Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ and the Tariff Shockwave

Yesterday, President Trump held the world’s attention as they awaited his announcement of the coming tariff storm.

The media was breathless because the president had not revealed what he would be announcing to anyone — not Wall Street, foreign governments, or even some inside the West Wing seemed to know what he would announce.

A Bloomberg columnist said, “I can’t recall the last time when so many people around the world were waiting for a White House announcement where no one seems to know what exactly is going to be announced.”

They only knew the “Liberation Day” announcement was scheduled for 4 PM EDT.

Be informed, not misled.

ABC News ran this headline yesterday morning: “Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ plans ‘still very fluid’ as he gambles big on risky tariff policy.”

ABC also said, “President Donald Trump on Wednesday will unveil in the White House Rose Garden what are expected to be broad-based ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on imports as part of his ‘America First’ agenda.”

It’s a moment months in the making for the president who has repeatedly billed it as “Liberation Day,” claiming it will free the U.S. from dependence on foreign goods and saying, “we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries.”

Though just hours before the announcement, Trump and his top advisers were still trying to find some common ground where they agree.

“It’s all still very fluid,” one senior administration official said on Wednesday morning following meetings on the topic.

CBS News said, “Trump to announce new tariffs today on what he calls ‘Liberation Day’ amid fears of higher prices.”

Al Jazeera, a Muslim news organization, reported: “US President Donald Trump is poised to unveil sweeping new ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, but has kept the world guessing until the last minute about the scope of the announcement that many fear could lead to a global trade war.”

They continued, “According to the White House, at 4pm (20:00 GMT), Trump will participate in the ‘Make America Wealthy Again’ event in the Rose Garden. This is when he’s expected to announce his so-called reciprocal tariffs.”

It was not chaos; it was choreography. He turned policy into primetime.

Trump has a salesman’s instinct, part negotiator’s tactic — and wholly consistent with the idea of America reclaiming its role as the agenda-setter in global trade.

Liberation Day

President Trump did not disappoint.

He announced reciprocal tariffs during his highly anticipated “Make America Wealthy Again” event, which he said would restore the American dream and bolster jobs for U.S. workers.

“American steel workers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen will prosper,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden on 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.”

“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 continued. “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.”

“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. I could have done that. Yes. But it would have been tough for a lot of countries,” he said.

Trump showed the audience a list of countries and the tariffs they impose on goods compared to the tariffs the US imposes.

It’s stunning.

Fox reported, “Trump pointed to the European Union, and explained the U.S. will charge its nations a 20% tariff, compared to its 39% tariffs on the U.S. Japan will see 24% tariffs, compared to the 46% the country charges the U.S., while China will be hit with a 34% tariff, compared to the 67% it charges the U.S.”

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?”

“If they complain, if you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America. Because there is no tariff. If you build your plant, your product in America. And we’ve seen companies coming in like we’ve never seen before,” he said.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that Mexico doesn’t plan to impose retaliatory tariffs on the United States, ahead of President Donald Trump’s announcement of plans to impose new tariffs.

Sheinbaum added that Mexico will “announce a comprehensive program, not a tit-for-tat on tariffs” on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Ontario, Canada’s Premier Doug Ford suggested the nation would be willing to drop its tariffs if the United States did the same. The Trump administration has not yet indicated whether it will accept this proposal.

The Left is agonizing over Trump “destroying our country.”

I believe Trump is right, and we’ll begin to see positive results sooner than later.

I’ll be talking more about Trump’s announcement and the responses on our radio program this morning.

Please join me. Here’s how.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.