Trump Announces New Front in His Global Trade War

Reciprocal tariffs from other countries seem to have taken the president by surprise.

Donald Trump announced yet another round of tariffs against the European Union early Thursday, claiming that the “hostile” coalition of countries—who have been allies with the U.S. for decades—would face severe consequences for placing levies on U.S. whiskey imports.

“The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States, has just put a nasty 50 percent Tariff on Whisky,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “If this Tariff is not removed immediately, the U.S. will shortly place a 200 percent Tariff on all WINES, CHAMPAGNES, & ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE AND OTHER E.U. REPRESENTED COUNTRIES. This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”

The EU swiftly hit back Wednesday after Trump raised tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, announcing its own tolls on some of its biggest U.S. imports. Those include American beef, poultry, peanut butter, jeans, motorcycles, and alcohol, the last of which has become collateral damage in Trump’s international trade war.

“The EU is a major destination for U.S. whiskey, with exports surging 60% in the past three years after an earlier set of tariffs was suspended,” reported the Associated Press.

The president’s new tariffs are expected to cost companies billions of dollars. Corporations will either have to eat the losses or—as is more likely—pass the higher costs off to their customers.

“We deeply regret this measure. Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Wednesday, noting that the levies will cost jobs and only serve to increase the cost of goods both in the U.S. and abroad.

But Trump’s influence in hiking the cost of alcohol likely won’t bode well for the U.S., if history serves as any lesson. While Trump’s efforts aren’t exactly stripping alcohol from the shelves, they will make the price of liquor, wine, and beer skyrocket. That could make bottles less accessible for the average American and ultimately shrink consumption.

The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which criminalized alcohol and sparked Prohibition, was not just wildly unpopular with the American public but had dire consequences for the U.S. economy. Government tax revenues, which up until that point relied heavily on liquor sales to substantiate budgets, plummeted. The lack of alcohol sales between 1920 and 1933 cost the federal government $11 billion in lost tax revenue.

In 2023, alcohol excise tax collections for the federal government totaled $11.1 billion, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.

Elon Musk’s rightward turn has led to a downward spiral for Tesla, and no amount of photo ops with Donald Trump will be able to save it, because the president is exactly what’s threatening the brand.

The futuristic electric cars that were previously associated with Democrats have become the bleeding badge of honor for the MAGA movement—and now they’re bleeding stock value, too. 

“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman told Axios. 

Tesla stock plummeted 15 percent Monday after Trump couldn’t muster a promise not to drag Americans into a recession. The fall dried up the very last drops of Musk’s postelection gains, costing him a whopping $29 billion. 

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who has previously been bullish about Tesla, told Axios that Musk’s political association with the White House was now hurting his brand. 

“Tesla is becoming a political symbol of Trump and DOGE, and that is a bad thing for the brand,” said Ives. 

As Americans have become more disturbed by Musk’s lack of oversight at the Department of Government Efficiency, rooting through citizens’ private data, recommending massive layoffs, and lying about the discoveries of so-called fraud, Teslas and their dealerships have become a target across the country for some destruction of property … which appeared to, in one case, involve Molotov cocktails. 

Trump said Tuesday that acts of violence against Teslas would be considered domestic terrorism, cementing the automaker’s status as a state symbol and ensuring that Trump cares more about cars than he does about women. 

Tesla’s flailing is not just contained to the United States, either. In Europe, Tesla sales have begun to crash, according to Electrek. 

In Germany, where Tesla’s first manufacturing facility in Europe has long been a target of climate activists, sales were down 70 percent in February. 

Since Musk’s government stint began at DOGE, his cars have transformed into a symbol of something Germans would rather not be associated with. Patrick Kunkel, the mayor of the small town of Eltville, explained that he’d been receiving pressure from his constituents to stop driving his Tesla. 

“Tesla now epitomizes autocratic thinking. [Musk] is a negative example of what can happen when a highly undemocratic person goes from business to politics,” Kunkel said. It seems like a lot of people feel the same.

Tesla sales have also dropped 48 percent in Denmark, roughly 45 percent in Norway and Portugal, and about 44 percent in France, Spain, and Sweden, according to Electrek. 

While Tesla does not publish its U.S. sales, the number of registrations fell 11 percent in January, according to S&P Global Mobility.

There is another reason, besides the obvious, that Musk should be chiefly concerned with saving the value of Tesla stock: The billionaire bureaucrat has pledged heaps of shares as collateral for his billions in loans. If the stock value drops low enough, the banks he borrowed from could force him to sell his shares to meet his loan obligations.  

Every person that President Trump dramatically deported to Guantánamo Bay for violating U.S. immigration laws is on their way back to the United States.

Trump initially announced that he planned to send 30,000 undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, turning the infamous torture facility into an immigration detainment camp. There were 40 people there as of Tuesday, when they were all flown to an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana.

