US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order allowing a range of food products, including coffee, bananas and beef, to escape his sweeping tariffs.

The move comes as his administration faces mounting pressure over rising prices. While Trump previously downplayed concerns about the cost of living, he has focused on the issue since his Republican Party’s poor performance in last week’s elections.

The dozens of products included on the White House’s list of exemptions range from avocados and tomatoes to coconuts and mangoes.

These goods, the Trump administration said on Friday, cannot be produced in sufficient quantities domestically.

Trump has long said that his tariffs – currently a baseline 10% on imports from all countries, with additional levies on many trading partners – would not lead to increased prices for US consumers. He also said affordability was a “new word” and a “con job” by Democrats.

He has argued the taxes are necessary to reduce the US trade deficit – the gap between the value of goods it buys from other countries and those it sells to them. Trump has said the US has been exploited by “cheaters” and “pillaged” by foreigners, adding that higher levies would encourage those in the US to buy American goods instead.

But grocery costs and the soaring price of beef has become a political issue for Trump. Last week, he called for an investigation into the meat-packing industry, accusing companies of “Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation”.

He has aimed to rally support for the taxes, offering $2,000 tariff rebate cheques to Americans – even as the US Supreme Court is currently weighing whether Trump had the legal authority to implement them.

But the latest exemptions signal a reversal by the Trump administration, as the White House seeks to lower prices by walking back levies on some food staples.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Trump said the decision will affect products that are not produced in the US, “so there’s no protection of our industries, or our food products”.

He added that he doesn’t think more policy rollbacks will be required in the future, saying “I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”

“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee were a little bit high. Now they’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time,” Trump said.

Economists have warned that companies would pass the cost of tariffs onto their customers in the form of higher prices.

While inflation remained milder than many analysts had expected in September, most items tracked in the Department of Labor inflation report showed price increases, with groceries up 2.7% from last year.

The Trump administration’s new tariff exemptions for food products take effect retroactively at midnight on Thursday 13 November, the White House said.

In another move to address concerns among consumers about grocery prices, the Trump administration said import taxes on coffee and bananas will be lowered as part of trade deals with four Latin American countries.

This week, Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent both vowed to decrease coffee prices by 20% in the US this year.

What items are no longer subject to tariffs?

The White House released a list that includes more than 100 products no longer subject to the levies. Some of them include:

• Coffee
• Cocoa
• Black tea
• Green tea
• Vanilla beans
• Beef products, including high-quality cuts, bone-in and boneless cuts, corned beef, some frozen items, as well as salted, brined, dried or smoked meat
• Fruits, including acai, avocadoes, bananas, coconuts, guavas, limes, oranges, mangoes, plantains, pineapples, various peppers and tomatoes
• Spices, including allspice, bay leaves, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, curry, dill fennel seeds, ginger, mace, nutmeg, oregano, paprika, saffron and turmeric
• Nuts, grains, roots and seeds, such as barley, Brazil nuts, capers, cashews, chestnuts, macadamia nuts, miso, palm hearts, pine nuts, poppy seeds, tapioca, taro and water chestnuts

After 43 days, the longest US government shutdown in history is coming to an end.

Federal workers will start receiving pay again. National Parks will reopen. Government services that had been curtailed or suspended entirely will resume. Air travel, which had become a nightmare for many Americans, will return to being merely frustrating.

After the dust settles and the ink from President Donald Trump’s signature on the funding bill dries, what has this record-setting shutdown accomplished? And what has it cost?

Senate Democrats, through their use of the parliamentary filibuster, were able to trigger the shutdown despite being a minority in the chamber by refusing to go along with a Republican measure to temporarily fund the government.

They drew a line in the sand, demanding that the Republicans agree to extend health insurance subsidies for low-income Americans that are set to expire at the end of the year.

When a handful of Democrats broke ranks to vote to reopen the government on Sunday, they received next to nothing in return – a promise of a vote in the Senate on the subsidies, but no guarantees of Republican support or even a necessary vote in the House of Representatives.

Since then, members of the party’s left flank have been furious.

They’ve accused Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer – who didn’t vote for the funding bill – of being secretly complicit in the reopening plan or simply incompetent. They’ve felt like their party folded even after off-year election success showed they had the upper hand. They feared that the shutdown sacrifices had been for nothing.

Even more mainstream Democrats, like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, called the shutdown deal “pathetic” and a “surrender”.

