By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China is reaching out to other nations as the U.S. layers on more tariffs in what appears to be an attempt to form a united front to compel Washington to retreat. Days into the effort, it’s meeting only partial success with many countries unwilling to ally with the main target of President Donald Trump’s trade war.

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Facing the cratering of global markets, Trump on Wednesday backed off his tariffs on most nations for 90 days, saying countries were lining up to negotiate more favorable conditions.

China has refused to seek talks, saying it would “fight to the end” in a tariff war, prompting Trump to further jack up the tax rate on Chinese imports to 145%. It was initially announced on Wednesday as 125%, but that did not include a 20% tariff on China tied to its role in fentanyl production.

China has retaliated with tariffs on U.S. goods of 84%, which took effect Thursday.

Trump’s move was seemingly an attempt to narrow what had been an unprecedented trade war between the U.S. and most of the world to a showdown between the U.S. and China.

“A just cause receives support from many,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a daily briefing on Thursday. “The U.S. cannot win the support of the people and will end in failure.”

China has thus far focused on Europe, with a phone call between Premier Li Qiang and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “sending a positive message to the outside world.”

“China is willing to work with the EU to jointly implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of China and the EU, strengthen communication and exchanges, and deepen China-EU trade, investment and industrial cooperation,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

That was followed by a video conference between Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and EU Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security Maroš Šefčović on Tuesday to discuss the U.S. “reciprocal tariffs.”

Wang said the tariffs “seriously infringe upon the legitimate interests of all countries, seriously violate WTO rules, seriously damage the rules-based multilateral trading system, and seriously impact the stability of the global economic order,” Xinhua said.

“It is a typical act of unilateralism, protectionism and economic bullying,” Wang was quoted as saying.

“China is willing to resolve differences through consultation and negotiation, but if the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end,” Wang said.

Wang has also spoken with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while Li, the premier, has met with business leaders. China has “already made a full evaluation and is prepared to deal with all kinds of uncertainties, and will introduce incremental policies according to the needs of the situation,” Xinhua quoted Li as saying.

In Hong Kong, the spokesperson for the local office of China’s Foreign Ministry reiterated Beijing’s unwillingness to negotiate with the U.S. under current conditions.

“We must solemnly tell the U.S.: a tariff-wielding barbarian who attempts to force countries to call and beg for mercy can never expect that call from China,” Huang Jingrui wrote in an op-ed appearing in the South China Morning Post.

If the U.S. is truly sincere about starting a dialogue with China, it should “immediately rectify its wrong practices and adopt the right attitude of equality, respect and mutual benefit,” Huang wrote.

Despite their unhappiness with Washington, not all countries are interested in linking up with China, especially those with a history of disputes with Beijing.

“We speak for ourselves, and Australia’s position is that free and fair trade is a good thing,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters. “We engage with all countries, but we stand up for Australia’s national interest and we stand on our own two feet.”

China imposed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers against Australia in 2020 after the government angered Beijing by calling for an independent inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic.

India has also reportedly turned down a Chinese call for cooperation, and Russia, typically seen as China’s closest geopolitical partner, has been left out of the Trump tariffs altogether. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said on Wednesday that his government is preparing for talks on tariffs with the U.S.

The U.S. imposed a 32% tariff on imports from Taiwan, a close trading and security partner. Taiwan produces most of the high-performing computer chips craved by the U.S. and others and has long enjoyed a trade surplus with Washington.

Yet, Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam and Cambodia find themselves in a particular bind. They benefited when factories moved to their countries from China due to rising costs. They are being hit by punishing tariffs but have few buyers outside the U.S. and are already operating on razor-thin margins.

Trump had previously denied contemplating a pause, but the drama over his tariffs will continue as the administration prepares to engage in country-by-country negotiations. Meanwhile, tariffs will be 10% for the countries where the larger ones were paused.

It’s not clear what further steps China will take, but the Foreign Ministry’s Lin said China “will not sit idly by and let the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese people be deprived of, nor will we allow the international trade rules and multilateral trading system to be undermined.” Non-tariff options include bans on American movies, American law firms and other trade in services.

World markets soared on Thursday, with Japan’s benchmark jumping more than 9%, as investors welcomed Trump’s decision Germany’s DAX initially gained more than 8%. It was up 7.5% at 21,141.53 a bit later, while the CAC 40 in Paris gained 7.2% to 7,360.23. Britain’s FTSE 100 surged 5.4% to 8,090.02.

However, U.S. futures edged lower and oil prices also declined. Chinese shares saw more moderate gains, given yet another jump in the tariffs each side is imposing on each others’ exports.

The future for the S&P 500 was down 0.4% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.2% lower.

Associated Press reporters Rod McGuirk in Sydney and Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

By MICHELLE L. PRICE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump intensified his efforts to punish his critics by signing a pair of memoranda directing the Justice Department to investigate two officials from his first administration and stripping them of any security clearances they may have.

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Trump’s targeting of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in Trump’s first term, and Chris Krebs, a former top cybersecurity official, came as the Republican president has sought to use the powers of the presidency to retaliate against his adversaries, including law firms.

