'Significant political rift': Trump faces possible defeat in first tariff test
President Donald Trump’s revised tariffs will likely further increase prices despite his promise to provide widespread economic relief, according to a new analysis.
“The Trump administration is preparing to reshape its steel and aluminum tariff regime, altering duties on finished products to help simplify compliance,” wrote The Wall Street Journal's Gavin Bade and Bob Tita on Wednesday. “The net effect of the changes could effectively raise costs for many imports.”
Bade and Tita added that by applying a 25% tariff to all finished imported aluminum products, “the 25% tariff would apply to the entire value of a finished product—known derivative products—containing steel and aluminum, the people said. That would replace the current 50% duty, which only applies to the value of steel or aluminum used in a product.”
The two journalists pointed out that this is drastically different than in 2018, when Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imported steel and 10% tariff on imported aluminum that applied strictly to commodity-grade metal. Even that, though, had major economic consequences when combined with Trump’s other tariffs at the time.
"There’s no question that a certain number of people in our country feel that they somehow suffer from foreign competition. And I suppose some people do. They do," former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) told this journalist for Salon Magazine at the time. "But overall, bottom line, trade has been a tremendously positive for the American economy creating jobs, and incidentally, bringing in lower-price consumer products that people in the lower-income, middle-income groups benefit from."
As Bade and Tita pointed out, though, “when Trump returned to office, he increased the aluminum tariff to 25% and expanded the metal tariffs to hundreds of imported finished goods, including screws, furniture and auto parts that were previously not subject to levies. Last June, he doubled those levies to 50%.”
After Trump’s tariffs were thrown out by the Supreme Court as illegal, the Journal reported that “the administration weighed a plan to create three tiers of different tariff levels, but ultimately decided on an even simpler proposal.”
Also on Wednesday, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, argued for the Journal that Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive the economy.
“"If the economy was 'dead' in 2024, there's no evidence Mr. Trump's tariffs have brought it back to life,” Gramm and Boudreaux said, adding that “most economists predicted that the economy's performance would be negatively affected. Thus far data overwhelmingly indicate that is what has happened."
In addition to not helping the economy, Trump’s tariffs may have actually inflicted long-term damage.
"The world isn't deglobalizing,” Gramm and Boudreaux explained. “It's reglobalizing around partners who commit to rules rather than those who wield tariffs like a club." Main data points reinforce this fact, such as how "in 2025 the pace of losing manufacturing jobs accelerated to 1.2%, faster than the decline in 2024 of 0.7%. In 2017 manufacturing jobs actually increased by 0.7%."
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation agrees with them, with Trump’s tax chaos being further compounded by his tariff policies according to one of their experts.
Trump thinks tariffs are “the golden ticket to our revenue problems,” Garrett Watson, director of Policy Analysis at the Tax Foundation, wrote for The Hill last month. In fact, Wilson said tariffs fail to bring in anywhere near the revenue Trump says they will but instead cause "higher prices, lower wages and smaller profits" that "threaten to offset much of the growth and income gains from the 2025 tax cuts."
Wilson concluded America needs "a simpler code and an honest accounting of the nation's finances would do more for working families than another round of tariff fights and tax complexity."