On the menu today: The new tariffs went into effect at midnight, and Americans should get ready to live under them for a long stretch. President Trump was pressed on Monday about whether the tariffs are permanent or negotiable, and he answered: “They can both be true.” The evidence points to semi-permanent, or at least around for a long time. Meanwhile, the ambitions of a man who gets compared to a cardboard box give us a little insight into a metaphorical dog that isn’t barking in California.
The Tariffs Will Be Around for a While
It will probably not surprise you to learn that I think our Audrey Fahlberg ranks among the very best reporters on Capitol Hill — and, increasingly, the White House. Her latest report features a quote that indicates that the current tariff-driven economic upheaval and stock-market turmoil are going to be around for a long while, because President Trump does not want a small win and a quick return to anything resembling the pre-tariff status quo.
“The goal of these tariffs isn’t to get a marginally better trade deal with our trading partners” that will make things “5 percent better” or incentivize countries to “buy a little bit more of our ag produce,” a White House official said in an interview Tuesday evening. The president wants a meaningful change to the status quo on the trade-deficit front. “We’re ready to negotiate on trade deals insofar as those renegotiated trade deals would actually make headway into reducing the United States’ trade deficits with our trading partners” and eliminating nontariff barriers to trade. The official emphasized that “with certain trading partners, the tariffs can’t really be negotiated away, because structurally we’re not on a level playing field even if those barriers were reduced.”
Even beyond this assessment of the president’s intent, simple logistics indicate that most or all the recently announced tariffs will still be in place a week from now, a month from now, and half a year from now.
Let’s assume you have absolute faith in President Donald Trump’s skills as a negotiator.
Let’s assume you accept all the assumptions behind the new tariff regime, primarily that every other country in the world is screwing over the U.S. in trade and getting rich off us.
Let’s assume you believe that even Burundi, whose projected per capita gross domestic product for the coming year is $602, is one of those countries getting rich off of Americans, which is why it requires a new 10 percent tariff on all goods the U.S. imports from Burundi. (In January 2025, the U.S. imported $845,000 worth of coffee, less than $5,000 in men’s undergarments, and about $2,000 in knitted hats.) Let’s assume that you believe it is entirely reasonable for the U.S. government to expect Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries, to buy as much in U.S. goods as we buy from them in coffee, underwear, and hats.
Let’s assume that you believe the stock-market meltdown that we’ve seen in the past week is a result of “Panicans” who are “weak and stupid,” as the president put it.
Let’s assume you concur with the administration that it is a great accomplishment that, after throwing up massive new barriers to trade, “50, 60, maybe almost 70 countries” have reached out to the U.S. government seeking to negotiate a new trade deal, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday afternoon on Larry Kudlow’s program.
First, there’s the wrinkle that even the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and its “more than 200” employees will have a hard time negotiating 50 to 70 new trade deals simultaneously. And according to officials from those other countries, they’re calling, but the Trump administration isn’t answering the phone.
The Philippines is still waiting for a reply to its request for a meeting, according to one official from the country. The United Kingdom pitched the White House on a framework for a trade deal but failed to avoid the tariff increases. Another foreign diplomat said their government was reaching out to various Trump aides at all levels, but many either were not responding or were unwilling to do anything beyond listen.
“I’m not sure … how receptive the Commerce Department, the [U.S. trade representative], is in getting our Cabinet secretaries to meet with counterparts. Many of us have already written to them asking for meetings,” said the official from the Philippines. “We are all waiting for the reply,” the official said, referring to representatives of several Southeast Asian countries. Like other foreign officials quoted in this story, the person was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic talks.
None of Trump’s top officials “have a mandate to negotiate,” agreed another foreign diplomat, and at lower levels they are even less empowered or knowledgeable about the administration’s plans. The diplomat pointed out that Vietnam had offered to drop tariffs and Israel had as well, but they’d gotten no concessions in return.
“Even if you have a meeting, apart from a nice tweet, you don’t get anything,” the diplomat said.
One might fairly wonder what the point of demanding negotiation is if you don’t have the time and manpower to actually negotiate with these other countries. It is fair to wonder if the president, who considers himself the world’s greatest dealmaker, wants to handle each country’s negotiations himself.
