(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Thursday his administration will impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports as early as next week, a highly controversial move that Trump framed along economic and national security lines.
Trump said the US will impose a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% tariff on aluminum to shore up the struggling industries, capping a fierce, months-long internal debate that divided some of the President’s top advisers. The move is likely to invite retaliatory measures from foreign countries, raising the specter of a trade war between the US and several other steel-producing countries.
It was not immediately clear whether the tariffs would be phased out over time and whether Trump would follow the advice of his national security advisers and exempt some countries from the tariffs to avoid harming key steel-producing US allies.
Trump announced the move during a meeting with steel and aluminum executives, even though the policy he announced is not yet ready to be implemented, let alone fully crafted. He acknowledged the policy is “being written now.”
“We’ll be signing it next week. And you’ll have protection for a long time in a while. You’ll have to regrow your industries, that’s all I’m asking,” Trump said. “What’s been allowed to go on for decades is disgraceful. It’s disgraceful. When it comes to a time where our country can’t make aluminum and steel … you almost don’t have much of a country.”
The tariffs will amount to perhaps the most substantive and wide-reaching trade action Trump has taken to date, making good on another key campaign promise.
But the announcement also sent the stock market tumbling, with the Dow taking a 500-point dip in the first hours after the announcement. The plan also drew a stiff rebuke from US manufacturers of products made using steel and aluminum, who maintained that the tariffs could lead to lost jobs in their operations and increased consumer prices.
Republican lawmakers urged Trump in recent weeks to reconsider his position, warning him that while the move would boost US steel and aluminum manufacturers, it would lead to increased costs for consumers of those materials and hurt some of the manufacturers he pledged to protect.
In a rare break with the White House, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokesman Doug Andres said Ryan “is hoping the President will consider the unintended consequences of this idea and look at other approaches before moving forward.“
The move was welcomed by the steel and aluminum executives gathered Thursday around a table in the Cabinet Room, who have urged Trump for months to make good on his campaign promise to protect their industries from cheaper foreign imports.
“This is vital to the interests of the United States. This is our moment. And it’s really important that we get this right,” said Dave Burritt, the CEO of the US Steel Corporation.
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