Making America Great Again? The Economic Impacts of Liberation Day Tariffs

On April 2, 2025, President Trump declared “Liberation Day,” announcing broad tariffs to reduce trade deficits and revive U.S. industry. We analyze the long-term economic impacts of these tariffs through the lens of a trade model that features flexible tariff passthrough and endogenous trade deficits, calibrated to trade and income data from 194 countries. If trading partners do not retaliate, the tariffs could decrease the U.S. trade deficit and improve its terms of trade, yielding modest welfare gains when tariff revenues reduce the income tax burden for American workers. However, reciprocal retaliation results in net welfare losses for the U.S. economy. We derive the unilaterally optimal tariff within our model and show that the USTR tariffs, based on bilateral deficits, differ markedly from this theoretical benchmark. Our calibrated model implies a unilaterally optimal tariff for the U.S. of 19 percent, uniformly applied across all trading partners, and linked to the overall trade deficit rather than bilateral imbalances. Under optimal foreign retaliation to the USTR tariffs, the calibrated model predicts a decline in U.S. welfare by up to 3.8 percent when accounting for input-output linkages, and a contraction in global employment by 1.1 percent.