Trump Threatens 300% Tariffs on Foreign Countries and Enterprises That Fail to Invest in US

President Donald Trump took his tariff talk to new heights over the weekend, suggesting at a campaign rally that the United States hit offshore companies with tariffs of 150-300 percent unless they take imminent action to invest in American manufacturing.

Speaking at an event in Vandalia, Ohio on Saturday for Republican Senator Jon Husted and gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, the president said that corporations from South Korea, China, Japan and Canada could face steep duty hikes if they fail to invest in building U.S. operations soon.

“Countries around the world, including China, Japan, Korea and Canada, have used tariffs against the United States for a long time,” the president said.

“We give them a little window of about a year and a half so they can build their plant here,” he suggested to the crowd, which gathered at an area high school. “If they don’t do that, we charge them a tariff of 150, 200, 250, 300 percent.”

Trump said his tariff strategy has brought in trillions of dollars-worth of investment to the U.S.

The threat against South Korea in particular comes after months of pressure from the Trump administration, which has been urging the country’s government to make good on a 2025 commitment to invest $350 billion in the U.S. The agreement includes $200 in unspecified “commercially reasonable” strategic investments and $150 billion for shipbuilding. In exchange, Washington agreed to lower Seoul’s “reciprocal” tariff rate from 25 percent to 15 percent last July.

According to the administration, South Korea was presented with the opportunity to make a strategic investment in the Alaska LNG, an 800-mile Alaskan oil pipeline, last week. Representatives from the South Korean government said they were still assessing the opportunity when Trump announced that the country had bought into the project.

The president insisted that he “didn’t jump the gun” in a post on Truth Social, adding that if South Korea failed to move forward with the plan, he’d just “charge them more.”

Since the deal was brokered last summer, it’s faced hurdles. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung hinted that the back-and-forth with Trump administration officials about the details of the investments had been rocky. The two sides reached an impasse on how revenue would be distributed, along with losses from projects that failed to turn a profit.

South Korea ultimately vowed in October to funnel $200 billion of the $350 billion overall commitment into U.S. projects in installments of up to $20 billion annually.

Since then, Trump has intermittently threatened to up duties on the country for not living up to its end of the bargain. In January, the president Truthed that he would raise tariffs on Korean imports of lumber, cars and prescription drugs back up to 25 percent if the South Korean Legislature didn’t ratify the October framework.

Meanwhile, the president’s continued provocations against Canada may not have landed with the Ohio audience on Saturday, as the state’s manufacturing sector is among those most vulnerable to Canadian tariff retaliation. Ohio exports more than $2 billion in products like machinery and metals to Canada each year—goods that are now subject to steep new duties.

As of early September, tit-for-tat tariffs between the North American trading partners hit more than $27.6 billion in bilateral trade, including U.S. exports of textiles and apparel. Just last week, the U.S. banned $1 billion in Canadian products from entering the American market altogether, including certain alcohols and spirits, motorcycles and dairy.

At the Group of 20 (G20) Trade Ministerial in Milwaukee, Wisc. over the weekend, U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer told reporters he didn’t feel hopeful about a resolution returning warmth to the relationship, saying, “The reality is there are a handful of outstanding issues that are quite difficult to resolve.”

While China was mentioned offhandedly during the president’s weekend diatribe, the president is unlikely to want to dispel the recent good vibes generated during a state visit extend a trade framework, the Busan Agreement, brokered by Xi and Trump last fall, by two months.

Not mentioned over the weekend was India, which remains most mired in uncertainty when it comes to the future of trade. While India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said in late September that the country’s laboriously negotiated trade agreement with the U.S. was nearly “done and dusted,” the sentiment was called into question by another official last week who called U.S. “self-centered” in its aggressive trade policy, which he said harms the Global South.

On Monday, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman confirmed that the negotiations had encountered some major setbacks. According to a report from Reuters, the official said the framework thus far has “been a hard and very vigorously negotiated” one, but eliciting concessions from either side at this juncture would be “very, very difficult.”