Tariff Man's superpowers are weaker than he thinks

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

78% : The world trade system showed extraordinary flexibility and resilience after Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods during his first term.
59% : With a diverse production profile, it has always been quite a self-sufficient economy, and the rise of the Asian consumer pushed the US share of worldwide goods imports down to just 15.9 per cent last year, less than Europe (taking the EU and UK together) and only 3 percentage points above China.
49% : For Trump, import taxes are the philosopher's stone that turns base metal into gold.
47% : Quite simply, the US just isn't that big in global trade any more.
43% : Beijing itself knows the limits to blocking other countries' exports, having tried and failed to coerce Australia and Lithuania into changing political stances by restricting trade.
40% : This week Beijing announced export bans on some critical minerals including germanium and gallium in retaliation for US controls on semiconductor technology, but such restrictions weren't exactly crippling when China tried them on the EU in the past.
35% : Tariffs may have an intuitive appeal, but the evidence suggests they are a weaker superpower than Trump supposes.
29% : Even before taking office Trump has threatened them twice: against Mexico and Canada if they don't sort out immigration and the fentanyl trade, and against the Brics middle-income countries for their (almost non-existent) campaign for a currency to replace the US dollar.
28% : The US trade deficit with China, which Trump accuses of dumping cheap goods into the American market, did shrink after his tariffs were imposed.
28% : Trump may go after those countries with tariffs too, but in that case, imports will either find a way round or get choked off altogether, causing a massive inflationary shock and/or recession to force domestic production and consumption into line.
23% : If Trump really does favour tariffs over other measures like export controls on technology and financial sanctions he will find them a clumsy and often ineffective way of asserting American power.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.