Trump also on Wednesday retaliated against another law firm, Susman Godfrey, as he seeks to punish firms that have links to prosecutors who have investigated him or employed attorneys he sees as opponents.

Although Trump has ordered security clearances to be stripped from a number of his opponents, including former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, the president’s order Wednesday directing the Justice Department to broadly investigate the actions of Taylor and Krebs marks an escalation of Trump’s campaign of retribution since he returned to power.

Taylor, who left the Trump administration in 2019, was later revealed to be the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 that was sharply critical of Trump. The person writing the essay described themselves as part of a secret “resistance” to counter Trump’s “misguided impulses,” and its publication touched off a leak investigation in Trump’s first White House.

Taylor later published a book under the pen name “Anonymous” and publicly revealed his identity days before the 2020 election.

Trump said Wednesday that Taylor was “like a traitor” and that his writings about “confidential” meetings were “like spying.”

“I think he’s guilty of treason,” he said.

Taylor responded by saying Trump had proved his point.

“Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path,” he wrote on X.

Trump named Krebs the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency but became angered with him after he declared the 2020 election that Trump lost to be secure and the ballot counts to be accurate.

Krebs did not respond to a message seeking comment, but late Wednesday he shared on X a message he originally posted when he left government in 2020: “Honored to serve. We did it right.”

Trump has falsely claimed he was cheated out of reelection in 2020 by widespread fraud, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where he disputed his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory. Judges, including some he appointed, rejected dozens of his legal challenges.

“It’s bizarre to see a president investigate his own administration and his own appointee,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer and coauthor of “The Big Truth,” a book about Trump’s 2020 election lies.

Becker noted that Krebs issued his reassurances about the security of the upcoming election for months during 2020 without pushback from the then-president, with Trump only souring on him after the votes were counted.

“The reason he can sit in the White House today and govern from that position is because our election system is secure and has accurately determined who has won the presidency,” Becker said.

Susman Godfrey, the firm Trump targeted in an order Wednesday, represented Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit that accused Fox News of falsely claiming that the voting company had rigged the 2020 presidential election. Fox News ultimately agreed to pay nearly $800 million to avert a trial.

The order bars the firm from using government resources or buildings, according to White House staff secretary Will Scharf.

In a statement, Susman Godfrey responded that people who know the firm know it takes seriously its duty to uphold the rule of law. “This principle guides us now,” the firm said. “There is no question that we will fight this unconstitutional order.”

Trump has issued a series of orders meant to punish firms, including by ordering the suspension of lawyers’ security clearances and revoking federal contracts. He’s succeeded in extracting concessions from some who have settled, but others have challenged the orders in court.

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Eric Tucker in Washington and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration has been predicting its barrage of tariffs targeting China will push Apple into manufacturing the iPhone in the United States for the first time.

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But that’s an unlikely scenario even with U.S tariffs now standing at 145% on products made in China — the country where Apple has manufactured most of its iPhones since the first model hit the market 18 years ago.

The disincentives for Apple shifting its production domestically include a complex supply chain that it began building in China during the 1990s. It would take several years and cost billions of dollars to build new plants in the U.S., and then confront Apple with economic forces that could triple the price of an iPhone, threatening to torpedo sales of its marquee product.

“The concept of making iPhones in the U.S. is a non-starter,” asserted Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, reflecting a widely held view in the investment community that tracks Apple’s every move. He estimated that the current $1,000 price tag for an iPhone made in China, or India, would soar to more than $3,000 if production shifted to the U.S. And he believes that moving production domestically likely couldn’t be done until, at the earliest, 2028. “Price points would move so dramatically, it’s hard to comprehend.”

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday. The Cupertino, California, company has yet to publicly discuss its response to Trump’s tariffs on China, but the topic may come up on May 1 when Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to field questions from analysts during a quarterly conference call to discuss the company’s financial results and strategy.

And there is no doubt the China tariffs will be a hot-button issue given Apple’s stock price has dropped by nearly 20% and lowered the company’s market value by $600 billion since Trump began increasing them on April 2.

If the tariffs hold, Apple is widely expected to eventually raise the prices on iPhones and other popular products because the Silicon Valley’s supply chain is so heavily concentrated in China, India and other overseas markets caught in the crossfire of the escalating trade war.

The big question is how long Apple might be willing to hold the line on its current prices before the tariffs’ toll on the company’s profit margins become too much to bear and consumers are asked to shoulder some of the burden.

One of the main reasons that Apple has wiggle room to hold the line on its current iPhone pricing while the China tariffs remain in place is because the company continues to reap huge profit margins from the revenue generated by the subscriptions and other services tied to its product, said Forrester Research analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee. That division, which collected $96 billion in revenue during Apple’s last fiscal year, remains untouched by Trump’s tariffs.

“Apple can absorb some of the tariff-induced cost increases without significant financial impact, at least in the short term,” Chatterjee said.

Apple tried to appease Trump in February by announcing plans to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the U.S. through 2028, but none of it was tied to making an iPhone domestically. Instead, Apple pledged to fund a Houston data center for computer servers powering artificial intelligence — a technology the company is expanding into as part of an industrywide craze.

