General
Trump’s Tariffs: Anxiety and Assent
Readers react to news of the president’s move to reshape global trade.
Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Trump Rolls Out Vast New Arsenal of Global Tariffs” (front page, April 3):
President Trump has called his announcement on Wednesday of a new round of tariffs on our trading partners“our declaration of economic independence.” But he went even further with claims that sound wild, hyperbolic and unbelievable. “April 2, 2025,will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn,” he said, “the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again — gonna make it wealthy, good and wealthy.”
The president believes obsessively in the merits of tariffs and sees them as his tool to redress years of what he calls our trading partners’ “ripping us off.” If you go beneath the words and listen to his tone, it’s not hard to hear his anger at what he seems to truly believe has been the inequity built into our trade relationships. He doesn’t understand that freer, less fettered trade increases the size of the economic pie for all of us to share, ultimately making our slice larger.
Experts say that his tariffs, along with the virtually obligatory retaliatory tariffs other countries will impose on our goods, will cost consumers thousands of dollars in purchasing power and effectively act as a kind of tax on us, the American people.
Mr. President, while we dearly hope that your view is correct, the experts, and our own common sense, suggest that you are wrong.
Ken Derow
Swarthmore, Pa.
To the Editor:
President Trump has used the National Emergency Act as an excuse for the bizarre tariffs he has enacted. The only national emergency we face is his presidency, enabled by a spineless Republican Congress and a billionaire puppeteer. Congress has rolled over and allowed the president to usurp many of its constitutionally designated powers, including the power to impose tariffs.
The president inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, and he has begun to either systematically or whimsically destroy it, disrupting the global economy in the process.