Whatever upcoming negotiations occur, they’re going to take a while. For example, take the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement that President Trump’s team negotiated in his first term and that he almost immediately violated upon taking office in his second term.
The first negotiations for the replacement of NAFTA began on August 16, 2017, and the agreement was signed by leaders of all three countries on November 30, 2018. The new arrangement went into effect July 1, 2020. And the irony is that “USMCA is actually mostly identical to NAFTA.” So that negotiation, which did not really involve massive changes, took one year, three months, and two weeks to come to fruition, and then another one year and seven months before it went into effect.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer testified before the Senate Finance Committee yesterday. This is the hearing where North Carolina GOP Senator Thom Tillis asked Greer, “whose throat do I get to choke if this turns out to be wrong?”
Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner angrily demanded to know why the Trump administration had imposed a tariff on longtime ally Australia, when the U.S. runs a trade surplus with that country. Greer began his answer by declaring that the United States “should be running up the score on Australia” in terms of its trade surplus.
Apparently, the Trump administration’s objective is to have as large of a trade surplus as possible with as many countries as possible.
There were also some troubling signs that either Greer was mixing up his numbers and products, or he simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Greer contended that Australia imposes non-tariff restrictions on U.S. imports, and claimed, “we have zero exports of the fresh and frozen U.S. pork to Australia.”
That is. . . not the case. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture boasted, “the U.S. has reestablished itself as Australia’s primary source of pork imports in the first half of 2024.” U.S. pork exports to Australia in the first two months of 2024 were triple the same time period of that in the preceding year.
As you would expect, today National Review is filled with more criticism of the administration’s trade moves, in particular the immediate imposition of a cumulative tariff of 104 percent on goods imported from China.
When you do an instant tariff, you guarantee to do maximum damage to American importers, who placed their orders weeks, months, maybe years ago — only to find their cost certainty gone. In the case of those importing from China, they are faced with a 104 percent surcharge at the border.
The worst dilemma for that American importer is that they have no idea what the tariff rate will be a few hours from now. China may dump more treasuries to anger Trump, and Trump may raise rates again tomorrow. Or he mighty, as he’s done before, announce a pause. Do you delay and risk a 208 percent tariff? Do you delay and hope for one that is halved, or canceled altogether?
In any case, everyone getting hit with instant tariffs on goods they bought with what they thought had cost certainty will blame the White House. And no deal the White House can make in the future will make them whole or make them forget the shock bill they faced this week.
There they go again! Just what you would expect from those free-trade-ideologue globalists like Dominic Pino or Andrew Stuttaford or Veronique de Rugy or Noah Rothman or. . .
. . . wait a minute, the passage above is from . . . (checks notes) Michael Brendan Dougherty, my National Review colleague most inclined to agree with the Trump administration’s perspective on trade. Dear Trump administration, when our old friend MBD sounds the alarm, you really ought to pay attention.
ADDENDUM: Credit John Gerardi for a perfect label for former HHS Secretary and California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, “the cardboard-box candidate.” Gerardi calls Becerra this because, as a gubernatorial candidate, he’s just “an empty vessel for whatever California’s so-called expert consensus of activists, bureaucrats, and activist-bureaucrats think.”
Gerardi also writes:
The only good news about Becerra’s campaign is its indication that Kamala Harris might not run for governor. NR’s Jim Geraghty considered that Becerra might not care whether Harris is running and be open to challenging her, but I find that somewhat unlikely. Harris would have such an advantage in a gubernatorial race based on name recognition alone that I think her presence would dissuade serious, non-desperate challengers (apologies to Katie Porter) like Becerra from running, or donors from backing them. I would guess Becerra took the donors’ temperature before announcing, many of whom likely gave to both his and Harris’s prior statewide campaigns.
The near-invisibility of Harris since Election Day been a recurring theme on the Three Martini Lunch podcast lately. Yes, the primary isn’t until June 2, 2026, but. . . if you were interested in running for governor of California, would you have the public profile of a person in the Witness Protection Program? Big chunks of Los Angeles burned to the ground, the state’s budget faces a $68 billion deficit, the Medi-Cal health-care program is running a $6.2 billion deficit, tourism from Canada is dropping quickly, and the state’s Public Employee’s Retirement System lost about $15 billion when the stock market crashed.
Does Kamala Harris want to weigh in on any of these problems?