When asked this week about whether Trump believes Apple intends to build iPhones in the U.S., White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt pointed to Apple’s investment promise as evidence that the company thinks it could be done. “If Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” Leavitt said.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also predicted tariffs would force a manufacturing shift during an April 6 appearance on a CBS news program. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Lutnick said.

But during a 2017 appearance at a conference in China, Cook expressed doubt about whether the U.S. labor pool had enough workers with the vocational skills required to do the painstaking and tedious work that Lutnick was discussing.

“In the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Cook said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

Trump also tried to pressure Apple, to no avail, into shifting iPhone production to the U.S. during his first term as president. But the administration ultimately exempted the iPhone from the tariffs he imposed on China back then — a period when Apple had announced a commitment to invest $350 billion in the U.S. Trump’s first-term tariffs on China also prompted Apple to begin a process that led to some of its current iPhones being made in India and some of its other products being manufactured in Vietnam.

Cook also took the president on a 2019 tour of a Texas plant where Apple had been assembling some of its Mac computers since 2013. Shortly after finishing that our, Trump took credit for the plant that Apple had opened while Barack Obama was president. “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America,” Trump posted on Nov. 19, 2019.

By MARC LEVY

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A new executive order from President Donald Trump that’s part of his effort to invigorate energy production raises the possibility that his Department of Justice will go to court against state climate change laws aimed at slashing planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels.

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Trump’s order, signed Tuesday, comes as U.S. electricity demand ramps up to meet the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing applications, as well as federal efforts to expand high-tech manufacturing. It also coincides with “climate superfund” legislation gaining traction in various states.

Trump has declared a “ national energy emergency ” and ordered his attorney general to take action against states that may be illegally overreaching their authority in how they regulate energy development.

“American energy dominance is threatened when State and local governments seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authorities,” Trump said in the order.

He said the attorney general should focus on state laws targeting climate change, a broad order that unmistakably puts liberal states in the crosshairs of Trump’s Department of Justice.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said it would be an “extraordinarily bold move” for the federal government to go to court to try to overturn a state climate law.

Gerrard said the quickest path for Trump’s Department of Justice is to try to join ongoing lawsuits where courts are deciding whether states or cities are exceeding their authority by trying to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the cost of damages from climate change.

Democrats say they won’t back down

Democratic governors vowed to keep fighting climate change.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused Trump of “turning back the clock” on the climate and said his state’s efforts to reduce pollution “won’t be derailed by a glorified press release masquerading as an executive order.”

The group Climate Mayors, which includes the mayors of America’s biggest cities, said in a statement from its chair, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, that the federal government is overreaching its authority and ignoring the “enormous costs of continued environmental destruction and the political and social harm of retreating American leadership.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, cochairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, which includes 22 governors, said they “will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis.”

Climate superfund laws are gaining traction

Vermont and New York are currently fighting challenges in federal courts to climate superfund laws passed last year. Trump suggested the laws “extort” payments from energy companies and “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”

Both are modeled on the 45-year-old federal superfund law, which taxed petroleum and chemical companies to pay to clean up of sites polluted by toxic waste. In similar fashion, the state climate laws are designed to force major fossil fuel companies to pay into state-based funds based on their past greenhouse gas emissions.

Several other Democratic-controlled states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon and California, are considering similar measures.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and natural gas industries, applauded Trump’s order that it said would “protect American energy from so-called ‘climate superfunds.’”

“Directing the Department of Justice to address this state overreach will help restore the rule of law and ensure activist-driven campaigns do not stand in the way of ensuring the nation has access to an affordable and reliable energy supply,” it said.

Court battles are already ongoing

The American Petroleum Institute, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed the lawsuit against Vermont. The lawsuit against New York was filed by West Virginia, along with several coal, gas and oil interests and 21 other mostly Republican-led states, including Texas, Ohio and Georgia.

Make Polluters Pay, a coalition of consumer and anti-fossil fuel groups, vowed to fight Trump’s order and accused fossil fuel billionaires of convincing Trump to launch an assault on states.

The order, it said, demonstrates the “corporate capture of government” and “weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage.”

Separately, the Department of Justice could join lawsuits in defense of fossil fuel industries being sued, Gerrard said.

Those lawsuits include ones filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and dozens of cities and states seeking billions of dollars in damages from things like wildfires, rising sea levels and severe storms.

In the last three months, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to get involved in a couple climate-themed lawsuits.

One was brought by oil and gas companies asking it to block Honolulu’s lawsuit. Another was brought by Alabama and Republican attorneys general in 18 other states aimed at blocking lawsuits against the oil and gas industry from Democratic-led states, including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Trump’s order set off talk in state Capitols around the U.S.

That includes Pennsylvania, where Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro is contesting a court challenge to a regulation that would make it the first major fossil fuel-producing state to force power plant owners pay for greenhouse gas emissions.

John Quigley, a former Pennsylvania environmental protection secretary and a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, wondered if the Department of Justice would begin challenging all sorts of state water and air pollution laws.

“This kind of an order knows no bounds,” Quigley said. “It’s hard to say where this could end up.”

Associated Press reporter Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report. Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter