U.S. President Donald Trump said his long-promised tariffs on pharmaceutical drugs will be coming soon, the latest signal that he plans to press ahead with more sectoral tariffs despite market fallout from his global levies.
“We are going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals,” Trump said Tuesday at a fundraising gala for House Republicans, without providing details on the planned levy.
“Once we do that, they’re going to come rushing back into our country, because we’re the big market,” Trump said. “The advantage we have over everybody is that we’re the big market.”
Trump has long bemoaned a lack of domestic pharmaceutical production and has repeatedly promised tariffs to bring more capacity into the country.
His administration has signaled that they’ll use so-called section 232 powers to enact the levies, though they haven’t launched the prerequisite investigation. “We’ll be announcing pharmaceuticals at some point in the not too distant future,” Trump said on March 24. “We don’t make pharmaceuticals anymore and if we have problems like wars or anything else, we need steel, we need pharmaceuticals.”
Trump has already applied 25% sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles, while launching the process to also enact them on copper. In addition to pharmaceutical drugs, his administration has separately pledged additional sectoral levies including on lumber and semiconductor chips, though timing and details are unclear.
Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs announced last week, which have sapped trillions in value from American markets, exempted sectors that either already have, or may soon have, their own levies.
--With assistance from Hadriana Lowenkron.
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