For months on the campaign trail and after taking office, President Donald Trump promised that his tariff policies would be based on a simple principle: reciprocity.
“Whatever they tax us, we will tax them,” Trump told a joint session of Congress in March, outlining plans for higher tariffs on imports from much of the world. When some of those tariff rates were unveiled in early April—before being paused, amended, altered, and in some cases finally imposed—the president reiterated that point. “They’re reciprocal—so whatever they charge us, we charge them,” Trump said.
The White House has dropped that talking point in recent months. Even so, the executive order that invoked emergency powers to impose those tariffs still promises that they will be “reciprocal.” And in courts where the Trump administration is defending the president’s use of those expansive (and possibly unconstitutional) powers, the administration’s attorneys continue to refer to that set of tariffs as the “reciprocal” tariffs—to distinguish them from tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico that were imposed in February for different reasons.
So are the tariffs actually reciprocal? Not even close.
Consider Switzerland. Last year, the average Swiss tariff on U.S. goods was a minuscule 0.2 percent, while the U.S. charged an average tariff of 1.4 percent on goods imported from Switzerland.
To make trade with Switzerland “reciprocal,” then, Trump would have had to lower American tariffs on Swiss goods. In fact, he’d have to lower them even more, because in January the Swiss government abolished all of its tariffs on industrial goods from America—an arrangement that Swiss officials said would allow more than 99 percent of American items into the country duty-free.
Trump responded to that by imposing a staggering 39 percent tariff on imports from Switzerland. This is reciprocity?
The Swiss tariffs are where the Trump administration’s claim of reciprocity is most disconnected from reality, but it is hardly the only example.
Singapore does not charge any tariffs on imports from the United States. Nevertheless, Trump’s 10 percent baseline tariff applies to anything that Americans want to purchase from individuals or businesses in Singapore. The average tariff charged by the European Union on American goods is a scant 1.7 percent, but imports from there will now face a 15 percent tariff here. Vietnam charges an average tariff of less than 3 percent on American goods, but Vietnamese goods will face a 20 percent tariff when coming into the U.S.—and that’s after Vietnam negotiated with Trump to lower what had been a 46 percent rate announced in April.
In all, about 80 percent of the Trump administration’s supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs are higher than the tariffs charged by those countries on American goods, according to a new analysis from the Cato Institute.
“This revelation is more than just a rhetorical gotcha: tariff advocates, including Trump himself, have long justified new US tariffs on the grounds that they were needed to balance foreign tariffs, which are supposedly quite high, on American goods,” write Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, the co-authors of the Cato analysis. “Overall, the data further demonstrate that US tariffs today are about protectionism, with ‘fairness’ and other buzzwords simply a cover for achieving it.”
There’s nothing fair about charging Americans higher taxes in an attempt to restrict global trade. And there’s nothing reciprocal about it at all.
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