Hello and welcome to the CR podcast, unpacking Europe. My name is Jay Kejaki and I'm a senior research

fellow at the CR. I am your host today. And we will be talking about digital policy today,

because Trump's tariffs on the EU are back on the agenda. In fact, the deadline for a new deal is just

10 days away. And digital policy has been in the crosshairs in some of those discussions.

So what would this mean for the EU? To talk this through, my guest today is Zach Meyers, an

associate fellow at the CR, and Director of Research at the Center for Regulation in Europe. Zach,

welcome back to the podcast. Nice to be here, great to chat, thank you. Yeah, lovely to have you back. So let's start with an assessment of where we are.

We are talking on Monday, July 21st.

Can you give us an update on the latest developments?

Sure.

So I mean, as we all know, Trump is tariff man,

and he proposed across the board tariffs on basically

all of the US trading partners. And that had led to a whole series of

discussions with different training partners around the world, all trying to secure a deal.

He's just proposed 30% tariffs on the EU if a deal isn't done by the 1st of August,

as you said, which really seems to be an effort to kind of up

the ante. And in particular, I think it's proven that while Trump thought that trade deals

would be easy to get, there's been only four countries that have signed up to one with the US so

far, the UK being one of them. And I guess kind of the importance and significance and enduring nature of those deals is

pretty much in question.

So I think for the EU, it had seemed a couple of days ago that a trade agreement was very,

very close to being finalised.

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