President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 2.

“If you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America,” Trump said when announcing his blanket tariffs on April 2.

The U.S. would now “charge countries” for “taking our jobs, taking our wealth, taking a lot of things that they have been taking over the years,” he added. (Tariffs are paid by the companies purchasing the imports, not their originating countries.)

This is what Trump ran on in 2024 when he called tariffs the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

We’re going to bring the companies back,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg in October 2024.

“I think tariffs are a means to an end, and that end is bringing the manufacturing base back to the U.S.,” Bessent said on Fox Business in February.

This is, quite plainly, the point of tariffs. A country imposes a levy on imports as protection for the domestic market. This disincentives imports while incentivizing domestic production, especially if paired with an industrial policy that subsidizes or promotes domestic industry,

That is what the Biden administration did with its combination of tariffs and industrial policy enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS & Science Act. Those two laws provided subsidies to build domestic production of microchips, electric vehicles, batteries and various other products for the clean energy sector. To protect these infant industries, Biden imposed tariffs, largely on goods from China where the industry is more developed. The most stringent of these was a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles.

That was a targeted and strategic pairing of tariff policy and industrial policy aimed at reshoring jobs and building entirely new manufacturing industries. This is not what Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs look like.

Rather than strategically designed tariffs on countries with known unfair trade practices or targeting China’s unbalanced export economy, Trump’s tariffs hit almost every country in the world, including those that export products to the U.S. that cannot be manufactured or acquired here. No one can grow bananas in the United States nor do we have vast diamond mines.