Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:
The plan all along is tariffs. President Trump is someone who has talked about wanting there to be tariffs against pretty much every country in the world on imports from everywhere. He has always wanted to be tougher on China.
What happened here is essentially the tariff level that President Trump imposed on China, and then China retaliated, and then the U.S. retaliated. And then it got to a level where it was essentially a trade embargo. Whether it’s 80 percent or 100 percent or 135 percent, those goods are not being transferred between the countries.
And so where they are now is 30 percent for imports to the U.S. and 10 percent for imports to China. That is in the neighborhood of what President Trump had discussed on the campaign trail, which at the time was roundly rejected by economists and others, who said that would disadvantage American consumers, would make things more expensive, would hurt small businesses.
But now it’s like, wow, those tariffs really came down. This is such a dramatic reduction from where it was. So, in a way, President Trump has, by imposing these so-called reciprocal tariffs that are extremely high, conditioned people to be OK with the tariffs that he truly has been talking about all along.
If you will note, the deal, which is a preliminary deal with the U.K., those tariffs are also at 10 percent. President Trump has made clear that he thinks a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports to the U.S. is something that he’d like to have because he wants the revenue from it, though that is widely seen as revenue that would be paid by the American people.
