By David Lawder, Michael Martina and Katharine Jackson Reuters
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday accused China of violating a bilateral deal to roll back tariffs and announced a doubling of worldwide steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%, once again rattling international trade.

Trump said China had violated an agreement with the U.S. to mutually roll back tariffs and trade restrictions for critical minerals and issued a new veiled threat to get tougher with Beijing.

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“China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

Later, at a rally in Pennsylvania promoting an impending “partnership” between Japan’s Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, he announced the U.S. would double steel tariffs from 25% to 50%, effective next week, which he said “will even further secure the steel industry in the United States.”

He subsequently announced in a Truth Social post that aluminum tariffs would also double to 50% on Wednesday.

While China is the world’s largest steel producer and exporter, very little is sent to the United States, as a 25% tariff imposed in 2018 shut most Chinese steel out of the market. China ranks third among aluminum suppliers.

Trump did not specify how China had violated the agreement made in Geneva, Switzerland, or what action he would take against Beijing.

Asked later on Friday in the Oval Office about the China deal, Trump said: “I’m sure that I’ll speak to President Xi, and hopefully we’ll work that out.”

China talks ‘stalled’

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News Channel that U.S. trade talks with China were “a bit stalled” and that getting a deal over the finish line will likely need the direct involvement of Trump and Xi.

The U.S.-China agreement two weeks ago to dial back triple-digit tariffs for 90 days prompted a massive relief rally in global stocks, and along with other pauses on Trump’s import taxes, lowered the effective U.S. tariff rate to the mid-teens from around 25% in early April. It was less than 3% when Trump took office in January.

The temporary truce between Washington and Beijing, however, had done nothing to address the underlying reasons for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, mainly longstanding U.S. complaints about China’s state-dominated, export-driven economic model, leaving those issues for future talks.

Major U.S. stock indexes ended little changed on Friday after Trump’s complaint about China’s compliance. Trump’s social media post came two days after a reporter infuriated him by asking him about Wall Street’s new term for bets that he will back off extreme tariff actions – the “TACO” trade, an acronym coined by a Financial Times columnist for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

“I chicken out? Oh, I’ve never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set, down to 100 and then to another number?” Trump said, later adding: “It’s called negotiation.”