Trump Threatens Apple With 25 Percent Tariffs on iPhones Assembled in India

The president of the United States on his blog:

I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your [sic] for your attention to this matter!

Last night Trump held his crypto memecoin grift gala at his Virginia golf club, about which The New York Times flatly reported:

Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

I mean, duh, right? But there it is. The influence peddling is just right out in the open. I’m guessing someone at the event last night put it in Trump’s ear that Tim Cook is making a jerk out of Trump, by trying to shift production to India for most iPhones to be sold in the US. (Why stop with the iPhone? How about iPads and MacBooks and AirPods and everything else? I’m guessing it’s because the iPhone is the only Apple product Trump personally uses and thus that’s as far as his imagination can stretch.) And I’m sure in private, Cook has tried — and will now try again — to explain to Trump that it’s simply not possible to produce in America all iPhones sold in America, and really not even feasible to assemble any of them here, at any sort of scale. Trump saying he wants to see them all assembled here in the US is only slightly more realistic than saying he wants them assembled on the moon.

But Trump wants it to happen so he believes it can happen. It’s utterly fantastical thinking, true mad-king nonsense. Apple sells a mind-reeling 150,000 iPhones in the US every single day. Not at launch — they sell millions a day then — but just on regular days, like now, in the middle of May. 150,000 per day, every day. Even if Apple tried its best to make US production happen, it would take years and a veritable fortune to build out the infrastructure — not mere factories, but literal city-sized campuses, full of highly-skilled employees who would somehow be convinced to take these tedious repetitive jobs at relatively low wages. So by the time Apple pulled it off, if they could manage to pull it off, Trump would either be out of office or democracy would have ended in the US. So there’s no real point to even trying.

The whole stock market is down today — Trump also announced, on a whim, 50 percent tariffs starting next week on all imports from the EU this morning — but Apple’s stock is “only” down about 3 percent, suggesting that the market is starting to factor in how little faith they should have in Trump’s erratic tariff threats.

I’ve also seen folks cracking wise, wondering if Cook still feels his million dollar contribution to Trump’s inauguration slush fund racket was worth it. In all seriousness, you have to consider that even with threats like today’s polemic against Indian-assembled iPhones, Tim Cook and Apple might be getting highly favored treatment from Trump. That this is what you get when you’re on his good side.

★ Friday, 23 May 2025