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The EU appears to be on the verge of signing a trade deal with Donald Trump after the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, announced she would meet the US president on Sunday during his four-day trip to Scotland.
Trump was scheduled to land on Friday evening before the opening of his new golf course in Aberdeenshire and was planning to meet the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Monday.
The European Commission said von der Leyen’s visit would be at Trump’s invitation. Ireland’s taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said on Friday a deal would “hopefully be signed off before the weekend is over”.
Before boarding an Air Force One flight to Glasgow, the US president said the EU had a “50/50” chance of a deal, but later said his teams were working “diligently” to land the “big one” with the bloc, potentially signalling an end to the threat of a trade war.
Trump heaped praise on Starmer and Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, and said the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was “a team player” but that France’s planned recognition of Palestine as a state would not “carry any weight”.
Trump said he was looking forward to meeting Swinney. Before boarding the presidential plane, he told journalists: “The Scottish leader is a good man, so I look forward to meeting him.”
He said he had a “lot of love” for Scotland.
Trump also hinted he was looking for more concessions from the EU, saying that Japan had had a worse chance than Brussels of getting a deal but succeeded after offering more to the US.
Von der Leyen said she “had a good call” with Trump before he landed in Scotland and they had “agreed to meet in Scotland on Sunday to discuss transatlantic trade relations, and how we can keep them strong”.
While signalling he was not yet ready to sign a deal with Brussels, Trump would not be meeting von der Leyen unless a deal was to be signed, sources have said.
Trump also hinted he was ready to widen the deal he had already agreed with the UK, fuelling speculation he could finally eliminate the 25% tariff he imposed on steel. “This week we want to talk about certain aspects [of the trade deal] which are going to be good for both countries; more fine tuning. We are also going to be doing a little celebrating together because you know we get along very well,” he said.
“We are going to have a good time I think. The prime minister and I get along very well; the Scottish leader too, we have a lot of things, my mother was born in Scotland, and he’s a good man … so I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
Asked about a trade deal with the EU, he said: “I would say that we have a 50/50 chance, maybe less than that … I would have said we had a 25% chance with Japan, and they kept coming back, and we made a deal.”
The EU is resigned to an agreement in principle on 15% baseline tariffs including on cars, which will make brands from Volvo to Volkswagen more costly to export than Range Rovers from Britain, which carved out a deal allowing 100,000 cars a year to be exported at a 10% tariff.
On Friday, Volkswagen laid bare the cost of Trump’s import tariffs saying it had taken a £1bn hit in the first half of the year as a direct result.
Trump struck a deal with Starmer in May reducing tariffs on cars from 27.5% to 10% in exchange for increases in US imports of beef and ethanol. While it is now being seen as a clever move by Starmer, the ethanol industry says it is fighting for survival after the prime minister opened the sluice gates to US ethanol, which is used in E10 biofuel in filling stations around the UK.
The president of the National Farmers’ Union, Tom Bradshaw, told the Guardian his “biggest worry” was that Starmer would sell farmers out by allowing US dairy products in. “We understand the US is pushing very very hard for dairy access and for us that is a real red line as they use hormones that we stopped using in dairy production 30 years ago.”
He said the farming sector could not “give any more” and warned Starmer not to use agriculture as a sacrificial lamb. Before boarding Air Force One, Trump claimed he would have sealed deals with nearly all of the 60 countries he threatened with punitive tariffs by next Friday, his self-imposed deadline for agreements.
“Most of the deals are finished … I don’t want to hurt countries but we’re going to send a letter out sometime during the week and it’s basically going to say you’re going to pay 10%, you’re going to pay 50%, you’re going to pay maybe less, I don’t know,” he said.
He said he had not “really had a lot of luck with Canada” but he was not focused on it, and rather was “working very diligently with Europe, the EU” to get a deal.
