President Trump Makes ‘Major Announcement’ Effecting Nearly All U.S. Trading Partners

[Conservative Angle]

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Today is Wednesday – April 2nd, 2025.

But it’s also ‘Liberation Day’ in America, according to President Trump’s post on his official X account, sharing his earlier post on Truth Social earlier this morning.

pic.twitter.com/RPXb6Y9E6y

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2025

That’s how the White House has framed today’s long awaited big announcement.

With the world waiting to find out exactly how far the President would go in his threats to balance out the international tariff ledger, the tone set at the White House was celebratory.

Not at all the doom and gloom pushed by the mainstream media and the President’s detractors, who say his threatened tariffs would amount to guaranteed global economic disaster.

Just a short time ago while speaking from the Rose Garden, he called his announcement “a declaration of economic independence”, as related by White House Correspondent Emel Akan, along with this photo she captured sitting in attendance to hear the much anticipated tariff details:

“It’s a declaration of economic independence,” Trump says while announcing his new reciprocal tariff policy in the Rose Garden. pic.twitter.com/OJfyttYjZp

— Emel Akan (@mlakan) April 2, 2025

One key part of the President’s unveiled tariff plan includes an immediate 25% tariff on all foreign made cars.

And that tariff goes into effect almost immediately, at midnight tonight.

BREAKING: At his Liberation Day Rose Garden event, President Trump has just announced a 25% tariff on all foreign made automobiles effective at midnight tonight.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 2, 2025

While not surprising, that one detail immediately set the tone for the President’s comprehensive tariff plan.

That announcement alone put nearly every U.S. trading partner on notice that the old way of taking advantage of the United States economically — and getting away with it — is over.

Here’s a clip from SkyNews covering the moment the President was introduced, and the tone-setting introduction to his speech:

“This is Liberation Day 2 April 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn.”

Donald Trump arrives in the Rose Garden to loud cheers as he prepares to sign an executive order on reciprocal tariffs.https://t.co/gduCXZ51En

Sky 501 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/ZOvoRSBnvR

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 2, 2025

President Trump also had a chart brought to him after his initial remarks, detailing the specific situation, line-by-line, for each of America’s key trading partners.

He referenced the eye-opening realities of imbalanced trade relations directly from his custom chart, detailing the trade disparities that have unjustly hurt American workers and the national as a whole.

Trump brings a tariffs chart to his Rose Garden event

"They rip us off, it's so sad to see." pic.twitter.com/jIQ1yZSxhF

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) April 2, 2025

Here’s a clip of the President talking through some of the details of his plan, calling out some of the worst infractions, directly from his chart.

I’ll include images below the clip of the info sheets passed out at the event; basically miniaturized versions of the chart he used on stage:

BREAKING: President Trump just announced at the Rose Garden on Liberation Day that the U.S. will be charging these countries with reciprocal tariffs:

China – 34%
EU – 20%
Vietnam – 46%
Japan – 24%

“The United States can no longer pay the deficits of Canada and Mexico.… pic.twitter.com/tSTweNokW5

— AJ Huber (@Huberton) April 2, 2025

Here are the numbers by nation constituting President Trump’s tariff plan:

In a nutshell, the President’s plan seems very well designed with one purpose: bringing U.S. trading partners to the table to negotiate fair terms of trade.

The baseline for his plan is a 10% matching tariff on nations that charge that on U.S. imports, which is the minimum any nation included on the list docks U.S. goods.

But notably, the President’s plan does not actually MATCH those who have abused the United States the most, but calculates each ‘reciprocal’ tariff to approximately half of what each nation is charging the United States.

This is another campaign promise being fulfilled, such that even CBS News couldn’t ignore giving him that credit in their reporting:

President Trump has repeatedly referred to the tariffs he is set to announce on April 2 as “Liberation Day.” But liberation from what? First and foremost, Mr. Trump wants to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign goods.

More broadly, and going back to his first term in the White House, Mr. Trump has long sought to reshape the global trade system. Underlying that goal is his view that other countries’ trade policies, along with treaties such as the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement and 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, harm American manufacturers and workers.

Trump administration officials say that tariffs will spur both foreign and domestic companies to expand in the U.S.; lead to more balanced trade with economic allies; reduce the U.S. trade deficit with other countries; and generate federal revenue that can be used for other priorities.

“I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” Mr. Trump said in his Jan. 20 inaugural address. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

In almost every case of serious trade imbalances, President Trump is levying 50% of that nation’s tariff against the U.S. back against them.

I almost wouldn’t even call that a ‘trade war’, as much as a shot across the bow coupled with an invitation to come negotiate before things ESCALATE to unrestrained economic ‘war’.

That baseline 10%, along with higher percentages levied against about 60 other nations, goes into effect at midnight on April 9th, according to a report in The Hill:

President Trump on Wednesday announced a baseline 10 percent tariff on imports from all foreign countries, as well as higher tariff rates for dozens of nations that the White House deemed the “worst offenders” when it came to trade barriers.

The 10 percent tariff will go into effect on Friday. About 60 countries facing a higher reciprocal tariff will see those rates go into effect on April 9 at 12:01 a.m. Trump also announced a 25 percent tariff on all foreign-made automobiles that will take effect at 12:01 a.m. April 3.

