President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. will launch an investigation into the European Union and potentially impose tariffs, claiming the bloc unfairly imposed billions of dollars in fines on the U.S.’s biggest tech companies.
“This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration. The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday, listing Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google as companies that have been excessively fined.
Trump said his administration will “immediately” launch an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The law allows for the imposition of tariffs if the investigation ends up providing evidence of unfair trade practices.
“The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about,” Trump wrote in the post. “The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.”
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The EU announced Thursday that it was fining Google the equivalent of $1 billion for what it said were breaches of antitrust rules through Google Play and its search engine.
The Trump administration condemned the fine later Thursday.
“The EU’s various fines of Google alone add up to over 2 percent of the EU’s budget—a larger ‘contribution’ to the budget than many EU member states. Add in the recent announcement of the largest ever state-backed loan to Airbus, and it becomes clear that the EU continues to target the most competitive U.S. companies,” Trade Ambassador Jamieson Greer said in a statement.
Trump faced a large setback to his tariff policy earlier this year when the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 ruling to strike down the president’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners.
However, he’s found new ways to implement tariffs, including through Section 301 of the Trade Act. On Thursday, the U.S. imposed tariffs on 60 economies “for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
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