The “tariff rates” to which the God-Emperor 2.0 utilized to generate his newly-announced tariffs aren’t actually anything of the sort.
Flexport’s team was able to reverse engineer the formula the Administration used to generate the “reciprocal tariffs.” It’s quite simple, they took the trade deficit the US has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.
This makes a lot more sense, because Switzerland doesn’t have a 61 percent tariff on anything. Which means that we’re in the realm of rhetoric here, not dialectic, and I suspect what the God-Emperor intends is for everyone to simply accept a 10-12 percent tariff rate without any reciprocating tariffs on their own imports.
I’ll admit, I’ve seldom been more wrong than seeing the initial tariffs being graduated UK-EU-CH instead of the other way around, as I was expecting. But Trump’s usual tactic is to slap his interlocutor into accepting his framework, then offering a much more palatable deal that would have looked unattainable before the metaphorical slap in the face.
Regardless, he’s doing the right thing if he wants to rebuild America’s industrial capabilities again.