While cheating on trade does happen — genuine accusations of it can be adjudicated at the World Trade Organization — the White House's formula for calculating the tariff rates leaned on how much of a trade imbalance a country has with the U.S., not on evidence of cheating.
Trump and his allies "tend to use the term 'cheating' as any action by a foreign country that leads to a bilateral goods trade deficit with the U.S.," said Kent Jones, an emeritus professor of economics at Babson College who specializes in trade policy. "On the face of it, this definition has no economic validity, since bilateral trade balances are generally determined not by trade and other government policies, but by specific patterns of trade by commodity." Are the countries facing these now-paused tariffs cheating the U.S. on trade? The White House didn't provide evidence for this. White House adviser Peter Navarro said in an April 6 Fox News interview, "It's all these things that these foreign countries do that are designed explicitly to cheat us and are sanctioned by the World Trade Organization." "Our leaders allowed foreign countries to rig the rules of the game, to cheat, to steal, to rob, to plunder," White House adviser Stephen Miller said April 4 on Fox News. "That has cost America trillions of dollars in wealth. … They've stolen our industries." When he unveiled his initial tariffs plan, Trump said, "For nations that treat us badly, we will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers and other forms of cheating." During his April 2 announcement of what he called "liberation day," Trump released a list of new tariffs of up to 50 percent on virtually every country — a plan that took effect at midnight April 9 before he abruptly issued a 90-day pause hours later. (His April 9 change in course increased tariffs on China and kept a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on virtually all trading partners.) If you listen to President Donald Trump and his allies discuss his sweeping tariff plans, one word pops up a lot: "Cheating." Our analysis of the 10 countries with the highest announced tariff rates on April 2 showed that they are largely poor and small — and it is these factors, rather than unfair trade practices, that…