President Donald Trump threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on goods imported from China in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Monday. The total tariff on China would rise to 104% if the country doesn’t back off and drop the 34% retaliatory tariff it announced in response to Trump’s own 34% hike on goods coming from the U.S. last week. And Trump’s new threat isn’t exactly calming anyone’s nerves.
“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote.
Trump introduced a new 34% tariff on Chinese goods on April 2 during his bizarre “Liberation Day” announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House. But that tariff was already on top of an existing 20% tariff on imports from the country. If Trump does go through with his threat, it would seem the total tariff would amount to 104%, though it’s not entirely clear yet if that’s indeed the ceiling.
As always, Trump’s threats on Monday provided little clarity on how everything may actually work. When the president made his tariffs announcement last week, complete with a now-infamous chart, market analysts and journalists were left confused about what the numbers he was displaying actually meant. It turned out that Trump was creating fake numbers that purported to show existing tariffs on U.S. goods. In reality, the White House was using an equation that made absolutely no sense.
To arrive at its numbers, the White House took the trade deficit with each country divided by the total imports from that country to the U.S. and then divided that number by half to find the tariff. If the U.S. had a trade surplus with a country, it still got slapped with a baseline tariff of 10%. Australia, for example, imports more from the U.S. than it exports but still got hit with a 10% tariff on all goods it exports to Americans.
Trump did give some breadcrumbs of hope that his tariffs on other nations outside China were up for negotiation, according to his latest Truth Social post.
“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump concluded in his Truth Social post.
The markets have been swinging wildly on Monday, first plunging at the open but then recovering briefly after a tweet from someone named Walter Bloomberg on X. Bloomberg has no affiliation with Bloomberg News but many people follow the account because it often tweets breaking news from the wire services. Erik Wasson, a reporter for Bloomberg News, even tweeted Monday that people shouldn’t rely on that Walter Bloomberg account, writing “He doesn’t work for us and is not authorized by Bloomberg.” Walter Bloomberg tweeted that the White House was considering a 90-day pause on all tariffs, apparently because Trump advisor Kevin Hassett had given a Fox News interview two hours earlier where he’d been asked about the possibility of just such a reprieve.
KILMEADE: Would Trump consider a 90 days pause in tariffs?
HASSETT: I think the president is gonna decide what the president is gonna decide … even if you think there will be some negative effect from the trade side, that’s still a small share of GDP
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 7, 2025 at 5:33 AM
Hassett responded “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide,” which is essentially saying that he doesn’t know. But the stupid game of Telephone that is our modern internet took that as gospel that Trump would be pausing the tariffs, sending the markets soaring into positive territory before crashing back down when the White House called it “fake news.”
Congress has the power to impose tariffs under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution but Trump is using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which allows the president to impose tariffs in the name of a national emergency. Trump is imposing these global tariffs because he says trade deficits are an “emergency.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, introduced a bill last week to claw back some of that power. And as of Monday, the bill has seven Republican sponsors, according to NBC News. But even if the bill passes the Senate, it seems unlikely to come to a vote in the House, where House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has shown no signs that he will betray Trump by taking back any of the powers originally given to Congress.
Nobody knows what the rest of the week holds for the global economy, but it seems like it can only get stupider from here. And it’s almost entirely the fault of one guy if you don’t count the Republicans who have enabled this stupidity. Trump is playing chicken with the global economy. And picking a fight with the entire world hasn’t worked out well historically for the aggressor country.
