Key Takeaways
- The president announced a 90-day pause to some recently announced tariffs while Trade Representative Jamieson Greer testified to lawmakers.
- House Representatives grilled Greer about the strategy behind the tariffs, which have been explained as either leverage to negotiate better trade deals with foreign countries or a trade barrier to encourage manufacturing in the U.S.
- Despite the rollback, Trump has still imposed a punishing 125% tariff on China and a broad 10% tariff on imports from the rest of the world.
President Donald Trump’s abrupt change of tariff policy Wednesday left a top advisor scrambling to explain the switch to lawmakers.
Jamieson Greer, the White House trade representative, was in the midst of a hearing with members of the House of Representative’s Ways and Means committee Wednesday when Trump ordered a 90-day pause on many of the “reciprocal” tariffs that had just gone into effect hours earlier. Greer pivoted from defending wide-ranging tariffs against trading partners to explaining why Trump suddenly rolled back the policy.
“The President put in place these high tariffs, but today he just yanked them out. Is that part of the plan? Was that always part of the plan?” Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from New York, asked Greer.
Greer said the tariffs were paused to give time for other countries to negotiate deals with Trump, echoing the reasoning in Trump’s social media announcement of the pause.
“A lot of these countries have come to us and they said, ‘We understand American leadership. We understand what you’re trying to do. We want to have reciprocal trade with you,'” Greer said.
Were Tariff Threats Issued to Negotiate Deals?
Lawmakers, financial markets, and business leaders have spent much of the past few months guessing how serious Trump has been about imposing high import taxes on trading partners, potentially unraveling the global system of free trade.
The pause Wednesday suggested the threats were negotiating tactics to extract concessions from other countries, giving a boost to a battered stock market that had plunged last week in anticipation of the damage high tariffs would do to the economy.
Trump’s sequence of tariff announcements, abrupt reversals, and last-minute changes over the past few weeks has roiled financial markets and created uncertainty among business leaders and consumers, which economists say is damaging to the economy. However, Aaron Bean, a Republican from Florida, defended Trump’s trade wars as a way to restore manufacturing, one of several stated goals for the tariffs.
“It would be so easy to ignore our collapsing manufacturing base,” he said. “It would be so easy to just ignore that we’re subsidizing the rest of the globe right now, but it’s not how you roll. It’s not how this president rolls. We’re determined to make things better.”
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