President Trump said early Friday morning that he is set to resume a set of tariffs that he initially imposed in April on dozens of countries, before pausing them for 90 days to negotiate individual deals.
Most of those deals have yet to materialize, and businesses in the United States have been left guessing what levies they would be expected to pay on virtually every imported product.
Some of them could be even steeper than originally announced, Mr. Trump said in brief remarks to reporters at Andrews Air Force Base upon returning from a rally in Iowa on Thursday.
“So we’re going to start sending letters out to various countries starting tomorrow,” said Mr. Trump, hours after his major domestic policy bill passed the House of Representatives. “They’ll range in value from maybe 60 or 70 percent tariffs to 10 and 20 percent tariffs.”
He said his administration would then send more letters each day until the end of the 90-day pause, on Wednesday, when he expected they would all be covered. Smaller countries would come toward the end, and duties would begin to be collected on Aug. 1.
“It’s a lot of money for the country, but we’re giving them a bargain,” Mr. Trump said.
The original round of “reciprocal” tariffs was imposed on trading partners and ranged from 11 percent, for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to 50 percent, for Lesotho. The duties were decided using a formula that incorporated the trade balance between each country and the U.S. — even for tiny countries that had very little ability to buy goods from America. The reciprocal tariffs came on top of a 10 percent “baseline” tariff imposed on all countries.
Days later, after the bond market shuddered on projections that global commerce could seize up, Mr. Trump reversed course. Duties were reduced to 10 percent across the board, except for China, which saw its base tariff rise to 145 percent.
Since then, countries have been racing to hash out deals with the White House that would restore some sense of stability to their trade relationships. China negotiated a temporary truce that reduced its tariff to 30 percent. Britain came to an agreement in early May that would leave duties at 10 percent. And Vietnam committed to a framework this week that would set 20 percent tariffs on its products as well as higher duties on goods routed through the country from China.
But talks with other world leaders have so far yielded little, despite efforts from Japan, Malaysia, India and the European Union.
One complication for the Trump administration is a pending court decision on whether its reciprocal tariffs are legal. They were imposed under a decades-old law, on the argument that big trade deficits constitute a national security threat. An appeals court allowed the administration to keep those tariffs in place while it weighed the case.
And another wrinkle: The administration has moved forward under other authorities to impose tariffs on specific goods such as airplanes, lumber and copper. Those decisions are separate from the question of how high the reciprocal tariffs would be set, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said.
On Thursday, Mr. Bessent said on Bloomberg Television that he expected about 100 countries would end up with a minimum 10 percent rate, but that more deals were in the offing.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of action over the coming days,” he said. Last week, Mr. Bessent had suggested that some discussions could be extended until September 1.
Lydia DePillis reports on the American economy. She has been a journalist since 2009, and can be reached at [email protected].
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