Trump’s Ominous Threat to Apple

National Review Online

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

 

If you had told people ten years ago that in 2025, the president of the United States would be casually issuing orders to a specific corporation while threatening unconstitutional taxation for failure to comply, and asked them to guess which party that president was a member of, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say the Republican Party. Yet Donald Trump has done just that with his musings directed at Apple about iPhone production.

 

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump said on Truth Social, while threatening a 25 percent tariff on iPhones if they are produced abroad.

 

If this is what tariff proponents mean by “negotiation,” then their definition of that term is more similar to the Mafia’s than to the statesman’s. It’s one thing for the government to negotiate the reduction in trade barriers with another government. It’s something entirely different for the government to start a “negotiation” with an American corporation by threatening punitive taxes if it doesn’t do what the president wants.

 

Imagine for a second President Michael Bloomberg threatening 25 percent federal excise taxes on Smith & Wesson products if the company doesn’t stop selling guns he considers to be “assault weapons.” Or President Elizabeth Warren threatening 25 percent tariffs on Walmart because she thinks their workers should get better health benefits and higher pay. Or President Bernie Sanders threatening to tax FedEx shipments at 25 percent if the company doesn’t agree to a labor contract with the Teamsters.

 

That’s not a path anyone should want to go down. No president should have the power to unilaterally tax corporations’ products over disagreements on business decisions. A quick glance at the Constitution confirms that such a power does not, in fact, exist. And tariffs are not levied on goods from specific companies; rather, they apply to categories of goods.

 

While the Apple tariff threat itself is a dead letter, it nonetheless sets the expectation that major U.S. corporations have an obligation to satisfy the government’s demands at any given moment rather than focusing on their customers, workers, and shareholders. It would be heartening to see Apple call the president’s bluff, but CEO Tim Cook knows that gamble could backfire, and Trump could find other ways to retaliate against Apple.

 

That Cook does not feel sufficiently empowered to do so, given the self-evident absurdity of the threat, is a good sign that the federal government is too empowered over private businesses. The president of the United States is not a king whose words carry the power of law, yet businessmen have found it smart to act as though they do because they know the federal regulatory apparatus provides the president with avenues too numerous to count for punishing businesses he doesn’t like.

 

Apple can make its phones on Mars if it decides that makes business sense. One of the nice things about the United States is that the government doesn’t tell businesses how they have to be run. And one of the nice things about Republicans winning elections is supposed to be having a president who believes that.