Trump advisor on 25% tax threat: ‘Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers’

After President Trump threatened to slap Apple with a 25% tariff on iPhones made outside the U.S., one of his top economic advisors is now downplaying the potential fallout of the proposed tax. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the White House doesn’t actually want to hurt Apple, despite the rhetoric: “Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs. (…) In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.” Hassett’s statement came just days after Trump posted on social media that he expects Apple to manufacture iPhones for the U.S. market on U.S. soil, or face a 25% tariff. Apple, of course, has long assembled its flagship product in China and more recently expanded iPhone production in India and Vietnam. That seems to have annoyed the president. Hassett also repeated a famil ... Read full article.