Former President Donald Trump is proposing tariffs on just about everything during his third presidential campaign.
His solution to many problems, including lowering grocery prices, cutting the deficit, ending international wars, and even cutting the cost of childcare, is tariffs.
Tariffs are taxes on imported goods or services coming into the United States from other countries. Throughout history, they have been used to promote domestic business and regulate foreign trade, but Trump has proposed using them to solve unrelated matters.
“We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China,” Trump said at the beginning of the presidential debate earlier this month.
Here’s what Trump has proposed and what fellow Republicans and economic experts are saying:
Trump’s proposals
Trump has proposed tariffs on a number of things, including a 60% or higher tariff on Chinese goods and a blanket tariff of 10%. He also proposed using revenue from tariffs to lower the cost of childcare without giving much explanation of how he would achieve this.
“Child care is child care, it’s something you have to have in this country. You have to have it,” he said, adding that his proposals to tax imports from foreign countries at higher levels would “take care” of the high cost of childcare.
“We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive, compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” he said.
In his most recent venture into tariff planning, Trump threatened the farming equipment company John Deere, saying it would face a “200% tariff on everything” if it moved its manufacturing production overseas. John Deere announced that it plans to move some of its production to Mexico by 2026.
“I’m just notifying John Deere right now: If you do that, we’re putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States,” said Trump.
The same day, he made similar threats to the auto industry.
“We’re going to put big tariffs on those cars that are coming in here at 100 to 200%, and they’re no longer going to be competitive,” he said, “so you better stay in Michigan.”
What Republicans and economists are saying
Trump frequently falsely claims that foreign countries pay the tariffs, but in reality, tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and American or U.S.-based buyers typically pass on the additional costs.
“A tariff is just a form of a tax,” Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the Tax Foundation, told CNN.
“It’s the U.S. purchaser, the importer of those goods, that makes the physical payment to the U.S. government,” she added.
The Tax Foundation also estimated that Trump’s 10% tariff plan would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.1%.
Some Republicans are not convinced that Trump’s proposals will work as he intends. For example, many Republican senators were not convinced of Trump’s proposal for a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports.
“People are panicked about what they’re paying for everyday stuff,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Semafor. “If it’s the Alaska consumer, I don’t know how I can legitimately ask them to pay more.”
“I’m not a fan of tariffs. They raise the prices for American consumers. I’m more of a free-trade kind of Republican that remembers how many jobs are created by the exports that we engage in. So, I’m not a tariff fan,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters when asked about Trump’s latest comments on the matter.
Still, some of his strongest allies in Congress view this as positive. Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI) told the outlet that global tariffs could be a negotiating tactic to “bludgeon” other countries into making a deal.
Economists, on the other hand, broadly are not convinced that Trump’s proposal to use tariffs to solve most matters would be successful. Trump has previously said tariffs will end wars, but economic experts disagree.
“We don’t have to send troops, I can do it with a telephone call,” he said. “You go to war with another country that’s friendly to us, or even not friendly to us, you’re not going to do business in the United States and we’re going to charge you 100% tariffs,” Trump said at a North Carolina campaign rally earlier this month. “And all of a sudden, the president or prime minister or dictator or whoever the hell is running the country says to me, ‘Sure, we won’t go to war,’” Trump continued.
Because tariffs are meant to regulate foreign trade, there would likely be retaliatory tariffs against American exporters, which Trump has not mentioned.
George Lopez, professor emeritus of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, told the Hill that tariffs are less effective than sanctions.
“Even China is going to put down the phone from an American president and [his] closest allies,” he said. “There’s nobody in the room who’s going to take that seriously.”
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“This really is economics 101, and the notion that [Trump sees this] as a high priority, bold statement of economic policy, must be sending just chills to the spines of Wall Street and others,” he continued.
Still, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 56% of registered voters support Trump’s plan for a 10% blanket tariff and 60% tariff on Chinese goods.