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What exactly does President Donald Trump want tariffs to accomplish?
There hasn’t been a single cohesive narrative from the White House about what Trump ultimately hopes his tariffs will achieve, and with the president’s attempt Tuesday afternoon to walk back from the brink of his all-out trade war with China, his constant waffling makes it hard to keep track of what he really wants from all this. So all we can do is look at what the administration is actually doing.
So far, Trump’s tariff plan appears to be the equivalent of setting the neighborhood on fire and standing outside with a big fire truck, waiting for all the people line up and plead for help. And there’s not much to suggest the strategy goes much further than that, despite the administration’s quixotic and largely rhetorical fantasy of a bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
“The administration will say that one of the objectives of its grand economic strategy is to reindustrialize America,” said Joseba Martinez, an economics professor at London Business School. ”If that is the objective, the economic policy is internally inconsistent.”
The contradiction boils down to this: Tariffs can be a cudgel in trade talks, or they can force companies to bring operations to America, but they can’t do both at the same time. Once you start cutting deals, the cudgel loses its power. Industry leaders will quickly catch wise and, rather than spend billions upending their supply chains, work overtime to hammer out some kind of exemption.
When Trump put a 90-day pause on his most aggressive tariffs two weeks ago, he officially entered “let’s make a deal” mode.
It started with iPhones, which under Trump’s 145% China tariffs were set to more than double in price. But Apple CEO Tim Cook called the White House and soon secured a reprieve, the New York Times reports.
Other businesses took note, and soon CEOs and lobbyists were scrambling to make their case for why their burning house also deserves some water.
On Monday, the CEOs of Walmart, Target, Lowe’s and Home Depot descended on the White House to discuss tariffs, a White House official told my CNN colleagues. Lobbying groups from across corporate America have also been scrambling to get the president’s attention. Though, as Politico noted this week, many of those folks are hitting a wall — not because Trump is so ideologically committed to bringing back manufacturing jobs, but because the White House has failed to set up a formal process to let companies make their case.
“There’s only one person that can really authorize that exemption and that’s the president,” a business representative with close ties to the Trump administration told Politico. “So if you’re not a company that can whisper in the president’s ear or make the trip to Mar-a-Lago and do it persuasively, then you’re sort of frozen out of the process for now.”
Why is any of this a problem? First, there’s the obvious potential for corruption. Second, Trump’s populist tariff narrative (or at least the version peddled by discredited academic and Project 2025 contributor Peter Navarro) is shot. And third: The playbook so far is all strategy with no clear endgame.
After Trump’s April 9 tariff pause, his aides were quick to chide members of the media and critics of the administration as missing the point. “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history,” senior adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X. “Many of you in the media clearly missed the ‘Art of the Deal,’ you clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Maybe. Or maybe the administration isn’t all that clear on its own economic goals. Trump himself has sent wildly mixed messages about his agenda — most recently Tuesday afternoon, when he told reporters in the Oval Office that he won’t “play hardball” with China, the country he slapped 145% import taxes on.
If the media are confused, maybe trade negotiators are, too. According to Bloomberg, the EU’s trade chief left meetings in Washington last week with “little clarity on the American stance.” A deal with Japan that appeared imminent last week never came together, and Reuters notes that “Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he has “grave concern” over the “consistency” of the latest US tariffs.
Even if the administration manages to ink a series of deals, that would only put the fires it started. It wouldn’t undo the damage Trump’s tariffs have already done.
In an alarming report, the International Monetary Fund forecast sharply slower economic growth, particularly in the US, as we enter a new era in which “the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset.”
Bottom line: Trade wars are bad for business. Take it from DJ D-Sol, aka Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon:
“The level of uncertainty is too high. It’s not productive,” he told CNBC on Tuesday. “It will have an effect on the growth of the economy, and we will see that, in my opinion, relatively quickly.”
