President Trump stood on the 18th green in County Clare and told a cheering crowd he was scrapping the tariff on Irish whiskey.
Quick Take
- Trump announced the tariff removal Sept. 13 at the Irish Open in Doonbeg, on property he owns.
- He said the move came after repeated requests from Taoiseach Micheál Martin and pro golfers.
- The tariff in question was widely reported at 10 percent, though one source cited 15 percent.
- Trump later clarified the tariff relief covers only Irish whiskey, not other European Union goods.
A Golf Course Announcement Heard Around The World
Trump made the announcement at the closing ceremony of the Amgen Irish Open, held at his Trump International Golf Links resort in Doonbeg. He told the crowd, “Everybody’s been bugging me… Could you possibly take the tariffs off of Irish whiskey?”
Then he delivered the line fans had been waiting for: “On behalf of the United States of America, I am going to take the tariffs off”. The crowd erupted.
Reuters, Politico, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other major outlets all confirmed the same core moment from the same event.
That kind of wall-to-wall, independent confirmation from separate newsrooms leaves little room for doubt about what was said and where. The president was clearly playing to a home crowd, quite literally, on his own resort grounds.
Trump plans to remove a 15% tariff on Irish whiskey https://t.co/k2fo2jvLU1 pic.twitter.com/LXwiV6G7dH
— New York Post (@nypost) September 14, 2026
Who Asked, And Why It Mattered
Trump said the request came from more than one direction. He named Taoiseach Micheál Martin among those pushing him on the issue, and Reuters reported that professional golfers had raised it with him too.
Irish golfer Shane Lowry, a hometown favorite, was also tied to the moment in coverage of the event. The tariff has long irritated Ireland’s whiskey industry, which sends the overwhelming majority of its product overseas, much of it to American shelves.
That pressure campaign did not appear out of nowhere. Irish whiskey exports to the United States were worth roughly 420 million euros a year before tariffs started biting into that trade.
For an industry that exports 95 percent of what it makes, a double-digit tariff is not a rounding error. It is the difference between growth and stagnation for distillers who built their business on the American market.
The Rate In Question, And Why Numbers Diverge
Most contemporaneous reporting pegged the tariff at 10 percent at the time Trump spoke. That figure lines up with a Section 122 rate that applied to Irish whiskey for several months before a broader European Union trade framework pushed spirits tariffs to 15 percent.
One video transcript summary described the tariff as 15 percent instead, which reflects the confusion around which rate applied at which point in a fast-moving trade relationship.
That back-and-forth is not new. Whiskey tariffs between Washington and Brussels have swung repeatedly since 2018, when retaliatory tariffs tied to an unrelated aircraft dispute first hit Irish and Scotch single malts.
A five-year truce suspended those duties in 2021, only for new tariff fights to reignite the issue in 2025. Announcements like this one tend to move faster than the paperwork behind them, and that gap has defined this trade relationship for years.
What Comes Next For Implementation
Trump did not give a timeline for when the tariff change would take effect. He did clarify, later the same day, that the relief applies only to Irish whiskey and not to other European Union products still facing duties.
That distinction matters for anyone assuming this was a broader trade breakthrough rather than a narrow, targeted carve-out tied to one product and one country.
Formal tariff changes typically require a presidential proclamation or an executive order, followed by Customs and Border Protection guidance before importers see any difference at the border.
Whether Irish whiskey moves through that process quickly or slowly, the announcement itself already did what these moments are designed to do. It gave a struggling export industry hope, and it gave a golf crowd in Doonbeg something to cheer about.
For an administration that has leaned hard on tariffs as a negotiating tool, a targeted rollback like this one shows the flip side of that strategy.
Tariffs can be lifted as easily as they are imposed, especially when the ask comes from allies, golfers, and a home crowd standing on the president’s own fairway.
Sources:
thegatewaypundit.com, aljazeera.com, politico.com, nytimes.com, essentiallysports.com, reuters.com, rte.ie
