Trump Announces Sweeping Tariffs on All Imports - The New York Times

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A 10 percent tariff will apply to all countries, but key trading partners like China, Japan and Europe will face rates two and three times as high.

Updated April 2, 2025, 5:17 p.m. ET

Ana Swanson, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm

Here's the latest.

President Trump unveiled his most expansive tariffs to date in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, saying he would impose a 10 percent tariff on all trading partners as well as double-digit "reciprocal" tariffs on dozens of other countries that administration officials said had treated the United States unfairly.

The tariffs will apply to more than 100 trading partners, including the European Union, China, Britain and India.

Under Mr. Trump's plan, the United States will impose a staggering new 34 percent tariff on Chinese goods, on top of the 20 percent levy he already imposed on Beijing.

Some of Mr. Trump's steepest rates apply to U.S. allies, including a 20 percent tariff on imports from the European Union and a 24 percent tariff on goods from Japan. India will face a 26 percent tariff on its exports to the United States. These figures include the 10 percent baseline tariff.

White House officials said that pernicious trading practices by other countries had led to large and persistent trade deficits for the United States, and that other products, like lumber, copper, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals could face additional tariffs.

In a briefing with reporters, senior administration officials added they had little appetite for haggling over lower tariff rates, even with U.S. allies that have offered to reduce their own levies on American exports in recent days. They also issued an early warning to countries that have threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States.

Mr. Trump at one point described his approach as "kind," explaining that the government would only be charging other countries half of the rate that they had calculated should be applied based on those countries' trade practices. He framed his policies as a response to a national emergency, saying that tariffs were needed to boost domestic production.

"We're going to start being smart, and we're going to start being very wealthy again," Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump had promised for months to imposethe tariffs, which the president says will correct years of "unfair" trade in which other countries have been "ripping off" America.

Here's what else to know:

• Markets react: Wall Street shuddered as Mr. Trump announced the tariffs, with early market reaction pointing to a further slide in the stock market and a weakening dollar. Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade outside normal trading hours, slumped nearly 2 percent, erasing the day's gain of 0.7 percent.

• European response: European officials are poised to respond to Mr. Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs with countermeasures. Although the bloc so far has concentrated on imposing higher tariffs on a wide variety of goods — whiskey, motorcycles and women's clothing are among the products that could be affected — officials are also open to placing trade barriers on services, using a new trade weapon that was developed only in 2021 to target Big Tech and Wall Street.

• Tariff options: The administration has been weighing several different tariff strategies in recent weeks, including a 20 percent flat tariff on all imports, which Trump advisers have said could help raise more than $6 trillion in revenue for the U.S. government. Advisers have also discussed the idea of assigning different tariff levels to countries depending on the trade barriers those countries impose against American products, or exempting them from tariffs entirely through trade deals.

• Imported automobiles hit: New tariffs on automobiles made outside the United States go into effect on Thursday, adding to previous tariffs on steel, aluminum and other imports worth billions of dollars that Mr. Trump has imposed since returning to office in January.

Ana Swanson

International trade reporter

The National Retail Federation said in a statement that the tariffs would cause more anxiety and uncertainty for American businesses and consumers. Tariffs are not paid for by foreign countries or suppliers, but by U.S. importers, the group said, adding that "the immediate implementation of these tariffs is a massive undertaking." Typically governments give a lot more notice for changes to tariffs to give business time to prepare.

April 2, 2025, 5:17 p.m. ET

Tony Romm

Economic policy reporter

The National Association of Manufacturers said it is still parsing the details and implications of the president's tariffs. But the group's president, Jay Timmons, said in a statement: "The high costs of new tariffs threaten investment, jobs, supply chains and, in turn, America's ability to outcompete other nations and lead as the preeminent manufacturing superpower."

April 2, 2025, 5:15 p.m. ET

Joe Rennison

Financial markets reporter

Wall Street shuddered as President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on countries across the globe on Wednesday, with the early market reaction pointing to a further slide in the stock market and a weakening dollar. Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the index outside normal trading hours, slumped nearly 2 percent, erasing an earlier gain of 0.7 percent while exchanges were open.

April 2, 2025, 5:12 p.m. ET

Rich Barbieri

Several hours before the stock market will open in Tokyo, futures on Japan's Nikkei 225 index tumbled more than 2 percent, signaling what could be a rough Thursday for investors. The 25 percent tariffs on cars that Trump announced last week, and which are about to take effect, could be a devastating blow to the export-intensive Japanese economy.

