By JOSH BOAK Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will enter a 90-day negotiating period with Mexico over trade as 25% tariff rates stay in place, President Donald Trump said Thursday.
Trump, posting on his Truth Social platform, said a phone conversation he had with Mexican leader Claudia Sheinbaum was “very successful in that, more and more, we are getting to know and understand each other.”
The Republican president said that goods from Mexico imported into the U.S. would continue to face a 25% tariff that he has ostensibly linked to fentanyl trafficking. He said that autos would face a 25% tariff, while copper, aluminum and steel would be taxed at 50%.
He said that Mexico would end its “Non Tariff Trade Barriers,” but he didn’t provide specifics.
Trump had threatened tariffs of 30% on goods from Mexico in a July letter, something that Sheinbaum said Mexico gets to stave off for the next three months.
“We avoided the tariff increase announced for tomorrow and we got 90 days to build a long-term agreement through dialogue,” Sheinbaum wrote on X.
Some goods continue to be protected from the tariffs by the 2020 U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which Trump negotiated during his first term.
But Trump appeared to have soured on that deal, which is up for renegotiation next year. One of his first significant moves as president was to tariff goods from both Mexico and Canada earlier this year.
Census Bureau figures show that the U.S. ran a $171.5 billion trade imbalance with Mexico last year. That means the U.S. bought more goods from Mexico than it sold to the country.
The imbalance with Mexico has grown in the aftermath of the USMCA as it was only $63.3 billion in 2016, the year before Trump started his first term in office.
Besides addressing fentanyl trafficking, Trump has made it a goal to close the trade gap.