WASHINGTON — President Biden sped-read a speech Tuesday unveiling new tariffs on Chinese goods — as a springtime DC downpour cut short his remarks escalating former President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing just months before their election rematch.
“Frankly, before it rains, frankly — for all this tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do anything,” the 81-year-old Biden claimed in the Rose Garden as he tried to bite into the Republican’s polling lead on economic issues.
“I’m really going fast here because of the rain,” Biden added moments later as he wrapped up an accelerated version of his prepared remarks.
“That’s why we have to remember who we are, we are the United States of America and there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. God bless you all and I’m going to get out of the rain.”
The tariffs will apply to roughly $18 billion per year in imports, including metals such as steel and aluminum; green energy technologies, including solar panels and electric vehicles; and certain semiconductors, construction cranes and medical products.
“For years, the Chinese government has poured state money to Chinese companies across a whole range of industries — steel, aluminum, semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, the industries of the future, and even critical health equipment like gloves and masks,” Biden said.
“China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb, then dumping the excess products onto the market at unfairly low prices, driving other manufacturers around the world out of business.”
Over the next two years, electric vehicles will face a 100% tariff — though few currently are sold in the US — while solar panel parts will be slapped with a 50% import levy and other goods will receive a 25% penalty.
“China’s using the same playbook it has before to power its own growth at the expense of others,” chief White House economist Lael Brainard said in remarks outlining the tariffs.
Trump, 77, has vowed to push tariffs even higher on Chinese products, floating a 200% levy on electric vehicles to maintain a domestic edge.
“Joe Biden’s action today is a weak and futile attempt to distract from the grievous harm his insane Electric Vehicle mandate is doing to the U.S. auto industry and how his radical policies are wiping out thousands of American auto jobs,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
The 45th president, who is set for a rematch against Biden in November, aggressively imposed tariffs on Chinese goods beginning in 2018 in an attempt to force a new trade agreement that would have reduced Beijing’s protectionist practices at the expense of US companies.
Although pro-free-trade critics argued the tariffs would increase the costs of Chinese-made products for US consumers, Trump’s policies have since been largely supported by both parties.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, was among Biden’s detractors Tuesday, tweeting, “Tariffs are a direct, regressive tax on Americans and this tax increase will hit every family.”
Biden previously opposed Trump’s China tariffs, describing them in 2019 as “senseless political games” that Americans would “foot the bill for” and writing that “[a]ny freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”
But US Trade Representative Katherine Tai told reporters at the regular White House press briefing Tuesday that “that link in terms of tariffs to prices has been largely debunked.”
“As you allow China to dominate the supply and the production in these industries, your choice is actually made for you,” Tai said.
“It lays our entire economy — from consumers and workers all the way up to our government — susceptible to the kinds of coercion that we’ve seen from a government who was willing to weaponize the dependencies that it has created when a partner does something that it does not like.”
Tai also argued that “tariffs are tools” and pushed back on criticism that Biden’s election-year action was coming too late.
“They are designed to be strategic and not chaotic. They are designed to be effective and not emotional,” Tai said in an implicit swipe at Trump.
Biden, who kept in place Trump’s China tariffs, announced last month during a trip to swing state Pennsylvania that he supported an additional 15% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum pursuant to a review by Tai’s office.
Trump had imposed a 25% tariff on steel and 10% tariff on aluminum from most countries, including China.
He later imposed tariffs of between 7.5% and 25% on Chinese goods comprising $362 billion of annual imports.
Washington and Beijing agreed to a “Phase One” bundle of reforms in January 2020, but further talks were upended by the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the US in March of that year.
Biden’s tariff announcement comes as voters consistently rank the economy as one of their top issues amid persistently high inflation and interest rates.
A Gallup poll released this month found that just 38% of US adults have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in Biden to manage the economy, versus 46% who said so of Trump.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll this month similarly found that 32% trust Biden on the economy and 46% trust Trump.
Republicans argue that Biden has been too deferential to China on an array of issues — including in seeking answers on the origin of COVID-19, which killed more than 1 million Americans after what the FBI believes was a lab leak in Wuhan, China; and on halting exports of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which have killed more than 250,000 Americans since Biden took office.
Congressional Republicans leading an impeachment inquiry into alleged Biden family corruption have produced evidence that the now-president met with the leaders of two separate Chinese government-controlled business ventures that involved first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden.
Trump claimed last year that Biden “was bribed and now he’s being blackmailed” by Beijing and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told The Post last year that Biden was “soft” on China and that “it probably has something to do with business relationships and may very well involve Hunter and James Biden and some of the deals they made over there.”
