As I write, we are still a few hours away from Trump’s Liberation Day announcement. Although the Trump administration has argued (mostly correctly) that our trading partners use not only unbalanced tariffs on our goods but also other anti–U.S. imports strategies to protect their industries, I wonder what the political effect would be of our comprehensively laying out reciprocal tariffs and listing them exhaustively. Free traders could continue to argue, as most of them are wont to do, that the case for free traders is unilateral — and we should simply lower our tariffs no matter what other countries do. But I think it would be a much easier sell for Trump to say “This is how they are ripping us off” if he simply said, “I’m raising the U.S. tariff on autos from the EU from 2.5 to 10 percent to match the EU’s tariffs.”

Not only would this be more easily sold to the public, it would make retaliation from trade partners seem incomprehensible.