April 2, 2025, 5:10 p.m. ET

Rebecca F. Elliott

The U.S. energy industry could suffer if countries retaliate against the tariffs President Trump announced today. The United States produces more petroleum and natural gas than any country in the world, and it exports much of that fuel in the form of oil, gasoline, diesel and liquefied natural gas. China, Japan and members of the European Union are among the top buyers of U.S. natural gas and petroleum products, according to the Energy Information Administration.

April 2, 2025, 5:08 p.m. ET

Ben Casselman

Economics reporter

It's worth noting that the figures on Trump's chart for the tariffs imposed on the United States by other countries include "currency manipulation and trade barriers." It isn't clear exactly how the administration is coming up with those figures, but it's possible they include things like the value-added taxes that are common in many European countries. Economists argue those taxes should not be considered trade barriers.

April 2, 2025, 5:06 p.m. ET

Alan Rappeport

Economic policy reporter

Top Democrats continued to pan Trump's tariffs. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said that they would raise prices and fuel uncertainty: "Trump's short-sighted tariff plan won't rebuild American manufacturing or help working families get ahead. It's a tax on almost everything families buy, so Trump can give his billionaire friends a tax cut."

April 2, 2025, 5:05 p.m. ET

Matina Stevis-Gridneff

Canada bureau chief

The majority of the nations listed for "reciprocal" tariffs on the eight-page document distributed to reporters by the administration are poor, developing economies. They include some of the world's poorest nations -- South Sudan, Burundi and the Central African Republic -- as well as countries in the throes of war, notably Sudan.

April 2, 2025, 5:04 p.m. ET

Ana Swanson

International trade reporter

We've just gotten clarification from the White House that the tariff numbers in the charts Trump held up include both reciprocal levies and the 10 percent baseline. So Europe will face a 10 percent reciprocal tariff and a 10 percent baseline. China will face a 24 percent reciprocal tariff, on top of the 10 percent baseline. This is all happening in real time so the numbers were not clear at the outset.

April 2, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET

Andrew Duehren

Tax policy reporter

Trump once again touted his idea of allowing Americans to deduct interest payments on auto loans from their tax bills, but only if the car was made in America. His administration has presented this plan as a way to make up for the higher automobile prices created by his tariffs, though it is unclear how many Americans will actually be able to take advantage of the tax break. Many low income Americans do not owe much in income taxes to begin with.

Ana Swanson

International trade reporter

Many people had been expecting the president to announce high tariffs today, but the numbers that he just revealed are stunning. In addition to a 10 percent tariff on all countries except Canada and Mexico, dozens of other countries will face extra tariffs. That will likely force some manufacturing back into the United States, but also raise costs for American consumers and manufacturers and incite trade wars on many fronts.

April 2, 2025, 4:58 p.m. ET

Jeanna Smialek

Brussels bureau chief

"There's a reason this came at 4 p.m. Eastern time, with markets closed," said Jorn Fleck, senior director with the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council.

April 2, 2025, 4:58 p.m. ET

Jeanna Smialek

Brussels bureau chief

He said the tariff on the European Union, his area of expertise, is a "very high number" that will be painful for consumers and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.

April 2, 2025, 4:58 p.m. ET

Alex Travelli

South Asia business and economics reporter

India, like many of America's biggest trading partners, will be shocked by the tariff that Trump has announced. On the calculation that India's average tariff against American goods is 52 percent, he offered a "discounted" reciprocal tariff of 26 percent. But that figure seems to come out of the blue, to trade economists who have been watching.

April 2, 2025, 4:58 p.m. ET

Alex Travelli

South Asia business and economics reporter

India's tariffs vary widely between products, from the 70 percent on motorcycles that Trump mentioned, and even higher for some categories, down to zero on other goods. The World Trade Organization estimates that India's trade-weighted average tariff — taking into account the value of each category traded — was about 12 percent. That's higher than the trade-weighted American average, which was between 2 percent and 3 percent. But those figures suggested that Trump's retaliation might amount to an 8 percent additional levy on Indian goods.

April 2, 2025, 4:53 p.m. ET

Ben Casselman

Economics reporter

Trump said grocery and other prices are starting to come down, and that his policies are bringing down inflation. In fact, inflation has picked up in the first weeks of his term, and economists almost universally expect tariffs to further drive up prices.

