Gavin Bade

And for American consumers.

A lot of factory owners saying, I used to get a widget that I use in my factory.

I used to get it for less money.

Now I have to pass those costs on to consumers.

There's a couple reasons for this.

One is that many companies

were anticipating the tariffs and trying to front run them.

So you'll remember that Trump in April on Liberation Day said, we're going to put all these tariffs in place.

And then after a bunch of stock market upheaval, bond market upheaval, he paused them for a long time.

And so when he paused those tariffs, a lot of companies tried to bring in as much as they could, fill their warehouses so they wouldn't have to pay tariffs in the future.

That really ballooned the trade deficit in a few months of 2025.

Then after the tariffs got in place, you saw that trade deficit narrow a little bit, but you still saw more than us importing less.

What happened instead is that we just switched the places that we were importing from.

So we had very high tariffs on China for a number of months last year.

Our imports from China dropped, but our imports from India, from Southeast Asia, from other nations actually grew significantly.

Trump has used this tariff authority to threaten other nations over a variety of issues, right?

It could be a trade issue.

It could be something like, I want control of Greenland, so I'm going to threaten tariffs on the European Union.

Every one of those cases, he was using this legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

He used it because it allowed him to impose tariffs very, very quickly and really at the drop of a hat whenever he wanted to.