Trump Aides Prep New Tariffs On Imports Worth Trillions For ‘Liberation Day’

White House aides are preparing to impose new tariffs on most imports on April 2, laying the groundwork for an escalation in global economic hostilities that President Donald Trump has called “Liberation Day.”

Through his first two months in office, the president has raised tariffs on roughly $800 billion in imports from China, Mexico and Canada, although estimates vary widely. These tariffs have sent the stock market careening and raised the risks of a U.S. recession, while inviting retaliation against domestic industries by trade partners.

Despite the blowback, senior Trump advisers are now publicly pledging to create a new tariff regime that would impose new duties on trade with most countries that trade with the United States. A person familiar with internal planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private deliberations, confirmed administration officials are preparing tariffs on “trillions” of dollars in imports.

The potential to more than double the scope of Trump’s tariffs has alarmed economists and some congressional Republicans, while other White House allies are concerned about the logistical challenges of a complicated new import tax regime. The precise nature of these new duties has spurred extensive discussions at the highest levels of the administration, with Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House aide Peter Navarro and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent all playing a role in the talks, the person familiar with the plans said.

“The last two months have already hurt American businesses and consumers, but the April 2 deadline seriously could make all of that look like a tempest in a teapot,” said Joseph Politano, an economic policy analyst at Apricitas Economics. “We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, but from what they’re saying, it sounds functionally like new tariffs on all U.S. imports.”

The internal preparations suggest Trump remains unbowed in his push to upend the global trade order, despite deepening unease among allies on Capitol Hill and Wall Street and outright fury from overseas. Trump has said the tariffs are necessary to encourage companies to move production back to the U.S. and force concessions from foreign trading partners, but the fallout has rattled investors and consumers, leading to declines in several key economic indicators.

“It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

Trump has dubbed the next stage of his trade war “reciprocal tariffs.” The president first embraced the idea during his 2024 presidential campaign, arguing that other countries impose far higher trade barriers on U.S. exports than the U.S. government charges on imports. Trump has said the U.S. should match these tariffs with “reciprocal” duties that he believes will force other countries to lower their duties on U.S.-made products.

“If India, China, or any other country hits us with a 100 or 200 percent tariff on American-made goods, we will hit them with the same exact tariff,” Trump said in a video released during the presidential campaign. “In other words, 100 percent is 100 percent. If they charge U.S., we charge THEM – an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount.”

While many countries do protect specific markets with high trade barriers, most advanced economies maintain similar tariff profiles. On a trade-weighted basis, the average U.S. tariff is 2.2 percent. Japan’s is 1.9 percent and the European Union’s is 2.7 percent, slightly higher than the U.S. average, according to the World Trade Organization.

Trump’s reciprocal plan could return the average U.S. tariff to its early 1930s level of around 20 percent, said Edward Gresser, a former trade official who is now the vice president and director of trade and global markets for the Progressive Policy Institute. Gresser said Trump’s actions would be unprecedented, and many experts have argued the president does not have the authority to impose such sweeping tariffs without congressional approval.

Exactly how such a plan would work in practice has consumed administration officials as they seek to carry out the president’s ambitious vision. The U.S. trade representative is tasked with implementing the plan, but it is not clear if the trade office has the staff or organizational capacity to impose exact retaliatory tariffs that match what other countries charge on specific goods, said another person briefed on internal planning, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. Further complicating the challenge is that the administration wants to target a range of trade practices they regard as unfair, not just tariffs.

Administration officials are debating what legal authority the president can invoke to impose a reciprocal system, according to one person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump has the power under existing trade laws to impose some tariffs immediately, such as on goods from China, which are covered under a 2018 investigation of Chinese trade practices. A 1930 trade law permits the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on goods from a country that he determines has discriminated against U.S. goods.

Imposing new import taxes on other goods could require months of preparatory work. Jamieson Greer, the president’s chief trade representative, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are among those most attuned to the legal issues surrounding Trump’s plan, wanting any action to survive a courtroom challenge, the person said. Navarro, the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is among those pushing for swift and aggressive action, the person said.

Administration officials had considered a proposal to group all trading partners into one of three buckets – high, medium or low – and assigning a tariff rate accordingly. But the idea has been rejected in favor of calibrating a new tariff rate for each trading partner, one of the people said. The idea of sorting countries into three buckets, and its rejection, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Bessent, the treasury secretary, said on Fox Business on Tuesday that the administration will consider a broad range of factors when determining tariffs on foreign countries, including currency manipulation, “labor suppression” and other “nontariff barriers.” The U.S. will assign a number to “each country” that will be high for some and low for others and help determine their tariff rate, Bessent said. Bessent also expressed optimism that many tariffs won’t go into effect because countries will agree to change their own import duties before the April 2 announcement.

A White House spokesman said administration officials were broadly aligned.

“Although the final reciprocal tariff plan for April 2 has yet to be unveiled by President Trump, every member of the Trump administration is aligned on finally leveling the playing field for American industries and workers,” spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “President Trump has assembled the best and brightest trade team in modern American history to reignite American Greatness, and they are hard at work following the same playbook.”

However structured, the new tariff regime is likely to further rattle global markets and a domestic economy already shaken by Trump’s sudden trade moves. On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index has lost more than 8 percent in the past month; the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down almost 13 percent over the same period.

“I think they are worried and they should be worried,” economist Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, which provides market analysis, said of how investors are viewing the April 2 deadline.

A widely watched indicator of consumer confidence fell on Friday to its lowest mark since November 2022, and Americans’ five-year inflation outlook rose to an annual rate of 3.9 percent, the highest since 1993.

On Tuesday, the government said manufacturing output in February rose sharply, reaching its highest level in more than two years. But analysts said the jump was likely a temporary reaction to the flurry of presidential tariff announcements.

“Manufacturers raced to produce goods in February before large tariffs on imports could be imposed, as well as to meet a temporary tariff-induced spike in orders from households and businesses,” wrote Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.

The increase will likely be short-lived. New orders fell in February, as manufacturers raised prices to compensate for the higher cost of the metals and Chinese components they use to make their goods, Tombs added, citing the latest Institute of Supply Management survey.

Meanwhile, scores of industries – including commercial fishermen, growers of Christmas trees and makers of jams and jellies – have lined up in recent weeks to ask the Trump administration for tariff protection against foreign competitors as part of the administration’s trade jousting.

John Wyckoff, president of the National Christmas Tree Association, called for higher tariffs on artificial Christmas trees, saying that 95 percent of imported artificial trees come from China, “where lower production costs stemming from inexpensive labor and materials allow foreign producers to undercut domestic growers.”

Imports of frozen shrimp have driven domestic prices to a low around $1.25 per pound compared with roughly $3 in the 1980s, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which is seeking protective tariffs. The impact of foreign competition is being felt by truck drivers, suppliers and processors who serve the commercial fishing fleet.

Michael Madriaga, a vice president of J.M. Smucker Co., complained that E.U. tariffs of up to 24 percent keeps U.S. jams, jellies and marmalade sales to a trickle on the continent. Last year, the U.S. shipped to Europe just $295,614 of those items compared with nearly $238 million of similar European products sent to the U.S., Madriaga wrote, citing government statistics.

But the trade office also has heard from those that ship goods into the U.S. Keidanren, the Japanese business organization, urged U.S. trade officials to consider the broader partnership between Tokyo and Washington, while noting “no single country can maintain dominance across all technology sectors.”