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The Trump Tariff deadline has arrived and even tariff skeptics are declaring him the winner of numerous tariff showdowns.
“To the extent that it’s been a negotiating posture , it’s worked miracles,” said Richard Stern with the Heritage Foundation.
The president had declared August 1 as his deadline other countries to reach new, fairer, trade deals with the United States, or face punishing tariffs. As the final days ticked off, the U.S. announced deals with countries such as the U.K., South Korea, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Japan and Vietnam, as well as the European Union.
Stern sees Trump’s accomplishment as striking.“What’s extraordinary is… either his standing up and doing this is extraordinary,” he said, “or frankly, it’s extraordinary that it took 80 years or more to get a U.S. president who would stand up for us in this way.”
Stern says he still hopes to see the tariff furor settle down, a lot, until even the tariffs spelled out in those trade deals are whittled down to zero.
“If they’re left in the long run, tariffs are a tax on your consumers and your producers,” he said. “If tariffs were a magic way of reindustrializing your country, or drawing in revenues from abroad, everybody would be in support of tariffs all the time.”