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US tariff plan: what is Donald Trump's real goal?
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Apr 4, 2025
The penalties announced by Trump on Wednesday triggered a plunge in world financial markets and drew condemnation from other leaders reckoning with the end of a decades-long era of trade liberalization. What exactly is Donald Trump's goal? Analysis by FRANCE 24 foreign editor, Kethevane Gorjestani.
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Well, there's been a trail of red at global stock markets
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European shares opening lower this Friday. This after U.S. President Donald Trump had slapped at 10 percent import duties on all nations
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and far higher levies on imports from dozens of specific countries, including top trade partners China and the European Union
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Separate tariffs of 25 percent on all foreign-made cars also went into effect
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Canada swiftly responding with a similar levy on U.S. imports. Trump dismissing the turmoil, insisting to reporters as he left for a weekend at his Florida golf resort that stocks will go, quote unquote, boom
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Take a listen. I think it's going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on
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And it's a big thing. I said this would exactly be the way it is
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We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country. And we've never seen anything like it
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The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom
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And the rest of the world wants to see, is there any way they can make a deal
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They've taken advantage of us for many, many years. For many years, we've been at the wrong side of the ball
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And I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable. The thing that people have to talk about
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we're up almost to $7 trillion of investment coming into our country
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And you'll see how it's going to turn out. Our country's going to boom
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For more on this, I'm joined by our foreign editor, Kedavin Gurdistani. Hello to you, Kedavin
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There seems to be some back and forth about what the ultimate goal of these tariffs might be and how long they be in place What is Donald Trump trying to achieve Well look if you listen to what he said as he was leaving the White House
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there were several elements of what he hopes to achieve. One is the retaliation, this idea that the United States has been ripped off by the rest of the world for decades
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There's also the idea that this is going to sort of transform the American economy
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He was talking about trillions of dollars of investment, talking about also earlier that companies were going to move their business back to the United States
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Also, that this is going to bring revenue and that basically it's going to be a sort of industrial re-revolution of the United States by making it just simply too expensive to import and making it that companies build plants in the United States
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This is something that was doubled down on by his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who said this is a reordering of global trade
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His press secretary saying this is not a negotiation. So you would think that the idea is for these tariffs to stay in long term
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If you want to restructure the American economy, bring revenue, you want to keep those tariffs on
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But at the same time, just several minutes later when he was on Air Force One
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he talked about he was open to negotiations with different countries if they could offer something, quote, phenomenal
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meaning that the tariffs might not be long term because he trying simply to get concessions out of other countries in order to remove those tariffs And really this back and forth between a sort of short negotiating tactic
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and a long-term restructuring of global trade has been going on for weeks now
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not just in Donald Trump's mind, but also in his whole administration
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And the reality is that no one really knows what the ultimate goal is
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And that in itself is a problem for global markets, for businesses around the world, because there is uncertainty
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They cannot know for sure that these tariffs are going to stay or that these tariffs are going to go
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And his own words, a goal is for things to go boom, isn't it, Kedvin? That poster board he's holding up, it says reciprocal tariffs
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Are they really reciprocal? Well, look, if you look at that board, those charts, there were two columns
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One was the tariff that the United States was imposing on these countries, and the other one was the supposed tariffs that were charged to the United States by these different countries, including currency manipulation and trade barriers
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That was written in very small font. Let's take the example of the European Union, because he specifically mentioned it during that presentation
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He said, they charge us 39 percent. We're going to charge them 20, so we're charging them essentially half
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Now, how did they get to that number? In reality, it seems that what the European Union
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tariffs U imports is on average between 1 and 3 percent very far off from the 39 So how did we get to that number Several media outlets sort of looked into this and then questioned the White House
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and it seemed that the way they got there was to use the U.S. trade deficit with any specific
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country and then divide that by its exports, that country's exports to the United States
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That number being the final number and then divided by two is the number that they decided to reciprocate, quote unquote, to the other countries
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So clearly this is not actual reciprocal tariffs because it includes much more
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It includes the trade imbalance that the U.S. believes it has. It involves other barriers that are not trade related, like regulations, especially when it comes to the European Union
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Also, the value-added tax, even though the value-added tax in the European Union, for example, applies as well to U.S. goods as to domestic goods
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But if you listen to Howard Lutnick, again, the Commerce Secretary, he really made that very clear, saying that if countries want those tariffs to be removed, they need to change their regulations, change their value-added taxes, not just their tariffs if they want the U.S. to back off
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And he finished with this. These non-tariff trade barriers, they are the monsters that need to be slayed
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And all this explaining some of the stern responses we've seen from world leaders reacting to Trump's tariffs
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Thank you very much. Ketamin Gorgastani, our foreign editor
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