The New Yorker:

The White House promised that tariffs would make America boom. But job growth has stalled and the President has been reduced to firing an official scorekeeper.

By John Cassidy

Georg Riekeles knows about hardball trade negotiations: during the long and arduous talks about the terms on which Britain would leave the European Union, he was an adviser to Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator. Back in April, when Riekeles saw that President Donald Trump issued an order, which was subsequently suspended, imposing blanket tariffs of twenty per cent on E.U. exports to the United States, he had a clear view on how the Europeans should respond: by threatening hefty duties on U.S. exports to Europe. This was what China had done, and it seemed possible that America’s other major trading partners would join together to force Trump to relent. “What was needed was for the E.U. negotiators to prepare a broad retaliatory package,” Riekeles, who is now an associate director at the European Policy Center, a Brussels think tank, told me this week.

The E.U. did hit back by imposing hefty duties on some iconic U.S. goods, including Kentucky bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Subsequently, it threatened to expand the levies to U.S. aircraft, car parts, and certain other products. But, in the end, it held back from threatening Trump-style blanket tariffs and invoking the E.U.’s new Anti-Coercion Instrument, a policy tool that was introduced in 2023 to deal with external economic pressure, which would have enabled it to target U.S. banks and tech giants, such as Google and Meta, which have huge businesses in Europe. Referring to the E.U. leaders, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, Riekeles said, “They never got going on a really punitive package.”

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