Brendan Murray

And obviously, they're hearing a lot of complaints from consumers and members of Congress that the tariffs have become overly burdensome, and they're trying to scale it back.

You can imagine how hard it is to figure out how much of the contents of a product you import contains steel and aluminum.

And those companies have complained to the White House and the White House has acknowledged.

that the complexity has gotten too much for these companies to handle.

If you recall, the president put 25% tariff on steel and aluminum in March of last year.

Then he raised it to 50% in June of last year.

And then he added about 400 products that have steel and aluminum in them.

in August.

So that captured a lot of imports and created some collateral damage from companies that use steel and aluminum.

The administration rolled out a lot of tariffs last year, steel and aluminum included, in a sort of rushed and chaotic way.

And it feels like what we're hearing now is they're kind of course correcting and trying to narrow things down.

And obviously they're hearing a lot of complaints from consumers and members of Congress that the tariffs have become overly burdensome and they're trying to scale it back.

Well, what we know is the Trump administration has acknowledged that the steel and aluminum tariffs that they rolled out in waves last year are overly complicated for a lot of companies and have really created a lot of unintended consequences.

victims that have to pay these tariffs.

They rolled out the first 25% tariff in March of 2025.

Then they raised it to 50% in June.

And then in August, they extended the scope of the tariffs to include a whole host of maybe hundreds of goods that contain steel and aluminum.

European leaders met here in Brussels late into the evening last night and the message that we got from them when they came out looking very tired after a very hectic week was that they can no longer trust the U.S.

the way they used to trust the U.S.

The transatlantic relationship is going to undergo a rethink and the Europeans are talking a lot more than they have in the past about strategic autonomy,