On Friday, President Donald Trump told reporters that his administration would make a statement regarding reciprocal tariffs and that action on the issue would be taken early next week.
Trump stated, “I’m going to be probably meeting on that Monday or Tuesday, have an announcement, probably a news conference,” at a joint news conference with Shigeru Ishiba, the prime minister of Japan. “They charge us, we charge them.”
Both Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and his first administration focused heavily on reciprocal tariffs. Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and industry and a former member of the first Trump administration, also included them in a section of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan.
According to Navarro, a president would probably have to decide which nations to negotiate with first if the U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act, a bill that Trump called for in 2019, were passed. Potential targets might include “those countries that have relatively large trade deficits with the U.S. and apply relatively high tariffs.”
According to Navarro’s research for Project 2025, China and India should be the top priorities—the nations in a red zone. The nations that are “in the yellow zone” include the “European Union, which features a very high deficit, along with Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam, which feature particularly high tariff differentials,” he stated. According to Navarro, Japan and Malaysia would be on the third tier of targets.
In a campaign video released in June 2023, some six months after declaring his intention to run for president a third time, Trump reaffirmed his support for a reciprocal trade measure. In that video, he declared: “We will impose the same exact duty on China, India, or any other nation that imposes a 100% or 200% tariff on goods made in the United States. To put it another way, 100% is 100%. “An eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, the same exact amount.” “If they charge us, we charge them.” According to the campaign release, a 2019 Harvard-Harris poll found that 75% of Democrats and 91% of conservatives supported reciprocal tariffs.
As investors processed Trump’s most recent tariff proposals, U.S. stocks SPX DJIA COMP ended Friday’s trading day lower.
Trump’s planned import levies, according to economists, would increase inflation at a time when Americans are already fed up with high costs. The Coalition for a Prosperous America is one group that supports tariffs, arguing that they are a “essential tool for rebuilding the U.S. industrial base, fostering long-term economic growth, and reducing dependence on foreign imports.”
Following the implementation of Trump’s new 10% tax on Chinese imports, China is scheduled to impose retaliation tariffs on a number of American goods on Monday. Trump has consented to postpone hefty duties on imports from Canada and Mexico for 30 days.
