A key figure in the Trump administration is urging other countries to hit the pause button on hitting the United States with tariffs, CNN reported — even though President Donald Trump just went nuclear with tariffs on virtually the entire rest of the world.
The tariffs, which are part of an intended global economic realignment Trump calls "Liberation Day," range from 10 to 49 percent. Trump claims they are reciprocal tariffs that tax other nations' goods at half the rates they tax American goods, although experts have noted many of Trump's claimed foreign tariffs on the U.S. don't appear to be correct.
Stock futures plunged on the announcement, and Trump was buried in mockery for even putting tariffs on some remote islands that don't have a human population.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in response to alarm from U.S. trading partners over the situation, asked them not to change their own policies in response, and instead “Sit back, take a deep breath, don’t immediately retaliate.”
“Let’s see where this goes, because if you retaliate, that’s how we get escalation,” Bessent told CNN's Kaitlan Collins. “A trade war depends on the country. But remember that the history of trade is we are the deficit country. The deficit country has an advantage. They are the surplus countries. The surplus countries traditionally always lose any kind of trade escalation. As a student of economic history or a professor of economic history, I’d advise against it.”
Bessent's words appear to be a response to prior commitments by a number of other countries to respond to tariffs from the United States, said the report.
"The European Union, China, Japan, South Korea, Colombia and Mexico have previously said they would respond to Trump’s trade actions," while the European Parliament's International Trade Committee chairman Bernd Lange, warned the new U.S. tariffs are “unjustified, illegal and disproportionate," the report added.
