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“President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly backed off his tariffs on most nations for 90 days even as he further jacked up the tax rate on Chinese imports to 125%… The S&P 500 stock index jumped 9.5% after the announcement, but the drama over Trump’s tariffs is far from over as the administration prepares to engage in country-by-country negotiations. In the meantime, countries subject to the pause will now be tariffed at 10%.” AP News
Read our prior coverage of the tariffs here and here. The Flip Side
The left is relieved about the pause, but critical about the entire process.
“The administration’s supporters do not have a coherent message about why any of this is happening; before President Donald Trump announced the pause, they’d argued simultaneously that the tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic but also that they might be durable enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States…
“As of this writing, there is no evidence from the White House that Trump received any specific concessions from the tariffed nations; he merely created a crisis and then paused it because the world (and markets) got spooked. ‘People were getting a little bit yippy,’ Trump told reporters this afternoon.”
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic
“Lots of people are claiming that the tariffs are simply a way of getting leverage for negotiations… One obvious problem with this idea is that Trump put tariffs on way more countries than he could realistically negotiate with. The administration, possibly using ChatGPT, made a list of tariff rates for 90 countries… Even if Trump negotiated with one tariffed country per week… it would take him almost two years to make deals with all of them…
“I suppose it’s possible that Trump might make deals with a few key trading partners — Japan, the EU, and so on — and leave the rest out to dry… But even then, it’s hard to imagine what kind of concessions Trump would ask for. Most countries already have low or zero tariff rates on American goods — far lower than the imaginary rates that Trump’s team attributed to them. When Vietnam offered to lower its tariffs on American goods to zero, Trump’s guru Peter Navarro said that the offer ‘means nothing’.”
Noah Smith, Noahpinion
“[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and a White House spokesperson] both told reporters that the 10 percent baseline tariff alluded to in Trump’s tweet would be applied on top of the 25 percent tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico, only for another administration official to later say that it will not. Shortly after Bessent said that the pause had been planned ‘all along’ rather than being a reaction to the bond market, Trump said it had been a reaction to the bond market…
“And in the Oval Office late in the afternoon, the president seemed to be learning in real time, via a conversation with Lutnick and the reporters present, about retaliatory measures announced by the European Union earlier in the day. Long story short, inflation is still on the menu and the details of world-shaking decisions are being decided on the fly, sometimes after they’ve been announced.”
Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate
“Consumer confidence has tanked. Inflation expectations have risen. Millions of Americans think that the country is headed into a recession or believe it is already in one. In response, households are pulling back on their spending—meaning that they are slowing the economy down, making an actual recession far more likely… What has the country gotten for all of this chaos? Nothing.”
Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
The right applauds the pause.
The right applauds the pause.
“This was reality setting in and Trump respecting it. As I wrote last week, ‘Now, Trump is unlikely to carry his policies to their full fruition if markets respond as expected. He is too canny a politician for that.’ Trump lives in the world of reality; he is a pragmatist, not an idealist. And that means that when the stock market tanks, when the effects of his tariff regime are about to wipe out small businesses across America, when the economic pain is imminent, Trump will change course…
“Some Trump acolytes make the case that this was all a planned rollout. If so, the evidence is sorely lacking… Occam's razor suggests that Trump unleashed a policy he preferred and then reversed course thanks to blowback. Trump himself acknowledged that he changed policy because people were getting ‘yippy’ and ‘queasy.’ But in effect, it makes no difference whether this was planned chaos or merely reactionary course-changing — the utilitarian nature of the result is the same.”
Ben Shapiro, Creators
“The tariffs to every country was meant to cause the free world to make a choice - China or us. According to Scott Bessent on the White House lawn early this afternoon, north of 75 countries have chosen us. They are clamoring to renegotiate trade deals. Inevitably, every one of these deals will benefit the United States. It defies logic to believe that America's position vis-a-vis trade with any individual country is going to be worse off after negotiating a new deal… None of these pending trade deals would have been offered or committed to without the tariffs used as an attention-getter…
“China is now in a box. Their economy is almost entirely dependent on manufacturing and exports. If their exports crater as a result of the tariffs, their economy collapses… Trump knew all along the stock market, and the angst around it from the chattering class in resistance media was transient, and would rebound once he got us into a position of strength in global trade… This has [always been] about boxing in China. All of it. Yes, Canada, you, too.”
Duane Patterson, Hot Air
Others argue, “Nothing about the trade deficit, the state of manufacturing, or the principles of economics will change in the next 90 days. Even when both countries are willing to make a deal, trade agreements take years to negotiate. There is simply no possible way that a handful of people who can’t agree with themselves on what their own policy is will be able to restructure global trade by early July…
“The 10 percent minimum tariff is probably not high enough to encourage domestic production, and it probably won’t shift much trade from the countries to which it applies because it is uniform, so you can think of it as pretty close to being a simple tax hike. Republicans’ top priority should be making sure taxes don’t go up, which they will for nearly all Americans if they don’t pass a tax bill by the end of this year. Yet Trump continues to burn political capital on this tariff plan that his own administration can’t even get straight.”
The Editors, National Review
A libertarian's take
“As both Wall Street and Main Street struggle to follow what's going on at any given moment, it's a perfect time to ask whether a president should have this much power over the global marketplace… The Founders clearly never envisioned such unfettered power in one person's hands: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives ‘Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises’ to Congress, not the president…
“But over the course of the 20th century, Congress delegated many of its powers to the president, including the power to impose tariffs… Markets crave stability. It should not be so simple for a single elected official to cause double-digit swings in the market simply with an announcement. By the same token, it should not be so simple for a president to make policy—a job specifically delegated to Congress—all on his own.”
Joe Lancaster, Reason