“I’m not coming in to punch anybody in the face,” he told the Associated Press, “but I’m not pleased that, in the face of this invasive species that is Donald Trump, who’s completely changed the rules of the game, that we’re still playing by the old rules of the game.”

Newsom has 2028 presidential ambitions and can be a good barometer for the mood of the party. He was a loyal supporter of Joe Biden who turned out to defend the then-president even after his disastrous June debate performance against Trump.

If he is running for the pitchforks, it’s not a good sign for Democratic leaders.

For Trump, in the days since the Senate deadlock broke on Sunday, his mood has gone from cautious optimism to celebration.

On Tuesday, he congratulated congressional Republicans and called the vote to reopen the government “a very big victory”.

“We’re opening up our country,” he said at a Veteran’s Day commemoration at Arlington Cemetery. “It should have never been closed.”

Trump, perhaps sensing the Democratic anger toward Schumer, joined the pile-on during a Fox News interview on Monday night.

“He thought he could break the Republican Party, and the Republicans broke him,” Trump said of the Senate Democrat.

Although there were times when Trump appeared to be buckling – last week he berated Senate Republicans for refusing to scrap the filibuster to reopen the government – he ultimately emerged from the shutdown having made little in the way of substantive concessions.

While his poll numbers have declined over the last 40 days, there’s still a year before Republicans have to face voters in the midterms. And, barring some kind of constitutional rewrite, Trump never has to worry about standing for election again.

With the end of the shutdown, Congress will get back to its regularly scheduled programming. Although the House of Representatives has effectively been on ice for more than a month, Republicans still hope they can pass some substantive legislation before next year’s election cycle kicks in.

While several government departments will be funded until September in the shutdown-ending agreement, Congress will have to approve spending for the rest of the government by the end of January to avoid another shutdown.

Democrats, licking their wounds, may be hankering for another chance to fight.

Meanwhile, the issue they fought over – healthcare subsidies – could become a pressing concern for tens of millions of Americans who will see their insurance costs double or triple at the end of the year. Republicans ignore addressing such voter pain at their own political peril.

And that isn’t the only peril facing Trump and the Republicans. A day that was supposed to be highlighted by the House government-funding vote was spent dwelling on the latest revelations surrounding the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Later on Wednesday, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn in to her congressional seat and became the 218th and final signatory on a petition that will force the House of Representatives to hold a vote ordering the justice department to release all its files on the Epstein case.

It was enough to prompt Trump to complain, on his Truth Social website, that his government-funding success was being eclipsed.

“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote.

It was all a very clear reminder that the best-laid plans and political strategies can be derailed in a flash.

The BBC was accused of a misleading edit of Donald Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech two years before the Panorama sequence that led to the resignation of the director-general.

The clip aired on Newsnight in 2022, and a guest on the live programme challenged the way it had been cut together, the Daily Telegraph reported.

On Monday the BBC apologised for an “error of judgement” over an edited portion of the same speech that aired last year on Panorama.

The fallout saw the resignations of the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, and a legal threat from the US President.

Lawyers for Trump have written to the BBC saying he will sue for $1bn (£759m) in damages unless the corporation issues a retraction, apologises and compensates him for the Panorama broadcast.

In response to Thursday’s story in the Telegraph, a BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”

In Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021, he said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

More than 50 minutes later in the speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”

In the Panorama programme, the clip shows him as saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

In the Newsnight programme the edit is a little different.

He is shown as saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

This was followed by a voiceover from presenter Kirsty Wark saying “and fight they did” over footage from the Capitol riots.

Responding to the clip on the same programme, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who quit a diplomatic post and became a critic of Trump after describing the 6 January riots as an “attempted coup”, said the video had “spliced together” Trump’s speech.

“That line about ‘we fight and fight like hell’ is actually later in the speech and yet your video makes it look like those two things came together,” he said.

The Telegraph also reported that a whistleblower told the newspaper that a further discussion the following day was also shut down.

Last week, a leaked internal BBC memo claimed Panorama had misled viewers by splicing two parts of Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech together, making it appear as though he was explicitly urging people to attack the US Capitol after his election defeat.

The documentary aired days before the US presidential election in November 2024.

Speaking to Fox News, Trump said his 6 January 2021 speech had been “butchered” and the way it was presented had “defrauded” viewers.