U.S. Customs and Border Protection said items like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, flat-panel monitors and some chips would qualify for the exemption. Machines used to make semiconductors are excluded too. That means they won't be subject to most of the tariffs levied on Chinaor the 10% baseline tariffs elsewhere.

It was the latest tariff change by the Trump administration, which has made several U-turns in its massive plan to put tariffs in place on goods from most countries. White House officials sought to dismiss any suggestion of a reprieve as the weekend progressed.

"It's not really an exception. That's not even the right word for it," U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "This type of supply chain moved from the tariff regime for the global tariff, the reciprocal tariff, and it moved to the national security tariff regime."

Greer added that "the president decided that we're not going to have exemptions. We can't have a Swiss cheese solution to this universal problem that we're facing."

On Air Force One Saturday night, President Donald Trump told reporters he would get into more specifics on exemptions on Monday. In his post Sunday on TruthSocial, he promised the White House was "taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN."

Some had assumed the exemption filed Friday night reflected the president's realization that his China tariffs are unlikely to shift more manufacturing of smartphones, computers and other gadgets to the U.S. any time soon, if ever.

The administration has predicted that the trade war prod Apple to make iPhones in the U.S. for the first time, but that was an unlikely scenario after Apple spent decades building up a finely calibrated supply chain in China.

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