Trump Rolls Out Vast New Arsenal of Global Tariffs

Says it will restore fairness as he takes aim at adversaries and allies

Author

Matt Davis
April 03, 2025

There he is!

This morning’s front page lead story by Ana Swanson and Tony Romm makes no mention of the story below, left, about the Democrats winning in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. But the juxtaposition is significant, given how Mr. Trump likes to dominate the headlines. By going further and harder than economists expected on tariffs yesterday at his hourlong Rose Garden press conference, the president assured that his narrative dominated the paper today. On the other hand, stock market futures are down 3.5% this morning and as I type, I’ve been waiting for the markets to open at 9:30 a.m. so that I can post the $SPX ( ▼ 5.98% ) graph here:

😙 (just waiting. might brew myself a decaf ☕️, here).

Please don’t judge our filthy kitchen — we have a four-year-old! It’s an excuse!

Okay. Here it is:

And here’s the Dow:

Why do these graphs look like that? Well. The president has imposed tariffs across the board with America’s trading partners, and some are getting much harder tariffs than others. That sorta tears a hole in American trade policy that’s been built up since World War II.

Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University, said, “The era of increasingly free and extensive international trade, built upon a rules-based system that the U.S. was instrumental in shaping, has drawn to an abrupt end.”

He added, “Rather than fixing the rules that many U.S. trading partners admittedly took advantage of to their own benefit, Trump has chosen to blow up the system governing international trade.”

Markets “shuddered” in response, and analysts said this was more than they were expecting. Even the Cato Institute, which promotes free markets, argued that the administration’s “justifications for the tariffs were flimsy and conflicting.”

Meanwhile, business is spooked:

Jay Timmons, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said his group was still parsing the finer details. But he added that “the high costs of new tariffs threaten investment, jobs, supply chains and, in turn, America’s ability to outcompete other nations and lead as the pre-eminent manufacturing superpower.”

Mr. Trump has largely dismissed concerns that his tariffs could raise prices for American consumers and businesses, or prompt retaliation that would hurt farmers and other exporters. He’s doubled down, in fact.

“Every prediction our opponents made about trade for the last 30 years has been proven totally wrong,” the president said at one point during the Rose Garden ceremony, as he looked to pre-emptively rebut complaints that his tariffs could cause economic upheaval.

The trouble is, he ran on a platform of eggs being expensive. The way he’s planning to fix that, it seems, is to make everything else comparatively much more expensive so that eggs are cheap when you look at the price of consumer electronics, or cars, or toilet roll, or anything you need for your daily life, actually.

What I’m feeling is that Mr. Trump may be delusional about the level of public support he enjoys. It’s one thing to blunder ahead with a course of action that, say, bankrupts your father’s casino business in Atlantic City. But to do so when Americans’ consumer confidence is at stake seems enormously self-destructive, to me. Even that photo on the front page seems hubristic. Will this be the real turning point in Mr. Trump’s presidency?

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.

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