President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed "tariff man," has raised tariffs on goods imported into the U.S., honoring his campaign pledge in 2016 to slap tariffs on imports from countries that he believed were cheating the U.S., including China.
"Any country that devalues their currency in order to take unfair advantage of the United States, and all of its companies who can't compete, will face tariffs and taxes to stop the cheating. And when they see that, they will stop the cheating," Trump said during a rally in Tampa, Fla.
Trump has made good on this promise, experts told us. One expert we consulted is Simon Evenett, professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, who created Global Trade Alert, a trade policy monitoring initiative.
Citing Global Trade Alert data, Evenett said that as of June 22, an estimated $618 billion of U.S. imports were affected by tariff increases implemented under Trump. That number accounts for the taxes Trump has levied on goods coming in from all trading partners, not just China.
The products included imported solar panels, washing machines, steel and aluminum, and billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods as part of a trade war.
Other tariffs, including on all goods coming in from Mexico, were proposed but never put into effect. But a rewrite of NAFTA tightened the rules on goods that could be imported from Mexico or Canada tariff-free.
As of Jan. 7, 2020, the U.S. had imposed tariffs on 16.8% of imported goods, measured as a share of the value of all U.S. imports in 2017, the year before the first Trump tariffs were imposed, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The first phase of the trade deal Trump signed with China in January kept the bulk of Trump's tariffs targeting China in place, although it scaled down some tariff rates and suspended some additional import taxes that had been set for the future.
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"The 'Phase 1' trade deal with China hardly lowered any tariffs against China, and mainly just stopped him from a further threatened increase," said Alan Deardorff, professor of international economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
After the deal, average U.S. tariffs on imports from China remained more than six times higher than they were before the trade war started in 2018, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonprofit research organization.
"Meanwhile, the tariffs Trump applied to steel and aluminum from many countries continue to be in place," Deardorff said.
We rate this Promise Kept.