As President Donald Trump’s enormous new tariffs on China rippled through global supply chains, Apple CEO Tim Cook went to work behind the scenes.
Cook spoke to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week about the potential impact of the tariffs on iPhone prices, two people familiar with the phone call said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations that were previously unreported. Cook spoke with other senior officials in the White House, the people said. And he refrained from publicly criticizing the president or his policies on national television, as many other executives have over the past several weeks.
By the end of the week, the Trump administration agreed to exempt from import duties electronic products that Apple produces in China, an action that also granted a reprieve to other large U.S. firms, including HP and Dell. Trump did so despite the recommendations of senior White House aide Peter Navarro, who had wanted the taxes to remain in place, the people said.
Since the exemption was announced, Apple’s stock recovered roughly 7 percent of its value, although it later gave back some of those gains. The stakes for Apple are high; one estimate suggested that Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports would have led Apple to charge more than $2,000 for iPhone Pros, according to Wedbush Securities.
“Tim has a very good relationship with the president and rightly so. He has been playing a very careful role in that he obviously has a huge dependency on China but is also hugely important to the U.S.,” said Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary during Trump’s first term.
“In general, he has a lot of respect because he’s not a public whiner, he’s not a crybaby, but comes with the real voice of reality. It’s no surprise to me that his suggestions are being well received.”
As Trump’s sprawling global trade war affects dozens of countries and thousands of companies, foreign leaders and executives are trying to prevent their products from getting hit. Their urgency has intensified as the scale of Trump’s tariffs has grown, setting off a lobbying frenzy in Washington as they race to minimize the potential financial damage. CEOs have descended on the White House and Mar-a-Lago in increasing numbers, with chip powerhouse Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google CEO Sundar Pichai among those visiting the president over the past several weeks.
Both publicly and privately, Trump has expressed a desire to oppose pressure from specific corporate interests or allied industries. He is described by advisers as strongly disliking the word “exemption,” which he believes enabled his advisers to weaken the tariff measures of his first administration. The Sunday after the exemptions were announced, several administration officials stressed that the electronics products would be included as part of tariffs on semiconductors, meaning Apple’s imports would be only temporarily exempted.
These assurances, however, did not obscure that Apple, along with several other tech firms, had won a significant victory on tariffs at a time when many companies have tried and failed to do so for products they say are necessary for their bottom lines. While the White House denies that the administration did any specific favors for Cook, Trump also said Monday that he “helped” the tech executive. “I speak to Tim Cook,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I helped Tim Cook recently, and that whole business.”
White House spokesman Kush Desai said that the Trump administration had not granted “any exemptions” to benefit Apple or any other company. He also said the administration’s agenda will build on existing commitments by firms such as Apple, Nvidia and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to manufacture more in the United States.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
“Electronics are now the subject of a Section 232 investigation, a completely separate legal authority that is not up for negotiation,” Desai said. “The administration is taking a nuanced, strategic approach to combat China’s unfair trade practices and reshore the high-tech manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security back to the U.S.”
The policy shift reflects what Trump allies describe as Cook’s effectiveness in navigating the White House and captures some of the tensions inherent in the president’s economic policies.
Cook joined other tech executives in personally giving more than $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and people close to the president say he respects the Apple chief. When venture capitalist Marc Andreessen first met Trump at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, last year, the president-elect asked him what he thought of Cook, according to a separate person familiar with the dinner, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. Andreessen responded that he was impressed by Cook’s leadership of the iPhone maker. Trump agreed and told Andreessen that he appreciated how Cook met with him directly with no intermediaries, which has not been previously reported.
Cook’s playbook for dealing with Trump has become a source of envy, and emulation, across much of the business world. During Trump’s first term, Cook joined Trump for one-on-one dinners and spoke to him directly. Those meetings paid dividends, and Trump agreed to pare back tariffs on China after a direct request from Cook.
Though Apple, like other hardware makers, has made attempts to diversify its supply chain to Vietnam and India in recent years, 90 percent of its iPhone components are manufactured in China, according to Wedbush Securities estimates.
Since the election, tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have followed a similar script, dining or meeting with Trump privately at the White House or at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The frequent meetings mark a dramatic departure from the first term, when Trump often vilified or attacked these executives on Twitter.
The charm offensive appears to have changed Trump’s perception of some of the executives. Trump met with Pichai at the White House last month, according to a person familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Last week, Trump told reporters: “I love Google, and I got to like the people that run it. Very capable people. They didn’t like me so much in the first administration, but they like me a lot now.”
Cook also appears to remain in the president’s good graces.
Trump has imposed more than $2 trillion in tariffs since taking office, and much of them fall on products that have no chance of being produced in significant quantities in the United States, such as tomatoes and bananas, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst at Apricitas Economics who has written extensively about the import duties. Politano also pointed out that video game systems – another form of consumer electronics – were not given a reprieve, though they also include semiconductor components. The semiconductor tariffs could take up to 270 days to implement – a lengthy process that could yield further changes.
Other companies, such as Dell, benefit from some of the exceptions. But Lori Wallach, executive director of Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-leaning group that has been critical of Big Tech firms, pointed out that Apple appears to be the only company that benefits from virtually all of the new ones. (Wallach added that an eighth change exempted the machines used to make microchips, which did not appear to benefit Apple.)
“When you look at the specific seven additional tariff lines that were added de novo relative to April 2 exception list, it just happens to all be the things Apple makes – and few other companies, if any, make all this stuff,” Wallach said.
Some experts have defended the exemption as a logical recalibration after Trump raised the reciprocal tariffs on China to more than 100 percent. Daniel Kishi, a policy adviser at American Compass, a center-right think tank, said that the administration is harmonizing the various trade authorities it has brought to bear. Kishi said because devices such as iPhones include semiconductors, it makes sense for the semiconductor investigation to target the devices and for the tariffs to be set at the same rate as tariffs on semiconductors. Otherwise, companies will continue to import the assembled devices, and the incentive to produce semiconductors domestically would be reduced.
Trump has also separately imposed 20 percent tariffs on all imports from China, which is affecting Apple’s products.
“There was always going to be an investigation that covers consumer electronics as part of the semiconductor investigation,” Kishi said. He added: “Every other consumer electronics company similarly benefits from the short-term reprieve – it’s not like Apple was given a unique advantage relative to every other company.”
Whatever the reason, some critics say it’s unfair for one of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies to win an exemption due to its size. Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, pointed to social science research on the topic showing that tariffs hurt domestic industries by requiring leadership to spend time on political lobbying rather than innovation.
“It becomes clearer by the day that there is no grand strategy to Trump’s disastrous trade policies, and if you’re a CEO, the only way out of the chaos is to pay up,” said Alex Jacquez, who served as a senior trade official in the Biden administration and now works for the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank. “Meanwhile, manufacturers and small businesses that can’t afford million-dollar donations are going to start to fold.”
Jeff Stein,Elizabeth Dwoskin and Cat Zakrzewski, (c) 2025 , The Washington Post