The men were flown back on a flight under the banner ICE Air, according to The Washington Post, which was less expensive than the showy military aircraft the administration previously used to transport immigrants to Guantánamo.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people, some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump initially said in January. “So we’re gonna send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately, and tough, that’s a tough place to get out of. Today’s signing brings us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”

While the Department of Homeland Security has yet to comment on why their plans changed, this situation underscores the fact that Trump’s grand immigration crackdown may be easier said than done.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is taking aim at the military’s legal system, specifically the judge advocate general’s corps, in order to relax the rules of war. 

The Guardian reports that Hegseth is nominating new judge advocate generals, or JAGs, to replace the ones he fired last month, which will kick off an overhaul of the system. Hegseth has chosen his personal lawyer, former Navy Officer Tim Parlatore, to oversee the effort. Parlatore defended President Trump in his classified documents trial and former Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher on war crimes charges, and will continue to run his private practice at the same time.   

The overhaul will consist of retraining military lawyers so that their legal advice to commanders will allow for more aggressive tactics and more leniency on charging soldiers with battlefield crimes. Parlatore has reportedly said that JAG officers get too involved in decision-making and don’t exercise discretion in their prosecutions. 

Parlatore and Hegseth view JAGs as too restrictive on rules of engagement, and don’t like the interpretation of law that soldiers need to identify a target having a weapon before opening fire. Hegseth has also stressed the need to bring back a “warrior ethos” because he thinks the military has gone soft. 

Hegseth referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs” in his book The War on Warriors, saying that restrictions on the laws of armed conflict were too high for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which aided the enemy. While a Fox News host in Trump’s first term, Hegseth successfully appealed to Trump to pardon U.S. soldiers accused of committing war crimes, including Gallagher. 

Hegseth’s actions are ominous and disturbing, especially considering that he thinks very little of the Geneva Conventions on human rights. The fact that he faces his own sexual assault allegations also casts a shadow on his planned legal overhaul, as prosecuting sexual abuse in the military has long been a major problem. It seems that he thinks that there is no problem with U.S. soldiers committing war crimes, as long as America is “tough.”

Donald Trump transformed the White House into a car dealership to save Elon Musk’s floundering Tesla stock—to keep him from defaulting on his massive loans. 

Trump took a shot at being a shady car salesman Tuesday during a press event for Tesla at the White House. The president posed for photos behind the wheel of a Tesla he apparently can’t drive with a grinning Musk, remarked with astonishment that “everything’s computer” in the futuristic vehicles, and even read from what appeared to be a sales pitch sheet listing prices for different Tesla models.  

Trump’s desperate show of fealty toward the bouncing billionaire came after Tesla stock plummeted 15 percent Monday, drying up the very last drops of Musk’s postelection gains and costing him a whopping $29 billion. 

But it seems Trump’s rather unpresidential measures to boost Tesla’s floundering stock could serve a greater purpose: keeping the not-so liquid Musk from defaulting on his loans. 

The Washington Post reported in April 2022 that Musk had already used more than half of his more than 170 million Tesla shares as collateral to acquire loans, and planned to do so again to borrow more money to buy Twitter, now X. 

Musk acquired X for $44 billion in October 2022, borrowing roughly $13 billion from several banks, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America. Musk’s loans had been “hung” on those banks’ balance sheets for nearly two years, longer than some unsold deals from the 2008 financial crisis. 

Reuters reported last month that interest in acquiring Musk’s debt increased after Trump secured the White House and Musk emerged as his number two. At the time, only $1.3 billion remained on the banks’ sheets. 

In a 2024 SEC filing, Musk was listed as holding a whopping 238,441,261 shares of Tesla stock that were “pledged as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness.” At the time, he held ​715,022,706 shares in total, according to the filing, meaning that roughly one third of Musk’s shares were serving as collateral for his loans. 

It’s unclear exactly how much of Musk’s shares are held in collateral now. Musk currently owns 410 million shares of Tesla stock, a roughly 12.8 percent stake in the company, according to Investopedia. The value of those shares, including those held as collateral, appears to be dropping every day he plays pretend as the unelected bureaucrat leading the Department of Government Efficiency. 

Here’s where Musk’s problem emerges: If the stock price goes low enough, the banks Musk borrowed from could force him to sell his shares. 

Tesla warned that this could happen in its annual filing in 2022, according to The Washington Post. That, in turn, could make things even more dire for the car company. 

“If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline,” Tesla wrote.

“We are not a party to these loans,” the company added. 

It already seemed like Musk was going to have trouble paying back his loans for X. Last year, the social media company reported that its value had plummeted by more than half, to around $19 billion. When the banks formulated a plan to restructure the loan, X didn’t follow through, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Tesla stock was doing slightly better on Wednesday, as a result of an uptick in the wider market caused by a report that inflation had eased slightly in February.

This story has been updated.