On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.
So far it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.
At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.
Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.
China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technologic competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.
And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.
Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.
He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.
Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon.
In recent weeks, he has promised to use the tariff income flowing into the country to cut a government check of $2,000 for every taxpayer (“not including high income people!” he exclaimed on Truth Social in November). Last week, he declared at a cabinet meeting that “at some point in the not too distant future, you wouldn’t even have income tax to pay.”
The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.
The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.
The numeric magic continued on Monday, when Mr. Trump said he was using some of those tariff revenues as a “bridge payment,” to tide American farmers over Chinese until purchases resume, a commitment Mr. Trump says he extracted from President Xi Jinping when they met in late October.
The repeated use of the word “bridge” by the president and his top economic aides seemed intended to signal to Americans that they just needed to hold on, and the promised benefits from tariff plan would pay off.
“This money would not be possible without tariffs,” he told a small group of farmers and rice refiners who were brought into the White House for the event. “The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’re giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries, for maybe the right reasons, maybe wrong reasons.”
He was skipping by the fact that the imposition of the tariffs, primarily on China, led to a Chinese boycott of American farm goods. And now, to stem the bleeding for a core constituency, he was boasting that he was using tariffs receipts to compensate them. (Most of the payments will come through the Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program, and are not directly funded by tariff income.)
“They hated the farmers,” Mr. Trump said of the Biden administration. “I love the farmers.” He told them that when he talks to Mr. Xi, he brings up soybean purchases before even saying hello on phone calls, and his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, assured the group that soybean purchases come before geopolitical concerns.
In fact, economists note, the problem he is trying to address with the farm bailout is symptomatic of the slow squeeze others are feeling as the effects of the tariffs seep into the economy.
“The farmers problem is not entirely government-grown, but there is a big trade policy aspect to it,’’ said Scott Lincicome, director of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank that has objected to Mr. Trump’s moves toward state-directed capitalism.
“Prices are depressed because the Chinese boycotted our farm goods much of the year,” he noted. “But fertilizer, machinery, those costs have remained elevated, and subject to tariffs. You’ve heard Caterpillar and John Deere complain,” he said, referring to two of the biggest manufacturers of farm equipment, which Mr. Trump said on Monday he would also help by paying them tariff revenues.
The president added that he was going to eliminate environmental requirements for the machinery, which he said made them “so complicated you can’t fix them,” but would demand in return that the price of the equipment had to be lowered.
Mr. Lincicome said that the tariffs have also introduced a new level of “unprecedented, crippling and truly insane complexity” to operating businesses. It has only gotten more confusing as Mr. Trump has slashed some tariffs — on imported beef, for example — to mitigate supermarket prices.
“Americans just hate chaos,” he concluded. “No one wants this constant churn.”
Churn, of course, is usually one of Mr. Trump’s favorite state of affairs: It keeps his adversaries off balance, and requires his boosters, led by Republican lawmakers, to follow his every move.
But in this case, it has led to a dizzying array of policy maneuvers. One week, Mr. Trump is advocating 50-year mortgages. Another, he is ordering a lifting of his tariffs on coffee imports. And Monday, he declared that the United States would waive national security concerns about chip exports to China, as long as the United States was cut in for 25 percent of the revenue.
All this will take time, his vice president, JD Vance, insisted at a lengthy cabinet meeting last week. It would, Mr. Vance said, “be preposterous to fix every problem caused over the last four years in just 10 months.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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