President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced reciprocal tariffs during a highly anticipated event called “Make America Wealthy Again,” which he stated would restore the American dream and create jobs for U.S. workers.
“American steel workers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon. “We have a lot of them here with us today. They really suffered, gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. We had an American dream that you don’t hear so much about. You did four years ago, and you are now. But you don’t too often.”
“Now it’s our turn to prosper, and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt,” he added. “And it will all happen very quickly. With today’s action, we are finally going to be able to make America great again, greater than ever before. Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already. We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”
Trump was accompanied by members of his Cabinet for the highly anticipated announcement, marking the first official presidential event in the Rose Garden since his inauguration in January. “For nations that treat us badly, we will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, nonmonetary barriers and other forms of cheating. And because we are being very kind,” he said.
“We will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that. Yes. But it would have been tough for a lot of countries,” he said. Trump highlighted the European Union, explaining that the U.S. will impose a 20% tariff on its nations, compared to the 39% tariff they impose on U.S. goods. Japan will face a 24% tariff, while the country charges the U.S. a 46% tariff. Meanwhile, China will be hit with a 34% tariff, compared to the 67% it charges the U.S.
Trump listed the countries that will face reciprocal tariffs, including nations like Chile, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and others. He also stated that other nations would face a 10% baseline tariff. Additionally, Trump criticized “non-tariff barriers” imposed on the U.S. These barriers refer to trade restrictions that limit international trade through methods other than tariffs, such as quotas or regulations. Other countries often impose non-tariff barriers on U.S. agricultural goods, including limits on the export of meats and fresh produce.
“For decades, the United States slashed trade barriers on other countries, while those nations placed massive tariffs on our products and created outrageous non-monetary barriers to decimate our industries,” Trump said. “And in many cases, the non-monetary barriers were worse than the monetary ones. They manipulated their currencies, subsidized their exports, stole our intellectual property, imposed exorbitant taxes to disadvantage our products, adopted unfair rules and technical standards, and created filthy pollution havens.”
For more than 100 years, Trump stated that the U.S. operated as a tariff-backed nation, which led to significant wealth accumulation. “From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. And the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been,” he said. “So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”
“April 2nd, 2025, will go down as one of the most important days in modern American history,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Tuesday’s White House press briefing. “Our country has been one of the most open economies in the world, and we have the consumer base, hands down — the best consumer base. But too many foreign countries have their markets closed to our exports. This is fundamentally unfair.”