Trump (right) at the 2019 meeting when he praised “Tim Apple” — image credit: Apple
While denying he ever changes his mind, Trump has now said he helped out Apple with tariffs because of conversations with Tim Cook.
It’s up there with night follows day, but Trump has now effectively confirmed that it was after speaking with Tim Cook that he changed his tariffs. His statement has to be defined as effectively, because he was typically unclear and attempting to sound as if he were sticking flawlessly to his original tariff plan.
“Look, I’m a very flexible person. I don’t change my mind, but I’m flexible,” he said to reporters while officially meeting with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. “And you have to be.”
“You just can’t have a wall and you’ll only go… sometimes you have to go around it, under it or above it,” he continued. “There’ll be maybe things coming up… I speak to Tim Cook.”
“I helped Tim Cook recently,” said Trump. “And that whole business. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Apple gained its massive — if not complete — tariff exemption in a surprise announcement on Friday. The world reaction was then that Trump had backed down from his insistence that there would be be no exemptions, so naturally there was then pushback from the White House.
By Sunday, Trump was denying that there had been any exemption and re-framed it as changing from one type of tariff to another. He further had his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick explicitly say that Apple’s exemption or exception or whatever the latest synonym is, would only be short term.
It was a clear and firm commitment that wasn’t clear. The closest to a commitment Lutnick gave was that the exemption or exception or relief for Apple would be over “in a month or two.”
While Lutnick won’t commit to a schedule and Trump is adamantly stating that “there was no Tariff ‘exception’,” the one certainty about the tariff exception is that Tim Cook asked for it. Cook has famously been one of the few business leaders who has been praised by Trump, although he called him “Tim Apple.”
Cook was once described by Steve Jobs as not being a “product person,” but he’s unquestionably a politician. He apparently kept the working relationship going with Trump before the last election, and he is confirmed to have personally donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration.
