Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ is set to whack US economy

EVEN his most ardent detractors would grant that Donald Trump is a masterful marketer. So it goes for the barrage of tariffs that he is set to unveil on Apr 2. The US president has promised they will mark “Liberation Day” for America – a turning point when the country starts to claw back the respect and money that, he thinks, it has lost over the decades.

In practice, there will be nothing liberating about it. Over the two months since returning to the White House, Trump will have brought America’s overall tariff level to its highest since the second world war, setting the country up for slower economic growth, higher inflation, more inequality and, quite possibly, fiscal trouble.

How bad will things get? Everyone, reportedly including Trump’s closest advisers, is awaiting the final details. The president has swung between hinting at lenience and insisting his administration must take a hard line. Yet, as he has done so, the outline of his approach has come into focus.

On the campaign trail, he regularly vowed to introduce a universal tariff of 10 or 20 per cent on all imports. Soon after taking office, that idea was supplanted by a pledge for “fair and reciprocal” tariffs, with levies set to match the barriers that other countries supposedly erect against American goods.

The result will probably be a hodgepodge of different tariff levels, perhaps different tiers, applied to individual countries. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, has said the White House will mainly go after the “dirty 15”, or the roughly 15 per cent of countries that, in his view, have substantial tariffs against America. Possible targets came from the office of the American trade representative when it listed 21 economies that run large goods surpluses with Uncle Sam, including Britain, the European Union and Japan.