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Takeaways
- While Trade Representative Jamieson Grer was testifying to lawmakers, the president announced a 90 day pause on some tariffs that were recently announced.
- House Representatives grilled Greer over the strategy behind tariffs. The tariffs have been described as either a tool to negotiate better trade agreements with foreign countries or as a barrier to trade to encourage U.S. manufacturing.
- Trump has imposed a punishing tariff of 125% on China, and a 10% tariff on all imports from around the world.
The sudden change in tariff policies by President Donald Trump on Wednesday has left a top adviser scrambling to explain it to lawmakers.
Jamieson Greer – the White House trade rep – was in the middle of an hearing with members of House of Representatives’ Ways and Means committee on Wednesday when Trump issued a 90 day pause to many of the “reciprocal”, or reciprocal, tariffs which had just come into effect hours before. Greer pivoted from defending wide-ranging tariffs against trading partners to explaining why Trump suddenly rolled back the policy.
“The President put these high tariffs in place, but today he simply yanked out. Is this part of the plan? Was this always part of the original plan?” Greer was asked by Tom Suozzi from New York.
Greer said that the tariffs had been paused in order to give other countries time to negotiate with Trump. This echoes the reasoning behind Trump’s announcement on social media.
"A lot of these countries have come to us and they said, 'We understand American leadership. We understand what you're trying to do. We want to have reciprocal trade with you,'" Greer said.
Did Tariff Threats Influence Negotiations?
In the last few months, lawmakers, financial markets and business leaders have speculated on how serious Trump is about imposing high import taxation on trading partners. This could potentially unravel the global free trade system.
The pause on Wednesday suggested that the threats were negotiating techniques to extract concessions other countries. This gave a boost to an already battered stock exchange, which had plummeted last week due to fears of the economic damage high tariffs could cause.
Trump’s sequence of tariff announcements, abrupt reversals, and last-minute changes over the past few weeks has roiled financial markets and created uncertainty among business leaders and consumers, which economists say is damaging to the economy. However, Aaron Bean, a Republican from Florida, defended Trump’s trade wars as a way to restore manufacturing, one of several stated goals for the tariffs.
"It would be so easy to ignore our collapsing manufacturing base," he said. "It would be so easy to just ignore that we're subsidizing the rest of the globe right now, but it's not how you roll. It's not how this president rolls. We're determined to make things better."
