President Donald Trump is heading to Miami to appear at a LIV Golf dinner on Thursday, just one day after announcing severe reciprocal tariffs that have rocked the global economy.
He will later head to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, for the weekend, but the jaunt comes earlier than his normal Friday flights down south.
At a Rose Garden event Wednesday, Trump revealed a 10% baseline tariff on countries that tax U.S. imports. It will go into effect on Saturday. Additionally, roughly 60 to 90 countries will be hit with even higher reciprocal tariffs that go into effect next Wednesday.
In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,300 points, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%, and the S&P 500 dropped 4%. Global companies also took a market hit, with Nike and Lululemon shares falling 13%. Stellantis is temporarily laying off some 900 U.S. workers at its Canadian and Mexican auto assembly plants.
Trump largely avoided the limelight Thursday morning and early afternoon, leaving the work of defending his actions to others.
But before he departed from the White House for Florida, he briefly spoke about the tariffs with reporters. “I think it’s going very well,” Trump said, according to a pool report.
He also claimed that the United States will “have [$6 trillion or $7 trillion] coming into our country.”
“The markets are going to boom,” and “the country is going to boom,” Trump said.
Trump officials are furiously working to tamp down the uncertainty and financial pain that could deepen over the following weeks if the tariffs are not retracted.
“What I’d ask folks to appreciate here is that we’re not going to fix things overnight,” Vice President JD Vance said Thursday morning on Fox News’s Fox and Friends.
“We know people are struggling,” he continued. “We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it’s not going to happen immediately. But we really do believe that if we pursue the right deregulation, we pursue those energy cost-reducing policies, yes, people are going to see it in their pocketbook.”
“I know we’re hearing from countries that are kind of complaining about what’s happening, but I have a chart,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters Thursday afternoon at the White House.
Brooke Rollins holds up another chart about Trump’s reciprocal tariffs pic.twitter.com/0pxzsOzT6A
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(@MabintyQ) April 3, 2025
The chart, according to Rollins, shows the exports of other countries, including India, Taiwan, and Japan.
“This is the average: 14%. Well, down here, you’ve got little bitty United States of America, right? I mean, this is what he’s trying to fix,” Rollins said before claiming that farmers and ranchers would adjust to uncertainty. “This will be a short time of uncertainty, and then we’ll move back to the prosperity that this president has envisioned, that he is so bold and so willing to fight for.”
However, a former Trump administration official pushed back against the comments from current officials.
“I think the impact on consumers is going to be very, very high,” a former trade official from the first Trump administration said. “Politically, American voters have been willing to entertain the president’s sort of policies in this area because I think, in some ways, those in particular that voted for him, they align with this rhetoric that countries haven’t been treating us fairly.”
World leaders expressed shock and disbelief at Trump’s levies but were cautious in responding with retaliation.
“China firmly opposes this and will take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests,” a statement from the nation’s Commerce Ministry reads.
China was hit with a 34% levy in addition to a previous 20% tariff Trump imposed against the Asian nation.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called Trump’s tariffs “a major blow to the world economy.”
French President Emmanuel Macron pressed companies to pause their investments in the U.S.
“What would the message be of having big European players that invest billions in the American economy at the same time they are hitting us?” Macron said.
Trump, however, argues that it was foreign countries that “have taken advantage of us for many, many years” instead.