Among the countries being targeted with reciprocal tariffs are China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand, Switzerland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and the European Union.

“The tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that, I guess. But it would have been tough for a lot of countries,” Trump said.

The higher reciprocal tariffs included 35 percent on China, 20 percent on the European Union, 46 percent on Vietnam, 32 percent on Taiwan, 24 percent on Japan.

Officials expect hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in the next few years and “trillions” over a 10-year period from the reciprocal tariffs, they told reporters.

Trump announced the tariffs under the authority of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the president the power to regulate imports.

The White House stressed on Wednesday that the tariffs are not intended as a negotiation tactic. Officials argued the tariffs were necessary to bolster U.S. manufacturing and boost the domestic industrial base.

“We’re very focused on getting this tariff regime in place,” a senior White House official said. “This is not a negotiation, it’s a national emergency.”

The White House emphasized this was a response to a ‘national emergency’ as opposed to a trade negotiation tactic.

But the reality of the financial rebuke, coupled with his obvious restraint in sticking somewhere in the range of 10%-50% reciprocation, is sure to serve as one of the strongest negotiating tactics possible.

BBC Journalist Bernd Debusmann attended the Rose Garden event and shared the following clip of President Trump emphasizing that both ‘friend and foe’ have likewise engaged in unfair trade tactics against the United States:

Donald Trump is currently in the Rose Garden of the White House, making his case for tariffs that he will be signing into effect shortly. pic.twitter.com/zu42m2RQlg

— Bernd Debusmann Jr (@BernieDebusmann) April 2, 2025

President Trump called the Rose Garden announcement the “Make America Wealthy Again” event.

He spoke at length about righting the economic wrongs of past decades, which he has long held up as the primary reason he felt the need to run for President to begin with.

“Now it’s our turn to prosper”, he told the crowd, according to Fox News:

President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs during a highly anticipated “Make America Wealthy Again” event which he said will restore the American dream and bolster 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 said. “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 or. Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already. We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”

“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.”

Trump said that for more than 100 years, the U.S. was a tariff-backed nation, which provided a surge of wealth.

“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?”

Trump and his administration have for weeks touted April 2 as “Liberation Day,” arguing that reciprocal tariffs will even the playing field for the U.S. after decades of unfair trading practices.

The President signed an Executive Order immediately following his remarks, putting his plan officially into action.

He repeatedly touted the importance that will be anchored to this day because of the weight that his plan will carry for years to come in terms of American economic prosperity.

Here’s one clip in which he connects his tariff plan to the new ‘golden age of America’:

President Donald Trump says he’s imposing tariffs on US trading partners worldwide during an event in the White House Rose Garden. Trump will apply a minimum 10% tariff on all exporters to the US, according to the Wall Street Journal https://t.co/J2ZDIby6YX pic.twitter.com/olJV4W16BA

— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) April 2, 2025

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the WH Press Pool yesterday that the President was taking all day to ‘perfect’ his plan in advance of today’s announcement.

He had already made a decision at that time on exactly what approach he would take on the tariffs, according to Leavitt:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on April 1 that President Donald Trump is spending Tuesday "perfecting" his tariff plan a day ahead of the expected announcement of sweeping duties on U.S. trading partners. A Rose Garden announcement is scheduled for 4 p.m. on… pic.twitter.com/oikOSFJoZ0

— NTD News (@NTDNews) April 1, 2025

The White House pushed back against the idea that the President’s reciprocal tariff plan was some type of negotiation tactic.

But even the video released on President Trump’s X account this morning seemed to highlight the many financial wins he has stacked up in relation to this type of bargaining tactic:

pic.twitter.com/k8Eh7B8fq3

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2025

If that’s not a hype video intended to celebrate hardline negotiating tactics… I don’t know what is!

He later shared the full video of this afternoons event from the Rose Garden, which you can view at your convenience here:

https://t.co/CdTzF2sfMZ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2025

While this is a developing story of sorts, there is little guess as to what will happen next.

Some nations will attempt to bluff their way back to the status quo — and I don’t think the President will ever give in to that sort of gamesmanship.

One thing President Trump never does is bluff. He is ready to go the distance.

He is ready to endure a temporary downturn in the U.S. market and blowback across the financial sectors in order to see this plan through to the other side.

And eventually, those nations will realize they can’t outlast the strength of the United States with a strong leader sitting in the White House, and they will come to the negotiating table.

Most countries will have adopted a tone of reconciliation by this evening, and by close of business on Monday new trade deals will already be in the works.

And a few, like Canada, which President Trump is handling in a slightly different way considering the geographical security situation posed by our nearest neighbor openly cozying up to China in order to expressly hurt the United States…

That will continue to be a tell-tale sign of just how seriously President Trump is taking the economic battlefield in advance of the expected future battlefield with real guns and real bullets.

And maybe, just maybe… his ability to bring the world back from that impending calamity, as well.

Not by cozying up to those who are hell bent on pushing the United States out of its position on the world stage as a beacon of economic strength and freedom, but by sticking to his AMERICA FIRST principles, and taking the hard stance — because it’s the right thing to do.

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