Donald Trump is nothing if not a showman but in a strange way, his instincts deserted him on “Liberation Day”, which fell on an overcast and glum afternoon in the White House.
Having invited the world to a live streaming of his trade and tariff equivalent of Nightmare on Elm Street, the least the quivering masses around the world might have expected was the sensation of genuine terror. Instead, what they got was a familiar Trumpian concoction of threat, uncertainty, imminent chaos – and a sad little chart.
It’s true that with the numbers on that chart, listing each country according to tariffs charged to the United States and the ‘discounted reciprocal tariffs’, the Trump administration generated instant turmoil.
The Futures markets responded like a scalded cat: mayhem was anticipated with Thursday’s opening bell in New York. Across the Midwest, the farmers and fruit growers – the descendants of the doughty Swedes and Germans – began to mull over the implications of retaliations from Europe, from Mexico, from mighty San Pierre and Miquelon. Some 185 countries made the chart, including the Australian territories of the Heard and McDonald Islands, hit with the baseline ten per cent tariff although they are uninhabited. It’s the little things.
Trump launches a trade war against the world
Across the states, independent vineyards braced themselves for the long-term impacts of the sudden halt to their export market to Canada while the Rust Belt towns, far from the bright lights, listened to the president’s promise that the old factories would be revitalised and reborn.
Car sales teams looked out on their lots, bit their lips and sipped their coffees (99 per cent of which the US imports). Economists piped up to warn that Trump administration’s plan will increase the chances of thrusting the US into recession. They grappled with the implications of what is a de facto 54 per cent tariff imposition on China: 34 per cent on top of the existing 24 per cent in response to the influx of fentanyl to the US. They wondered how long the tariffs might last: if this was just a hard bargaining opening to a negotiation that will rectify some of the wrongs Trump perceives have been inflicted on the US without causing a catastrophic malfunction of the global trading ecosystem. Or whether April 2nd marks the end of globalisation.
Trump was punctual, by his standards- just five minutes after the hour when he appeared in the Rose Garden. He wore his good coat because the day was brisk. The mood around the White House had been strange all afternoon: the brass bands practised and the bunting was up. But there was no tinkling of glasses, no genuine cheer.
And when the president began to speak, it was impossible not to think back to his original Pennsylvania Avenue address, his infamous “American Carnage” inauguration vision in January of 2017. Eight years later, he depicted the country over which he presides in stark and dark terms.
“My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed and the day we began to make America wealthy again. For decades our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American autoworkers, steel workers, farmers and skilled craftsman, they really suffered gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American Dream.”
And so it began. From midnight on Wednesday, a 25 per cent tariff on all foreign made cars. Trump brought Brian Pannebecker, a retired Detroit auto worker and an early Trump believer to the stage to preach.
“My first vote for president was for Ronald Reagan. My entire life I have watched plant after plant in Detroit closed. There are now plants sitting idle, underutilised and Donald Trump’s policies are going to bring products back into those plants.”
The point is not that Trump’s tariff vision can work. The point is that he has given a huge swathe of American society which has felt itself forgotten an idea in which to believe. He has taken the old tool of the tariffs, an obsession that predates his political life by decades, and turned it into a kind of sun dance.
[ Trump tariffs: No justification for 20% tariffs on EU exports to US, says MartinOpens in new window ]
And not for the first time since he returned to office, Trump cast his eye to the formative days of the United States, telling the select gathering of cabinet members and supporters that “from 1789 to 1913 we were a tariff-backed nation and the United States was proportionally the wealthiest it has ever been.
For reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens rather than foreign countries would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929 it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression. They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country ... but it was gone. It was too late.”
It’s a version of history that airbrushes many crucial details, including the long-term consequences of the Great War. But none of that mattered to his audience. For almost fifty minutes, Trump outlined the unfairness of the prevailing system and promised, as he has promised almost from the moment he rode down the escalator in Trump Towers to announce his first presidential bid, that he would restore American greatness.
He told them that since the inception of NAFTA, the Clintonian trilateral trading agreement between Canada, Mexico and the US, America has lost some 90,000 factories, five million manufacturing jobs all the while accumulating trade deficits of $19 trillion. For the millions of Americans living in the hollow shells of the once-booming manufacturing towns, that vision of a rebirth will be intoxicating. The price of next week’s grocery bill at Walmart or Costco may be less so.
But returning America to a lost golden age is what he promised over and over again on his campaign. And building a time machine is not a simple task.
“My advice to every country right now is sit back,” said Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Wednesday evening.
“They’ve been doing this to us for a long time. And if they don’t like tariffs, then why have em? Do not retaliate. See how it goes. Because if you retaliate, then there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high watermark.”
Bessent was among those who applauded Trump when it was over. Most of the cabinet was out there in the dank afternoon. But conspicuous in his absence was Elon Musk, the loneliest billionaire on the planet the day after his humiliating failure to throw money at the Wisconsin state supreme court election to guarantee a conservative, Republican judge in the vacant seat. April has brought with it the sense that Musk may be reaching the end of his usefulness for Trump. Next on his agenda will be pushing to have his promised tax-cuts bill: the Republican budget blueprint was announced on Wednesday with $1.5 trillion tax cut built into the massive one-stop-shop bill for which he has been advocating since his campaign.
Just three months into his presidency, Trump is going for supernova broke in his bid to enforce a new order and re-cast the United States. He has, in essence, until the midterm elections in late 2026. In his world, there is no time for faffing around, for the old ways. It remains to be seen if he and his cabinet have the stomach to ignore the tongue lashing that will come from Wall Street and the heartland if shares plummet and prices rise and the economic pain becomes acute.
But his re-election, improbable this time last year as he faced a slew of felony cases, seems to have emboldened Donald Trump’s belief that if the US bowed to his abstruse will and belligerent salesmanship then the rest of the world should, too.