Colby Smith

U.S. economy reporter

Trump is emphasizing that manufacturing jobs that have been created since his second term began, as well as that some consumer prices have eased. The issue is that neither of those trends are likely to continue with these tariffs, economists say. A new report released this week showed that manufacturing activity contracted in March and businesses in that sector are now expecting much slower growth and higher prices.

April 2, 2025

Patricia Cohen, Adam Satariano and Eshe Nelson reported from London and Jeanna Smialek from Brussels.

Countries targeted by Trump's tariffs may strike back at U.S. services.

President Trump says he is outraged by the fact that the United States imports more goods than it sends to the rest of the world. What he rarely mentions, though, is that when it comes to services, the tables are turned.

Service sectors — which include the finance, travel, engineering and medical industries and more — make up the bulk of the American economy. Exports of these services brought more than $1 trillion into the United States last year.

But that dominance also gives other countries some clout in negotiations — including the ability to impose some pain on the U.S. economy as they look to retaliate against Mr. Trump's tariffs on goods.

The European Union, for instance, could use tools designed to restrict services coming into the bloc as a cudgel.

"The real leverage that the Europeans have is ultimately on the services side," said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political research firm. "It will escalate before it de-escalates."

The United States is the largest exporter of services in the world, and a large share of those services, from financial services to cloud computing, are delivered digitally. The country ran a trade surplus in services of nearly $300 billion last year.

Every time a European tourist stays at a U.S. hotel, for example, the money spent is counted in the services export basket. And every time someone in Canada or Japan or Mexico pays to listen to music or watch movies and television shows made in the United States, they are adding to America's surplus in the services trade.

Many of the countries that the United States is targeting for tariffs run a services deficit with the United States, including Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The E.U. is now equipped with policy tools to extend the range of retaliation against U.S. tariffs to target imports of U.S. services," Filippo Taddei, a managing director of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note about possible European responses.

Arguably the most extreme option is known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument. First proposed in 2021, the tool is largely untested, but it allows the European Union to hit a trading partner with a "wide range of possible countermeasures."

Such measures could include tariffs, restrictions on trade in services and limits on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. That could affect American tech giants like Google. Several European diplomats said that use of the tool is a distinct possibility, should the trade war escalate.

While possible restrictions aimed at services would be a new trade war response, Brussels has a history of penalizing the U.S. tech industry for other reasons. For more than a decade, the European Union has gone after Silicon Valley's biggest companies for anticompetitive business practices, weak data privacy protections and lax content moderation policies.

Europe's aggressive oversight has led to notable product changes because the European Union, home to about 450 million people, is a major market. Google has changed the way it displays search results, Apple has tweaked its App Store, and Meta has made adjustments to Instagram and Facebook because of E.U. rules.

Taking aim at the tech industry would intensify a feud with the Trump administration over European tech regulation. Even before the tariff standoff, senior officials including Vice President JD Vance have criticized the European Union for what they view as excessive regulation of American tech companies.

As soon as this week, the European Union was expected to announce new fines against Apple and Meta for violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 intended to make it easier for smaller companies to compete against tech giants. Meta and X are under investigation under another new law, called the Digital Services Act, that requires companies to do more to police their platforms for illicit content.

Britain, on the other hand, may use its rules over service imports as a carrot instead of a stick.

For weeks, British officials have tried to reassure the public that it was in a strong position to negotiate with the Trump administration to avoid tariffs, repeatedly pointing to the relatively balanced goods trade between the two countries. (Britain has a surplus when it comes to services.)

Still, one sore point for Trump administration officials has been Britain's digital services tax, which they say unfairly harms American tech giants. The tax was introduced in 2020 as a 2 percent levy on revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces. It is expected to raise the equivalent of more than $1 billion for the British treasury this fiscal year.

British officials said changes in this are part of negotiations with the Trump administration. Last month, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said, "We've got to get the balance right."

Britain has sought to position itself in a "Goldilocks zone" between the United States and European Union, according to researchers at Chatham House, a research institute, maintaining good relationships with both and keeping some regulation.

If scrapping the digital services tax brings about "a sweetheart deal for the U.K. that avoids the worst of U.S. tariffs, it might prove a masterstroke," wrote the researchers, Alex Krasodomski and Olivia O'Sullivan. "But that is highly uncertain — the president's application of tariffs has been in constant flux."

It was more likely that Britain would eventually have to pick a closer allegiance to either the United States or the European Union, they added.