Donald Trump announces 90-day pause on tariffs

James Cox

US president Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on tariffs "effective immediately".

9.45pm 

Tánaiste Simon Harris said US president Donald Trump’s suspension of higher tariffs “will come as a relief to many businesses in Ireland”.

The Tánaiste was speaking following a meeting with US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick in Washington DC.

Mr Harris said his meeting with Mr Lutnick, a key critic of the Irish Government’s fiscal policies, which occurred shortly after Mr Trump’s announcement, was “timely, valuable and substantive”.

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9.05pm

Tánaiste Simon Harris says Ireland will be a voice for calm, constructive engagement on tariffs.

In a statement, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade says he had a "valuable exchange" with US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in Washington today.

They discussed Donald Trump's latest announcement, EU-US trade and the pharmaceutical sector.

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9pm

European leaders have been reacting to the news that tariffs are going to be paused.

It's not clear yet if the EU will be exempt from the revised 10 per cent tariff that was announced today.

Germany's likely next chancellor Friedrich Merz says the pause is evidence a united European approach to trade is having a positive effect.

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk says they should make the best of the next 90 days adding that maintaining close transatlantic relations is a common responsibility of Europeans and Americans regardless of temporary turbulences.

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8.40pm 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the walk back was part of a grand negotiating strategy by Mr Trump.

“President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” she said, adding that the news media “clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here”.

She said: “You tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China, when in fact, we’ve seen the opposite effect, the entire world is calling the United States of America, not China, because they need our markets.”

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8pm 

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says nobody knows what's going on right now.

"Every day becomes worse and worse and worse in terms of the chaos, in terms of the unpredictability, and in terms of the logic. The only victim is the American public... the American consumer, the American citizen, the American business."

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6.39pm 

Mr Trump made the announcement on his social media network, Truth Social.

In the post, Mr Trump claimed China has shown "a lack of respect to World Markets", as the country raised tariffs on the United States in response to the president's tariffs. 

US secretary of the treasury Scott Bessent  has been speaking outside the White House in the past few minutes.

Despite the rollback from the Trump administration, Mr Bessent tried to claim the tariffs had been a success.

"It has brought more than 75 countries forward to negotiate. It took great courage for him to stay the course until this moment and what we have ended up with here... do not retaliate and you will be rewarded."

Mr Bessent added that the markets “didn’t understand” Mr Trump’s tariff strategy.

“The market didn’t understand, those were maximum levels. The countries can think about those levels as they come to us to bring down their tariffs, their non-trade barriers,” he told reporters at the White House.

He said Mr Trump “created maximum negotiating leverage for himself” and the Chinese have “shown themselves to the world as the bad actors”.

Speaking earlier on Wednesday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the tariffs were already having a negative impact on Irish business. - Additional reporting from Reuters and Press Association