When America’s ‘Liberation Day’ finally arrived yesterday, Donald Trump hailed it as a great moment for America. Still, he struck a strangely dark tone. ‘For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike’, brooded the US president in the White House rose garden, as he announced the most drastic hike in tariffs in the history of global capitalism. These include sweeping so-called reciprocal tariffs on those nations he deems to be the most egregious ‘scavengers’ and ‘cheaters’, as well as a baseline tariff on all other countries, who are all presumably also ‘ripping off’ the US in some shape or form.
The upshot of yesterday’s long-dreaded announcements is that literally nowhere on Earth is safe from the Trump trade war. US tariffs will soon fall on economies as diverse as China (54 per cent, when added to previous tariffs), the EU (20 per cent) and South Africa (30 per cent). Canada and Mexico retain their own special, punitive tariffs, while the likes of the UK, Australia and Saudi Arabia will pay the 10 per cent baseline. Even the most remote place on the planet, the Heard and McDonald Islands, an Antarctic island chain inhabited largely by penguins, last visited by humans around a decade ago, was named and shamed on the White House’s list of scavengers and cheats, held partly responsible for America’s industrial decline.
Not even America will be safe, of course. ‘Expert’ economists’ views should always be taken with a grain of salt, but there is enough historical evidence to suggest that tariffs are likely to, in the short term at least, slow economic growth and raise the cost of living. Even some in Trump’s team have conceded as much, if not in as many words. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent caused some sharp intakes of breath when he proclaimed last month that ‘access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream’. Trump himself has snapped that he ‘couldn’t care less’ if carmakers raise prices in response to his tariffs (cars and car parts face special taxes of 25 per cent). This could be grim news for those working-class voters still reeling from years of runaway inflation post-pandemic.
So, what about the longer term? It’s possible to discern three broad aims from Trump’s new tariff regime. Each could be worthwhile and noble in its own right. The trouble is, they are mutually contradictory and likely to fail.
In his speech yesterday, Trump proclaimed that ‘2 April 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn’. If this is the key purpose of his tariffs, then they would need to remain high enough to deter imports, which would then shield US manufacturing from external competition.
Yet Trump also promised the tariffs would bring in ‘trillions and trillions of dollars’ to fund public spending and tax cuts. This implies that imports will need to stay high so they can then be taxed.
Or are the tariffs a negotiating tool, to help bring wayward, rogue states – like, er, Canada – into line? This implies the tariffs could be waived or cut at some point, which means they could no longer be used for protectionist or revenue-raising purposes.
Trump’s bombastic, chaotic implementation of these tariffs is also part of the problem here. Since January, various tariffs have been threatened, withdrawn, raised, lowered and reimposed, seemingly at the president’s whim. Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass and a leading intellectual light of MAGAnomics, says for tariffs to successfully rebalance trade and restore American industry, they need to be based on ‘discernible principles, applied consistently, on predictable timelines’. Yet even Cass is unable to discern ‘what exactly the Trump administration wants’ to get out of Liberation Day. Its ‘continued failure’ to properly communicate its aims, he warns, ‘risks discrediting the entire project and diminishing its prospects of success’.
And there’s the rub. Because many of the aims of the populist project really are worth pursuing. Reversing industrial decline matters both for the prosperity of the working class and for national resilience. The industrial decay of the past few decades should not simply be accepted as an economic fact of life.
Similarly, global trade really could be much fairer and thus genuinely freer. Amid the bluster and bad policy, Trump has clearly got a point when he rails against the hypocrisies of the global order he is displacing. Trade barriers have risen considerably in the past two decades, despite the globalist elites’ rhetoric of ‘free trade’ (although this usually takes the form of non-tariff barriers, such as regulations and export subsidies, rather than outright tariffs). As Trump suggested in the rose garden, the European Union is among the worst offenders in this regard, posing as a paragon of free trade, despite being ruthlessly protectionist when it comes to imports from outside the bloc.
Yet the truth is that the ills Trump identifies are not caused by ‘foreign leaders’ who have ‘stolen our jobs’, or ‘foreign cheaters’ who have ‘ransacked our factories’, or ‘foreign scavengers’ who have ‘torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream’. They are the products of a domestic, US elite and its own policy choices. Indeed, the global trade order that Trump now bemoans as the foreign rape of America is itself a product of US hegemony and successive administrations’ policies. Many of the nations and peoples that Trump now decries as scavengers and cheaters have seen their own industries go to the wall in the era of globalisation, too.
For those – in America and beyond – who want to challenge a global order that has failed workers, Liberation Day could prove to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
