Trump signals tit-for-tat China tariffs may be near end; TikTok deal on ice

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

President Donald Trump hints at ending U.S.-China tariff hikes, calming market concerns.
He suggests tariffs may not increase further to encourage consumer purchases.
TikTok deal delayed pending resolution of broader trade negotiations with China.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday signaled a potential end to the tit-for-tat tariff hikes between the U.S. and China that shocked markets and that a deal over the fate of social media platform TikTok may have to wait.

"I don't want them to go higher because at a certain point you make it where people don't buy," Trump told reporters about tariffs at the White House.

"So, I may not want to go higher, or I may not want to even go up to that level. I may want to go to less because you know you want people to buy and, at a certain point, people aren't gonna buy," he said.

Trump's comments further pointed to a diminished appetite for sharply higher across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries after markets reacted violently to their introduction on April 2.

The Republican president slapped 10% tariffs on most goods entering the country but delayed the implementation of higher levies, pending negotiations.

Still, he hiked rates on Chinese imports, now totaling 145%, after Beijing retaliated with its own countermeasures. Last week, China said it "will not respond" to a "numbers game with tariffs," its own signal that across-the-board rates would not rise further.

Trump said China had been in touch since the imposition of tariffs and expressed optimism that they could reach a deal.

While the two sides are in touch, sources told Reuters that free-flowing, high-level exchanges of the sorts that would lead to a deal have largely been absent.

Speaking with reporters, Trump repeatedly declined to specify the nature of talks between the countries or whether they directly included Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump has repeatedly extended a legal deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of the short video app used by 170 million Americans. On Thursday, he said a spinoff deal would likely wait until the trade issue is settled.

"We have a deal for TikTok, but it'll be subject to China, so we'll just delay the deal till this thing works out one way or the other," Trump said.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.