Today the Washington Post reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are exploring tariff plans that would amount to paring back–the Post’s characterization–the tariff plans that candidate Trump proposed on the campaign trail
President-elect Trump immediately hit back on social media saying the Post story was made up and there were no such sources from his team.
My take is that Washington being Washington there were, of course, leaks of something from the Trump camp. Especially likely since the first Trump administration leaked like a colander.
But that doesn’t mean that there really are plans to scale back Trump’s tariffs for everyone and on everything. This leak could have been a trial balloon designed to move the eventual policy toward a less draconian position. And I certainly don’t rule out the double-bluff possibility that the leaks were designed to get Trump focused on the biggest possible tariff package.
What it certainly makes clear to me is the the questions of how high the tariffs will be? and who will get hit? are among the top issues as a new administration moves into the White House. Especially since unlike a new budget or mass deportations, tariffs don’t require messy, protracted battles in Congress. The President has the power to set new rates with the stroke of his pen. The stakes are high too because higher tariffs could revive inflation fears at the Federal Reserve and lead the central bank to put interest rate cuts on hold for 2025.
The Post story floated the possibility that instead of the universal tariffs of 10% or 20% on imports into the United States, the Trump tariffs would be applied to every country but would only cover imports in sectors deemed critical to national or economic security. Preliminary discussions, the Post reported, have largely focused on several key sectors that the Trump team wants to bring back to the United States that include defense industrial supply chain (through tariffs on steel, iron, aluminum and copper); critical medical supplies (syringes, needles, vials and pharmaceutical materials); and energy production (batteries, rare earth minerals solar panels).
After this story was published on Monday morning, Trump criticized The Washington Post’s reporting in a post on his Truth Social site and said his tariff policy would not be pared back. “The story in the Washington Post, quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don’t exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back. That is wrong,” Trump wrote. “The Washington Post knows it’s wrong. It’s just another example of Fake News.”
