John Cassidy on the announcement of President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, with which the President hopes to correct what he perceives as a long-standing trade imbalance.
After weeks of nervous anticipation in the financial markets and in the capitals of America's trading partners, Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs have arrived, and, even by his standards, they are shockingly high and wide-ranging. "For decades our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far," Trump said on Wednesday to a crowd at the White House that included members of United Auto Workers, and also elected Republicans. After delivering a potted economic history of the country in which he bizarrely claimed that the Great Depression would have been avoided if high tariffs had been in place, Trump announced that "reciprocal tariffs" would go into effect on April 9th, with rates of thirty-four per cent on goods imported from China, twenty-four per cent on Japan, and twenty per cent on the European Union. Some of the highest rates were reserved for export-led developing countries in Asia: forty-six per cent on Vietnam, forty-eight per cent on Laos, and forty-nine per cent on Cambodia. The run-up to the announcement was chaotic. Trump has long been obsessed with tariffs, of course, but recently he has issued mixed messages, at one point suggesting the new tariffs would be "somewhat conservative." A couple of weeks ago, there were press reports that he had settled on a relatively narrow approach, targeting only countries that run large trade surpluses with the United States, such as China and Japan. Last weekend, it emerged that universal tariffs, of the sort he talked about in last year's election campaign, were back on the table. "No one knows what the fuck is going on," a source close to the White House told Politico. "What are they going to tariff? Who are they gonna tariff and at what rates? Like, the very basic questions haven't been answered yet." Ultimately, Trump chose an "all of the above" option." The new tariffs involve a levy of ten per cent on virtually all imported goods, plus higher levies on many individual…