Trump’s Wine War Is Giving Macron a Headache
The U.S. president is threatening to impose tariffs on French wine in response to Macron’s digital tax. It’s not going down smoothly.
Wine wars.
Photographer: GEORGES GOBET/AFPU.S. President Donald Trump has taken aim at France’s most famous export: wine. His threats to slap higher import tariffs on grands crus, champagnes and the like in retaliation to a new French tax on big tech firms have left Didier Guillaume, France’s Agriculture Minister, apoplectic. It’s an “absurd” and “stupid” response, he fumed, to a legitimate attempt by a sovereign state to get the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. pay their fair share in France.
Plenty of people will raise a glass to that analysis. Governments across the world have balked at the aggressively "efficient" corporate structures of tech multinationals, which pay next to nothing in tax thanks to legal loopholes that aren’t easy to close. Even Trump excoriated Amazon in a tweet last year, saying the company paid “little or no taxes” and put unfair pressure on retailers. Attacking France for doing something about it is pretty hypocritical; hiking wine tariffs is downright hostile.