Trump Threatens 100% Tariff on French Wines Over Tech Tax
President Trump said France faces a 100% tariff on all champagnes and wines unless Paris removes its digital services tax on American tech companies. He told Emmanuel Macron he had “no choice” if France keeps the levy, sharpening a trade fight that now reaches a major export market worth more than $2 billion a year to French producers.
Trump’s 100% tariff threat
“I asked him not to charge American companies, and if they do, I have no choice but to charge a 100% tariff on all champagnes and all wines coming out of France,” Trump said in an exclusive interview. The warning targets a category of French exports that the United States buys heavily, with the U.S. market accounting for a fifth of the French wine industry’s global sales.
“All [Macron] has to do is get rid of the sales tax, and he wouldn’t have that kind of pressure,” Trump said. His comments directly linked the tariff threat to France’s digital services tax, turning a tax dispute into a pricing risk for French wine and champagne shipments into the U.S.
France’s 3% digital levy
3% is the rate of France’s digital services tax, which has been on the books since 2019 and applies to local revenue generated by companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple. France’s finance ministry said the tax raised roughly $700 million last year, while lawmakers in October voted 296-58 to double it to 6% and narrow the threshold to target the largest global players.
French ministers later vetoed the move to double the tax, after lawmakers had originally floated a 15% hike before scaling it back. That sequence left the levy in place, but it also kept the dispute alive as a tax fight with direct consequences for exporters tied to the American market.
Macron, G7, and wine sales
2019 was also the year the U.S. Trade Representative first proposed a 100% tariff level during an investigation into the French tax, so Trump’s warning revives a number already tied to this dispute. A senior source close to Macron said last week that the issue was no longer up for debate among G7 countries, and a U.S. official dismissed that account as not accurate.
Monday’s G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains now sits inside the same pressure point: a tax that hits U.S. tech companies first, and a tariff threat that would hit French wine and champagne exporters next. If France keeps the levy, the people shipping bottles into the U.S. face the clearest immediate risk in this fight.
