President Donald Trump delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
President Donald Trump has been using trade wars to bully America’s allies — but a new report indicates that his tariff strategies are failing spectacularly.
“As Carney prepared to walk away — a rare example of a foreign leader telling the president ‘enough’ — Trump was retreating on another trade front,” reported The Washington Post's David J. Lynch on Sunday. “On Friday, after insisting for more than a year that tariffs do not affect consumer prices, he lifted tariffs on beef imports, saying the move would lead to lower grocery prices.”
Lynch added, “The two developments, coupled with legal challenges to Trump’s tariffs, leave the president’s signature economic policy in a state of flux.”
According to Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and currently senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, “it’s a big setback for Trump’s trade policy. We’re at a juncture where other countries may be very closely watching how this plays out as they also are becoming increasingly frustrated with the demands the U.S. is placing on them in these largely one-sided trade agreements.”
Cutler also told Lynch that the organization has finalized 10 “reciprocal trade agreements” with nations from the United Kingdom and Japan to Malaysia.
“Hearing of the concessions that the U.S. offered Canada, including reductions in tariffs on industrial metals, some trading partners may demand revisions to their deals, Cutler said,” Lynch said.
Lynch also reported how “at a White House meeting, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department administers the national security tariffs, clashed with Greer, representing industry views that the higher aluminum tariffs were needed to encourage domestic manufacturing.”
Additionally, Lynch wrote that “Navarro and Lutnick were both yelling at Greer, saying: ‘What are you doing? This is stupid. You know, we’re not giving these things away,’’ said one industry representative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks. Late in the talks, the U.S. sought to exclude from tariff reductions heavy trucks produced in Ontario, such as the Ford F-350 and F-450, and the GM Silverado. Over time, that would have made it ‘more uneconomic’ for the automakers to keep making the vehicles in Canada, Carney said. The administration also sought to restrict Canada’s right to sign trade deals with other countries, a key part of Carney’s strategy to reduce dependence on its increasingly unreliable southern neighbor.”
Overall, Lynch pointed out that “Trump’s undiplomatic style — including saying that Canada should surrender its sovereignty to become the 51st U.S. state — made it harder politically for the Canadian leader to accept a deal. Public opinion in Canada has turned fiercely anti-American.”
Despite Trump promising that his tariffs would stimulate America’s manufacturing industry, the president’s own Labor Department has revealed that the United States lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs since the start of his second term. Experts agree that the tariffs have created economic instability rather than growth.
“It's about uncertainty,” Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, a former economic adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, told AlterNet in July. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”
Shapiro added, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”
Similarly the Progressive Policy Institute’s tariff expert Ed Gresser told AlterNet that Trump is achieving minor goals that do not work toward bigger economic resolutions.
“They're hoping to get small, individual policy achievements at the expense of a larger-scale increase in costs and loss of stability and predictability,” Gresser told AlterNet in July.
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