White House aides are preparing to impose new tariffs on most imports on April 2, laying the groundwork for an escalation in global economic hostilities that President Donald Trump has called “
Liberation Day”???
Through his first two months in office, the president has raised tariffs on roughly $800 billion in imports from China, Mexico and Canada, although estimates vary widely. These tariffs have sent the stock market careening and raised the risks of a U.S. recession, while inviting retaliation against domestic industries by trade partners.

Despite the blowback, senior Trump advisers are now publicly pledging to create a new tariff regime that would impose new duties on goods from most countries that trade with the United States. A person familiar with internal planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private deliberations, confirmed administration officials are preparing tariffs on “trillions” of dollars in imports. Enjoy that America!!!
The potential to more than double the scope of Trump’s tariffs has alarmed economists and some congressional Republicans, while other White House allies are concerned about the logistical challenges of a complicated new import tax regime.
The precise nature of these new duties has spurred extensive discussions at the highest levels of the administration, with Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House aide Peter Navarro and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent all playing a role in the talks, some person familiar with the plans said.
“The last two months have already hurt American businesses and consumers, but the April 2 deadline seriously could make all of that look like a tempest in a teapot,” said Joseph Politano, an economic policy analyst at Apricitas Economics. “We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, but from what they’re saying, it sounds functionally like new tariffs on
all U.S. imports.”
The administration has already unnerved investors with duties on Canada, Mexico and China. Advisers are readying a bigger move.
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The internal preparations suggest Trump remains unbowed in his push to upend the global trade order, despite deepening unease among
allies on Capitol Hill and
Wall Street and outright fury from overseas. Trump has said the tariffs are necessary to
encourage companies to move production back to the U.S. and
force concessions from foreign
trading partners, but the fallout has rattled investors and consumers, leading to declines in several key economic indicators.
“It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth
by taxing Americans up the wazoo with import tariffs that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
Trump has dubbed the next stage of his trade war “reciprocal tariffs.” The president first embraced the idea during his 2024 presidential campaign, arguing that other countries impose far higher trade barriers on U.S. exports than the U.S. government charges on imports. Trump has said the U.S. should match these tariffs with “reciprocal” duties that he believes will force other countries to lower their duties on U.S.-made products.
“If India, China, or any other country hits us with a 100 or 200 percent tariff on American-made goods, we will hit them with the same exact tariff,” Trump said in a video released during the presidential campaign. “In other words, 100 percent is 100 percent. If they charge us, we charge them — an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount.”
This will effectively, eventually, as soon as any trade partner is capable of doing so, remove America from most international trade…so I hope they have everything they need without outside anything from pretty much anyone (with the exception of Ukraine, I guess, who won’t have any sovereign choice in the matter).
Trump’s reciprocal plan could return the average U.S. tariff to its early 1930s level of around 20 percent, said Edward Gresser, a former trade official who is now the vice president and director of trade and global markets for the Progressive Policy Institute. Gresser said Trump’s actions would be unprecedented, and many experts have argued the president does not have the authority to impose such sweeping tariffs without congressional approval.
Administration officials are debating what legal authority the president can invoke to impose a reciprocal system, according to one person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump has the power under existing trade laws to impose some tariffs immediately, such as on goods from China, which are covered under a 2018 investigation of Chinese trade practices. A 1930 trade law permits the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on goods from a country that he determines has discriminated against U.S. goods….
& that could be pretty much anybody and everybody in this dude‘s mind.
Administration officials had considered a proposal to group all trading partners into one of three buckets — high, medium or low — and assigning a tariff rate accordingly. But the idea has been rejected in favor of calibrating a new tariff rate for each trading partner, one of the people said. The idea of sorting countries into three buckets, and its rejection,
was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
However structured, the new tariff regime is likely to further rattle global markets and a domestic economy already shaken by Trump’s sudden trade moves. On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index has lost more than 8 percent in the past month; the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down almost 13 percent over the same period.