Donald Trump dubbed his official tariff implementation “Liberation Day” in a Rose Garden speech yesterday. “My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day,” Trump said. “April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

That’s a fine turn of phrase, but exactly who or what is being liberated? Money from Americans’ pocketbooks?

Trump’s formulation for tariffs sounds something like a Common Core math problem. “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, we will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal.”

Essentially, Trump set a baseline 10% tariff on all imports (effective April 5), a 25% tariff on foreign-made cars (effective early this morning), and additional reciprocal levies (effective April 9) on the “worst offender” nations to account for other trade barriers and currency manipulation.

Notably, Russia is absent from the list. Some specifics from his list end up all over the map, so to speak: European Union (20%), India (26%), Japan (24%), South Korea (25%), and Vietnam (46%). And then you have the mystery of 32% tariffs on Taiwan to go along with a 34% rate for China. He’s also effectively blown up the USMCA trade agreement he proudly renegotiated from the bones of NAFTA by slapping Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs.

FULL LIST: Liberation Day pic.twitter.com/ZBiRuJBCAr

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025

He has his reasons, and many of them are right. The question is whether his solutions will fix things.

“For decades,” he said, “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. 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.”

With his typical hyperbole, he declared, “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steel workers, auto workers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen … they really suffered gravely.”

If you want to know why he’s so adamant about this, consider two things: the Rust Belt support he received in 2016 and 2024, and his vice president, JD Vance. Read Hillbilly Elegy and you’ll understand why tariffs seem like the right solution for the hollowed-out towns and lives dotting Appalachia.

Trump’s top financial adviser, Peter Navarro, paints these tariffs as “tax cuts.” He argues, “Tariffs are going to raise about $600 billion a year, about $6 trillion over a 10-year period.”

I know we live in an age where people with a straight face claim to be the opposite sex, but please.

Who does Navarro think will ultimately pay for these tariffs? Navarro is no dummy. He knows that the American consumer will foot the bill, but he’s trying to spin Trump’s protectionist tariff vision as an economic benefit and not a weight.

Tariffs are taxes. The money to pay them goes straight from consumers into the government’s coffers. According to the Yale University Budget Lab, these tariffs would cost the average American household at least $3,400 in added annual expenses.

Americans will pay more for every imported good with a tariff on it. Then, there will almost certainly be retaliation from other countries, and you can bet they’ll target our agriculture, making groceries more expensive, too.

Given this reality, is this just another instance of Trump engaging in his art of the deal? Is his objective to win concessions from our trading partners, getting them to lower their tariffs to obtain some form of trading reciprocity?

The concern is that Trump is igniting a potential trade war. He argues that we’ve already been losing a trade war for decades. Either way, voters aren’t thrilled. Neither is the stock market, which plunged this morning on the news.

Young people who dismiss the stock market as a “Boomer concern” might reconsider how investments affect their careers.

Perhaps the most confusing thing about Trump’s tariffs is his contradictory arguments. They are negotiating tools to correct imbalances, he says, while also arguing that they’re the permanent path to prosperity in and of themselves. “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?”

If tariffs pave the way to future prosperity, it wouldn’t be wise to rescind them no matter what concessions he gets. If he backs down after negotiations, maybe tariffs weren’t really the means to achieving the American Dream.

He’s making big promises about economic prosperity despite short-term pain. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back to our country,” Trump predicted. “We are going to produce the cars, ships, chips, airplanes, minerals, and medicines we need right here in America.” He has claimed that he “has secured nearly $5,000,000,000,000 in investment and trade commitments from across the globe.” We’ll see.

The president certainly sees these tariffs as an integral part of his America First policy. However, this represents the most significant shift in America’s policy since World War II, and many economists are skeptical that tariffs will bring about what Trump envisions. Indeed, the more pressing concern is whether Trump’s tariffs will trigger a recession.

Time will tell if Trump proves his doubters wrong. For the sake of the American economy, let’s hope he’s right.