Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Trump administration officials continued to defend Donald Trump’s tariff regime Sunday as the nation braces for another week of volatility and the potential of further U-turns by the president - including on a recent electronics exemption.
Lutnick appeared on ABC’s This Week and explained the newest wrinkle to the White House’s trade strategy: the revelation this weekend that the US tech sector would be spared the brunt of Trump’s tariffs, at least for now. Smartphones, flat-panel TVs, semiconductor storage devices and other parts including solar cells would all be exempt from tariffs — both Trump’s escalating “reciprocal” tariffs on China specifically as well as his across-the-board tariffs of 10 percent on all US imports.
The secretary told ABC News that those exemptions would disappear in the coming weeks.
"All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels -- we need to have these things made in America. We can't be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us," Lutnick said on Sunday.
Jamieson Greer, the White House trade representative, confirmed Lutnick’s announcement. On CBS’s Face the Nation, he said that tariffs on electronic goods were "shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of potential tariffs.”
It all comes after experts described the exemptions for the tech sector as a “dream” scenario for Silicon Valley investors. Two of the biggest winners were Nvidia and Apple; the CEO of the latter company, Tim Cook, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural festivities in January.
The exemption list, issued Friday evening in the form of guidance released by Customs and Border Protection, is also a sign that the White House relented after brutal losses for tech stocks on the market.
The biggest loss by far was suffered by Elon Musk’s Tesla, which is enduring twin pressures in the form of Trump’s tariffs and a growing, fierce political backlash to the brand among liberals across the country.
While Lutnick and other Trump officials maintain that the overall goal of the tariff implementation is the onshoring of tech manufacturing and other industries, the Commerce secretary said in his interview that semiconductor tariffs were coming within roughly 60 days — a far closer deadline than any company could hope to beat by surging investment in American manufacturing facilities.
"[T]hey're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon,” Lutnick said of the president’s thinking.
On NBC’s Meet the Press, Peter Navarro, another top trade advisor in the administration, defended the president’s strategy.
Navarro was questioned by moderator Kristen Welker over whether consumer confidence was returning after a week of tumult on Wall Street and claimed that it was; he was also asked by Welker to provide a “topline number” of all countries currently talking with the United States to negotiate new or updated trade agreements. Navarro was able to name less than a dozen, including the U.K. He would go on to claim, however, that others were “lining up” to begin talks.
Peter Navarro hypes a potential trade deal with North Korea
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 13, 2025
(he meant South Korea) pic.twitter.com/DtDDCDgffi
A group of the largest tech stocks make up more than a quarter of the S&P 500’s valuation, and have slid for weeks amid the near-constant announcement of tariffs and changes to tariffs from the White House. Investor’s Business Daily on Sunday predicted that tech futures could surge on Monday with the news of the exemption, though the magazine said Lutnick’s news of impending semiconductor tariffs could dampen that reaction.
The 90-day pause in implementation of the majority of Donald Trump’s planned “reciprocal” tariffs caused stocks to surge last Wednesday, and has revealed a president willing to occasionally back off from his own strategy in order to keep allies in the business world happy.
He even bragged about making money for two visiting guests at the White House this week, investor Charles Schwab and NASCAR owner Charles Penske. Pointing to the two men during an Oval Office pool spray on Wednesday, the president boasted: “He made $2.5 million, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!”
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