President Donald Trump on Wednesday afternoon announced a raft of new tariffs, including a universal tariff on all imports, as he seeks to reshape the global economy and right perceived economic wrongs against the United States. Here are three takeaways.
Why It Matters
Trump and his allies have repeated the catchphrase “promises made, promises kept” throughout the first two months of his second term as he tackled reform after reform—and no promise was bigger than bringing down costs and implementing widespread tariffs.
Trump, his allies, and the wider Republican party have all insisted that the president has a mandate to pursue his agenda after Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress.
What To Know
Standing in the Rose Garden, accompanied by Republican Congressional leadership and members of trade unions, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on multiple countries and touted major reinvestment returning to the U.S. on what he called “Liberation Day.”
Blaming previous presidents for allowing other countries to “take advantage” of the American worker and economy, Trump claimed Americans “subsidize a lot of countries and keep them going and keep them in business” and that his plan would be “finally putting America first.”
“Trade deficits are no longer merely an economic problem. They are a national emergency,” Trump said.
After-hours trading for U.S. stocks saw the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all dropped following Trump’s announcement, even though the president scheduled his announcement for 4 p.m. ET seemingly to avoid the potential impact of his announcement.
Here are the key takeaways from the various announcements Trump made on “Liberation Day.”
Universal Tariffs on All Imports
The biggest announcement Trump made in the Rose Garden was the plan to implement a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports from countries and higher tariffs on dozens of others.
This could be in addition to other tariffs he announced on individual countries: CNBC Senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that China’s specific tariff of 34 percent would be on top of the previous 20 percent tariff imposed at the beginning of March.
‘Kind’ Reciprocal Tariffs
The most-discussed issue ahead of the Rose Garden announcement was the concern about reciprocal tariffs – i.e. that the U.S. would hit back at countries who tariffed the U.S. with equal tariffs.
Trump did not implement like-for-like tariffs, but instead implemented what he called “kind reciprocal” tariffs, which meant half of any given tariff against the U.S. returned to the appropriate nation: This means that in the case of China, which the administration claimed had implemented a 67 percent tariff against the U.S., Trump applied a 34 percent tariff in return.
The tariffs that the administration calculated against the U.S. also include “currency manipulation and trade barriers,” meaning the tariff reciprocation is not against pure tariffs. The administration did not clarify how it determined each final amount of alleged tariffs charged against the U.S.
The image below lists the tariffs charged to the U.S. and the U.S.’s “discounted reciprocal tariffs” for 50 countries.
The largest tariffs on the list include developing countries such as Laos, Botswana, Myanmar (which just suffered a devastating earthquake), Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh—all being hit with larger reciprocal tariffs than China, which has a 34 percent reciprocal tariff. However, China’s total tariffs would be greater than any of these other countries.
Trump’s laid out his administration’s estimate that these tariffs will raise $6 trillion over a 10-year period, returning money to the U.S. and the pockets of taxpayers—even as Republicans have started to say that “short term pain” may be an inevitable part of the process.
“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”
Trillions in Pledged Investment to ‘Build, Build, Build’
The main balance of raising these tariffs on imports is a gamble that companies will look to onshore their production to the U.S. to avoid the associated price cost or risk losing out on business as people stop buying the higher-priced products.
Trump ran through a list of companies—most of them in tech or pharma—that had pledged to invest in the U.S. and build new production facilities and infrastructure, claiming trillions of investment collectively. Most of these pledges had been previously announced individually, but Trump presented the staggering collective figure.
Apple, for example, said it will spend $500 billion to build new plants in the U.S., and Meta has pledged $500 billion to build infrastructure to pursue artificial intelligence (AI) development.
Trump named Softbank, OpenAI, and Oracle for their $500 billion pledge—known as Operation Stargate—in addition to “hundreds of billions” from Nvidia and $200 billion from Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC.
He also named Johnson & Johnson, Merck, General Electric, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai and more.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
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