The Trump administration signaled on Sunday that it would pursue new tariffs on the powerful computer chips inside smartphones and other technologies, just two days after it excluded a variety of electronics from the steep import taxes recently applied on goods arriving from China.
The push came as President Trump’s top economic advisers scrambled to explain their strategy, after having insisted for weeks they would shield no company or industry from any of the fees it levied in a bid to reset U.S. trade relationships.
The reprieve for technology companies arrived in the form of a Customs and Border Protection rule issued late Friday that spared smartphones, computers, semiconductors and other high-tech imports from much of the new 145 percent tariff the administration imposed on Chinese goods. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had abruptly paused steep, so-called “reciprocal” tariffs planned for other nations, but ratcheted up those on China, citing Beijing’s retaliatory tariff hikes on U.S. goods.
The exclusions in the C.B.P. rule covered a wide variety of products that included modems and flash drives, and represented a major victory for Apple and other U.S. technology giants that rely on Chinese factories to help manufacture popular devices.
But on Sunday, the Trump administration sought to cast those exemptions in a different light.
Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser on trade, insisted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that they were “not exclusions” at all, and he stressed that the White House still could impose specific tariffs on the computer chips that power countless consumer and military products.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, signaled on ABC’s “This Week” that Mr. Trump could announce new tariffs “in the next month or two” that would target not only semiconductors but also pharmaceutical imports. He suggested that the administration would begin as soon as next week to work toward opening an investigation into the semiconductor industry — mirroring an approach the administration has taken to impose similar tariffs on other products, including auto imports.
And Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that it was “always the case” that some of these high-tech imports would be subject to their own tariffs, separate from those broadly imposed on countries in response to their trade practices.
“Semiconductors are a key important part of a lot of defense equipment,” Mr. Hassett added, saying, “I don’t think anything really should be a surprise.”
Jamieson Greer, the top U.S. trade official, described the move on CBS’s “Face the Nation” as more of a mechanical change, saying of semiconductors that it is “not that they won’t be subject to tariffs” but that they are being done under a “different regime.”
