeared the US president had finally run out of patience with the Russian leader, declaring he was 'no longer interested in talks' and cutting a previous deadline of 50 days dramatically short. But regardless of how encouraging this apparent renewed sense of urgency might be to Ukraine, Mr Trump's views on the war and support for Kyiv are anything but consistent. From the infamous Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky to fluctuating financial commitments from the US, Kyiv has been wise to look elsewhere for reliable supplies – preferably Ukraine's own burgeoning weapons industry. Ukraine has made no secret that a key priority is to build its own missiles that match the destructive power and long reach of the Shahed killer drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that Moscow has been launching in recent weeks. Russia has launched huge mass aerial attacks against the capital and cities across Ukraine including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Pavlohrad. Pavlohrad, in Ukraine's southeastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, recently suffered its biggest aerial attack since the start of the full-scale invasion. When The Independent drove into the city two days later, a huge plume of smoke, visible from miles away, hung over it as fires continued to rage. It is common knowledge that Pavlohrad has been home to missile production facilities since Soviet times, and Russia's defence ministry claimed, after the attack, it had struck facilities producing components for missiles and drones. Dima, who works in the local coal miners' union communications department, lives in the industrial area of the city that took the brunt of the attack. 'We experience explosions from Russian rockets and drones frequently,' he said. 'But this attack was the biggest and seemed to go on forever. The Russians have increased their aerial attacks and the targets are civilian more often than military to try to cause terror.' With Russia ramping up attacks regardless of any deadline Mr Trump attempts to impose, Kyiv has been looking at new ways to hit back. Ukraine has shown its advanced drones can destroy targets deep inside Russian territory, more than 1,000km from the Ukrainian border. And it is already producing and using a family of missile systems named 'Neptune', 'Palyanytsia,' 'Peklo,' and 'Ruta'. According to Kyiv, production multiplied eight times between 2023 and 2024 with even more growth planned for this year. Mr Zelensky has said Ukraine intends to produce 3,000 cruise and drone missiles in 2025. The homegrown R-360 Neptune cruise missile, with a 150kg warhead has been modified, according to Mr Zelensky, to give it an improved range. However, Neptunes and Ukraine's other missiles have explosive payloads that are only a fraction – sometimes a tenth – of those carried by Russian rockets. Ukrainian engineers are focused on long-range missiles able to inflict on Russia the sort of pain it is daily inflicting on Ukrainians. One of those is called 'Bars' (Leopard), first publicly mentioned at a Ukrainian weapons exhibition last April by the minister for strategic industries, Herman Smetanin. The scant information that has emerged about it suggests it is a hybrid between long-range drones and cruise missiles powered by a turbojet engine, giving it great speed and with a range of 700-800km with a warhead of 50-100kg of explosives. But it is not certain that Bars are the game-changing missiles on which Ukraine is pinning its hopes. A payload of only 100kg gives it a far weaker punch than that of Russian rockets, which often pack one-ton warheads. Mr Zelensky alluded last year to the successful test of an engine for a homemade ballistic missile. Military experts have speculated it is an offspring of the Sapsan Operational-Tactical Missile System – also known as Hrim and Hrim2 – that was conceived in the early 2000s but was dogged by funding problems and lack of political will. It was revived after Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and eastern Donbas region. One person, who did not want to be named and works with his country's defence industry, told The Independent information about missile development is probably Ukraine's most closely guarded secret. He said: 'Everyone, even senior officials, are forbidden to talk about this subject. If you do, you'll probably be arrested. The only person allowed to reveal anything is President Zelensky.' Strategic Industries minister Mr Smetanin, spearheads the efforts to grow the country's weapons production capacity. Adviser to the ministry, Yuri Sak, said that Ukraine heard the warning bells after the US first cut off support for Ukraine over the autumn and winter of 2023 to 2024. 'We realised that we had to start moving towards becoming self-sufficient and as a result our ministry was tasked with pretty much resuscitating Ukraine's defence industry. We began to make contingency plans, which we have in place now. 'Despite the war, despite the missile attacks, despite the hundreds of Shahed drones that are launched against Ukraine pretty much every night, we were able to increase our defence industry output by 35 times during the last three years.' Russia's stocks of arms and ammunition and her high capacity to manufacture weapons of all kinds meant it massively outgunned Ukraine initially, but Western-supplied weapons helped dramatically even up the odds. Mr Sak said that, since Russia's initial invasion in 2014, the number of weapons-related companies in Ukraine has mushroomed to about 100 state-owned defence industry enterprises and almost 700 private companies. From producing one howitzer per month in 2022, Mr Sak said Ukraine is now delivering 15 each month. The conflict in Ukraine has changed the nature of warfare and seen a profound shift toward drones, with Ukraine planning to produce five million this year. 'We are also producing domestically the full spectrum of unmanned and robotic systems, land drones, naval drones, aerial drones, which include both reconnaissance drones and bombers, and drones with ranges of up to 2,000km,' Mr Sak said. 'These very successfully target Russian war machinery and their oil refineries and depots because all the profits from their oil trade go to finance their war and to prosecute war crimes.' But the Russians know Ukraine is ploughing huge resources into producing its own missiles and other weapons and are trying to destroy any locations they identify where those are being developed or manufactured. Mr Sak said: 'We try to be as quiet as possible about the locations of our defence industry. Where possible, we have relaunched existing facilities that have been idle for the last 20-plus years and, in other cases, we are building new facilities. All this is kept confidential because the Russians are targeting our defence industry enterprises.' Much of Ukraine's defence production has been split up, so that three or four smaller, concealed sites replicate the same weapons system and, if one is hit, overall production continues. The Independent visited one such facility in western Ukraine on condition that no details were published that would allow its location to be identified. Concealed within a sprawling, somewhat dilapidated, Soviet-era industrial zone, the facility produces BTR-4E 'Bucephalus' armoured personnel carriers. The eight-wheeled Ukrainian design went into production in 2012. Until 2022, it was produced at a large plant in the east Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, targeted by Russia early in the full-scale war. The owner of the plant, calling himself Andriy for this article, is a former soldier who has himself seen action against the invading Russian forces. His factory previously produced heavy precision machinery and engine parts and converted to weapons manufacture in early 2024 to become one of three concealed facilities scattered across Ukraine producing Bucephalus APCs. Speaking with the glow of the plant's foundry behind him, Andriy said: 'We cast and produce almost everything for the construction of the APC, hull, turret, wheels, axles. The engines are brought in from Germany and the weapons are fitted elsewhere. We produce four per month and plan to increase that number.' In addition to the 300 plant employees, inspectors working for the Ukrainian defence ministry, minutely scrutinise each component produced there. The concealed sites are protected by air defences to counter Russian missiles and drones. Such secret weapons production sites are keenly sought out by Russian spies and informers on the ground and by satellite surveillance, and Andriy has security guards and equipment watching the perimeter of the plant. 'But mostly we rely on trust,' he explained. 'That people who live in the same community and know each other will not betray each other or their country.'
