Donald Trump is kicking off a summit of major industrialized nations in France by threatening a new trade war with the hosts over its tax on his billionaire backers in Silicon Valley.
“I asked them not to charge American companies, and if they do, I have no choice but to charge a 100 percent tariff on all champagnes and all wines coming out of France,” the president, who turned 80 on Sunday, told the New York Post. “All [French President Emmanuel Macron] has to do is get rid of the sales tax, and he wouldn’t have that kind of pressure.”
His warning comes ahead of Monday’s annual G7 summit, which brings together Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. to discuss issues of trade and security. This year’s edition is being held in Evian-les-Bains, France.
Exports to the U.S. account for an estimated 20 percent of all sales by the French wine industry, generating upward of $2 billion each year. The target of Trump’s ire is the GAFAM or “digital services” tax introduced by France in 2019.
The measures impose a 3 percent tax on revenue generated in the country by tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple, which brought in around $700 million last year. All four Silicon Valley behemoths are among the many tech companies to have voiced backing for Trump’s second stint in the White House.
Trump’s comments to the Post Monday blew apart claims from Macron’s office last week that any controversy over the digital services tax had been put to bed among G7 member states. A Macron aide said that the topic was “no longer up for debate.” Sources close to Trump were swift to slam that assertion as “not accurate.”
The U.S. president’s broadside comes ahead of what already promises to be a testy summit, as analysts forecast a combative arrival with Trump flying out straight after marking his 80th birthday with a UFC cage-fighting gala at the White House.
Expected flashpoints include Trump’s war on Iran, launched in late February, and the controversial deal to end it this coming Friday, announced by the president over the weekend.
The conflict has seen the Islamic Republic shut the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway in the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of global oil supplies passes. The closure has sent crude oil prices, and domestic gas prices at the pumps, sharply higher.
European allies repeatedly balked at sending warships to help reopen the waterway. Trump responded by branding NATO a “paper tiger” and its members “COWARDS,” stripping American forces from the continent and warning his retaliation would go “a lot further.”
Trump’s comments ahead of the G7 summit also follow after he upended global markets last year with his April 2025 “Liberation Day” Tariffs, imposing a 20 percent duty on European goods. He then doubled metal tariffs to 50 percent and threatened to push the general EU rate to the same level before Brussels and Washington struck a framework truce in July.
The president has equally turned the fiscal screws on NATO, strong-arming members at the alliance’s summit in The Hague last June into committing 5 percent of GDP to defense by 2035.
He publicly berated Spain for resisting that target and hedged on whether he would honor the bloc’s guarantees of mutual self-defense in the event any member comes under attack, having repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO member Denmark, since retaking the White House last year.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
