Trump says he’ll delay threatened 50% tariff on EU until July

President Donald Trump said that the US will delay implementation of a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union from June 1 until July 9 to buy time for negotiations with the bloc, anews informs via AP.

That agreement came after a call Sunday with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, who had told Trump that she “wants to get down to serious negotiations,” according to the US president’s retelling.

“I told anybody that would listen, they have to do that,” Trump told reporters on Sunday in Morristown, New Jersey, as he prepared to return to Washington. Von der Leyen, Trump said, vowed to “rapidly get together and see if we can work something out.”

In a social media post Friday, Trump had threatened to impose the 50% tariff on EU goods, complaining that the 27-member bloc had been “very difficult to deal with” on trade and that negotiations were “going nowhere.” Those tariffs would have kicked in starting June 1.