Donald Trump’s tariff policy is widely – and rightly – lambasted for being confusing and contradictory. But journalists’ reporting on the topic is often equally baffling.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the EU is “willing to accept” the US president’s 10% baseline tariff on most European exports, provided it is offered exemptions on Trump’s levies on steel, aluminium, and cars. Washington must also pledge not to impose duties on other “key sectors”, including pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, as part of any trade deal, it noted.

The article – which was widely picked up by international media and even caused the US stock market to whipsaw – contained no quotes from named or unnamed officials. Instead, it cited an unspecified number of “people familiar with the matter”.

“The European Commission, which handles trade matters for the EU, views this arrangement as slightly favouring the US but still something it could agree to, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the report added.

The article – and the media’s and investors’ reactions to it – are puzzling for several reasons.

For one, Bloomberg itself had told us just last week that Brussels had “finally revealed” that it would, in fact, retaliate if the 10% baseline remained in place.

The evidence adduced for this claim was an interview with EU industry chief Stéphane Séjourné, who said that the Commission “will need to retaliate and rebalance in some key sectors if the US insists on an asymmetrical deal”.

Barring a scenario in which the Commission is run by political schizophrenics – which, admittedly, cannot be ruled out – the two reports cannot both be true: the Commission cannot have “revealed” that it will retaliate against Trump’s 10% baseline and then, just six days later, concede that it won’t.

Arguably, this discrepancy – or, less charitably, the blatant contradiction – in Bloomberg’s reporting is symptomatic of a broader malaise afflicting the Brussels press corps.

These problems include uncritically reporting whatever an EU official says and, especially, an unhealthy addiction to citing unnamed officials – even for the most banal, blatantly obvious statements.

They also include a fundamental inability, or unwillingness, to interpret not merely what was said, but who said it – and, perhaps even more critically, what wasn’t said at all.

Séjourné, for instance, is not just a commissioner but is also a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, who is an explicit proponent of retaliating against Trump’s 10% baseline duty. Was Séjourné speaking more as a Frenchman or as an EU official during the interview? The question was not asked.

Even more important, however, is the fact that Séjourné is not the EU’s trade commissioner.

Construing his remarks as being reflective of the bloc’s trade stance makes as much sense as asking the Commissioner for Sports, Glenn Micallef, for his views on the EU’s competition policy – which is to say, none at all.

Obvious omissions
Furthermore, Séjourné’s “revealing” comments were completely at odds with other public remarks made earlier that very day by other EU officials, which strongly implied that Brussels will, in fact, accept Trump’s baseline tariff.

In particular, the Commission – which had previously flatly rejected any suggestion that it would accept the 10% levy – repeatedly refused to deny that it might accept it during its regular midday briefing with journalists.

“I cannot hear from this podium prejudge any outcome of these negotiations,” Thomas Regnier, European Commission spokesperson, told reporters when directly asked whether an eventual EU-US deal could include the baseline.

The remarks came just hours after Matthias Jørgensen, a senior Commission official involved in trade negotiations, similarly refused to respond to a question from the European Parliament’s Trade Committee about whether the baseline constitutes a “red line” for Brussels.

“I was quite happy when I saw some media report[s] where the Commission pushed back on this 10% baseline,” said Jörgen Warborn, a Swedish MEP who hails from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s own European People’s Party.

“But I didn’t hear a bit from the Commission today that that was a red line. And I’d like to have that clarified because, unfortunately, I think the US will keep pushing for that 10% baseline. And I think that is unacceptable.”

Jørgensen replied that “changes to existing EU legislation” and “regulatory autonomy” are “red lines” for the Commission. Tellingly, however, he didn’t say the same about the baseline.

Blowing their own Trumpet?
Regnier and Jørgensen’s comments also came the day after the EU’s actual trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, said that Trump’s tariffs on metals and cars are “unsustainable” – but didn’t describe the 10% baseline in such terms.

Šefčovič, who will meet with senior US officials in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday in a bid to avert the 10% baseline rising to 50% on 9 July, also noted that any future EU-US deal is likely to resemble the UK-US trade agreement struck in May, which provides exemptions for Trump’s car and metal duties but leaves the 10% levy in place.

The EU-US deal would thus probably include a “brief agreement on principles, or [a] framework agreement with stated goals”, followed by agreements “on the different sectoral issues”, he noted.

In short: the “news” that the EU is willing to accept the 10% baseline is, in fact, blatantly obvious information that is overwhelmingly in the public domain.

And EU officials’ apparent vacillation from rejecting the 10% baseline, to accepting it, to rejecting it, to apparently accepting it again, is almost certainly a single, unbroken process of chickening out – while trying to hide that this is what they are doing.

(om)