Trump hits India with 25% tariff
Imports from India will now face a 25% tariff, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday, his latest trade-war declaration in what has become a cornerstone of his second administration.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said India’s own tariffs are “far too high” while calling other trade barriers “strenuous and obnoxious.”
He also said the country would face an additional penalty for its reliance on Russian energy and military equipment.
The announcement comes ahead of a Friday trade negotiation deadline that Trump also said Wednesday “stands strong” and “will not be extended.” The president has signaled dozens of other countries will face a new baseline tariff level of as much as 20% — higher than the already-elevated 10% he announced in April.
Taken together, those tariff levels are at or near the historic tariffs that Trump initially threatened on “Liberation Day,” a move that shocked the global economy and sent stock markets tumbling.
Trump initially backed down, but has since steadily been reintroducing elevated tariffs at levels not seen since the 1930s, when a protectionist U.S. trade policy meant to boost the economy ended up worsening the Great Depression.
The Yale University Budget Lab said Monday that U.S. consumers face an effective tariff rate of 18.2%, the highest since 1934, translating to an equivalent loss of as much as $2,400 per household in 2025. That analysis came before Wednesday’s announcement of tariffs on India.
While India’s 25% rate would be slightly lower than the 26% that Trump threatened on April 2, it is still a sharp increase from 2.4%, which is the average tariff rate applied to Indian imports in recent years. India is one of the top sources of imports for American consumers and companies with nearly $90 billion of goods flowing in from India last year.
India recently became the top source of smartphone imports, after Apple shifted production away from China to avoid high tariffs and geopolitical conflicts, according to data reported by Bloomberg. Apple alone exported $17 billion of iPhones from India last year.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the company’s May 1 earnings call that he expected “the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. will have India as their country of origin” starting this quarter.
Other top U.S. imports from India include chemicals, plastics, leather goods, agricultural products, and metals.
In 2022, India applied an effective average tariff rate of 5.2% on U.S. goods. Oils, cement, stone, glass, and machinery rank as India’s top purchases from the U.S.
Trump continues to plunge headlong into a tariffs strategy that has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the global economy. Over the past two weeks, Trump has announced new agreements with a host of other countries designed to clarify new trade terms with the U.S., but which critics say are beset by vague details and unworkable promises.
Major stock indexes have nevertheless continued to churn higher, in part because some companies are noting the hit to their bottom lines from the tariffs won’t be as bad as initially feared when Trump first rolled out his country-by-country tariffs in April.
Still, the bilateral trade deals Trump has recently been announcing come with duty levels far higher than the ones that have prevailed for decades. They include 19% tariffs on goods from Indonesia and the Philippines and 15% tariffs on ones from Japan and the European Union. A deal announced earlier this month with Vietnam puts 20% duties on products from that country, rising to 40% for any goods deemed trans-shiped, or rerouted, from China.
