Trump’s Tariffs Kick Off at a Really Bad Time
President Donald Trump’s gambit to make “America GREAT & RICH Again” with global trade tariffs has gotten off to a spectacularly rocky start as they coincided Friday with a bleak jobs report that showed dismal growth since “Liberation Day” in April.
The White House churned out a flurry of social-media posts touting Trump’s economic prowess and “art of the trade deal” even as U.S. stocks fell on the uncertainty of newly unveiled tariffs and a jobs report showing that a mere 73,000 jobs were added in July. Perhaps more alarmingly, the Labor Department also said “larger than normal” downward revisions were made for jobs added in May and June, slashing a combined 258,000 jobs from the numbers previously given by the government.
Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged the jobs report wasn’t “ideal” but blamed it on “anomalous factors” rather than Trump’s trade policies, which some critics have said are starting to hit the job market.
The abysmal economic indicators coincided with Trump throwing a grenade into global trade with a slew of new tariffs on almost every single country, with rates going as high as 50 percent for Brazil (apparently due to a grudge over the prosecution of his pal, former president Jair Bolsonaro) and 39 percent for Switzerland. While Trump had spent weeks saying his August 1 deadline for the tariffs was firm, he quietly added a grace period late on Thursday, giving most countries until August 7 until the measures take effect. That extra week was not granted to Canada, however, which saw its tariff hiked up to 35 percent from 25 and taking immediate effect, though with exceptions for certain goods under the USMCA free-trade agreement.
Democrats have seized on the unfortunate timing of Trump’s tariffs rollout to warn of worse to come for Americans doomed to pay the price of the president’s disruptive trade moves. “If this is what Liberation Day was supposed to look like, then God help us,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor on Friday.
The average family will lose about $2,400 this year as a result of Trump’s latest tariffs, according to analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan policy research center.
The White House has made clear it pays no attention to such forecasts, however, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters this week that Trump is “proving the so-called economic experts wrong at every turn.”
Trump, for his part, is just waiting for the money to roll in, telling supporters on Truth Social, “The good news is that Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!”