File:Presidents tariff chart-2.jpg

April 2, 2025

Trump, in a Rose Garden announcement on Wednesday, said he was placing elevated tariff rates on dozens of nations that run meaningful trade surpluses with the United States, while imposing a 10% baseline tax on imports from all countries in response to what he called an economic emergency.

Trump’s Misleading Tariff Chart

• https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/trumps-misleading-tariff-chart/

In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries...

Economists told us that’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.

“Those listed numbers are simply not tariffs, but some other made-up measure based on a formulaic trade deficit calculation,” Kimberly Clausing, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us via email. “In almost every instance, countries’ true trade barriers are far, far lower.”

“This is not a legitimate way to calculate trade barriers, and the vast majority of subject matter experts (I would wager >99% of international economists) would reject this methodology as profoundly flawed,” Clausing said.

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