The speech was billed as a new dawn. On 2 April 2025, Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced a blanket 10% tariff on every imported good, with steeper rates as high as 50% on dozens of countries. It lasted forty days.
The markets answered first. Global stocks fell in their steepest slide since the pandemic, and a sell-off even hit U.S. Treasury bonds, the usual refuge. Trump’s own officials were dispatched to hold the line. “The president is not going to back off,” the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told CNN.
Seven days later, the higher rates had been in force for all of 13 hours when Trump announced a 90-day pause, cutting the duty on almost every country back to 10%. Markets surged. “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well,” he wrote, adding minutes later, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”
The exception was China. When Beijing vowed to retaliate, Trump answered with a 125% tariff, rising to 145% once other duties were counted, and Beijing hit back in kind. Days later, U.S. customs quietly exempted smartphones, computers and chips from the new levies.
As the weeks wore on, Trump reached for the same image to shrug off the pain. Higher prices, he said, meant “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls.” “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” he added.
The episode ended the way it began, in retreat. On the fortieth day, after talks in Geneva, the treasury secretary confirmed that Washington and Beijing would slash the tariffs they had piled on weeks earlier, bringing the U.S. rate on Chinese goods down to 30%. Trump called it a “total reset.”
Sources
- Gone in 40 days: how Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariff assault unraveled | Trump tariffs | The Guardian
- Donald Trump's Liberation Day tariffs: When does the pause end
