Donald Trump made his most extreme proposal yet on tariffs while speaking on stage Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago: He would consider a 2,000 percent tariff on goods coming into the country.
“If I’m going to be president of this country I’m going to put a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff,” said Trump. “They’re not going to sell one car into the United States.”.
Trump has made promises to impose tariffs in the past, including a suggestion for tariffs higher than 200 percent on foreign-made vehicles. Though Trump may later claim that 2,000 percent was an obvious hyperbole, he really did say it on the stage.
Trump is now proposing 2,000 percent tariffs on imported cars pic.twitter.com/hajcWz0BtD
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2024
During the rest of the interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, Trump outlined his horrible economic plan, claiming that companies will drop plans to build factories overseas when faced with his threat of high tariffs. “The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States,” he explained.
Despite being fact checked by Micklethwait about the economic harm that his tariff proposal will create, Trump declared that “to me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.”
Economists estimate that Trump’s “America First” economic agenda of mass deportation and extreme tariffs will harm Americans by increasing inflation and shocking industries that rely on immigrant labor. “We find that ironically, despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” a recent devastating report read.
