Big Economic Win: Trump Secures Foreign Investment That Dwarfs What Biden Bragged About

What a difference a weekend makes at the White House.

After Friday’s real-time clash on international television with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump on Monday was in front of the cameras again with a much more positive scene — announcing a massive investment by a Taiwan computer giant to increase its presence in the U.S.

And he used it to show that in the carrots-and-sticks world of international diplomacy and finance, his get-tough approach beats the Joe Biden White House by a long shot.

@POTUS announces a $100 BILLION new investment by TSMC in U.S. chips manufacturing! pic.twitter.com/PtiaxxwMXK

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 3, 2025

As CBS News reported, the White House event was called to announce an investment of $100 billion by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in plants to manufacture computer chips in the United States.

The announcement comes on top of $65 billion the company has already invested in plants in the Phoenix, Arizona, area, partly financed with American tax dollars. TSMC made its first move into Arizona in 2020, with a $12 billion investment in a chip-making factory, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In a 2024 news release, TSMC announced it was expanding in Phoenix using $6.6 billion in grants from the U.S. government provided by the CHIPS Act of 2022, a bill that was passed to encourage semiconductor manufacturers to build on American soil.

In a Commerce Department news release at the time, then-President Biden bragged about the project at length, calling it a “critical milestone” in implementing the CHIPS Act.

(In fact, Biden spent a good deal of his time in office — when he wasn’t on vacation — bragging about the CHIPS Act. They were boasts not even the liberals at the fact-checking site PolitiFact could buy.)

But it wasn’t the lure of federal grant money that convinced the company this time around. According to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, it was the threat of a 25 percent tariff on its computer chips if they were imported from Taiwan rather than manufactured in the U.S.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick:

“POTUS has made it a fundamental objective to bring semiconductor chip manufacturing back home to America… you’re seeing the power of Donald Trump’s presidency because TSMC… is coming to America with a $100 billion investment.” pic.twitter.com/8lhTV6BfZk

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) March 4, 2025

“President Trump has made it a fundamental objective to bring semiconductor chip manufacturing home to America,” Lutnick said at the White House.

“Under the Biden administration, TSMC received a $6 billion grant, and that encouraged them to build $65 billion, so America gave TSMC 10 percent of the money to build here.”

“And now you’re seeing the power of Donald Trump’s presidency, because TSMC, the greatest manufacturer of chips in the world, is coming to American with a $100 billion investment, and, of course, that is backed by the fact that they can come here because they can avoid paying tariffs.”

Of course, there might be other reasons a major capitalist country in Taiwan might think it’s a good idea to have a presence in the United States — as far as possible from the looming communist giant of China that’s bent on bringing the island nation under Beijing’s control.

But there’s also no question that Monday’s announcement proved a strategy Trump has backed going back to his first term in office.

And in his second term, Trump has made no secret of his intent to use tariffs — essentially taxes imposed by the federal government on goods manufactured abroad and imported into the United States — to force foreign governments to accept his policies.

Just on Tuesday, new tariffs went into effect against goods produced in Canada and Mexico — the United States’ two largest trade partners — because their governments have failed to “adequately address” U.S. concerns about drugs being moved into the U.S.

There’s no question that tariffs are a two-edged sword — they impact the countries and businesses abroad, but they will also, inevitably, raise prices in the United States for the goods they are placed on.

But Trump was elected after a campaign that promised to bring a hard-edged, “America-first” approach to government in his conduct of both domestic and foreign affairs.

His crackdown on illegal immigrants present in the country is one example.

His explosive confrontation with Zelenskyy on Friday, followed by a pause in military aid to Ukraine, is another.

The threat of tariffs on semiconductor imports is a third.

On Monday, he showed results. And this is what Americans elected him for.

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