The Liars Are Out in Force Thanks to the ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs

This column isn’t what you probably expect it to be. I’m sure you read that headline and expected we’re going to be decrying the legacy corporate propaganda press and its ubiquitous fearmongering over the economic effects of the tariffs which went into place last week as President Trump seeks to rebalance the relationships between the United States and the rest of the world on trade.

I could do multiple columns on that subject. Instead, I’ll just throw in this X conversation…

I think the market reax and most every mainstream economist left, right and center is pretty clear !

— Jonathan Martin (@jmart) April 5, 2025

That’s Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who responded to one of the on-again, off-again expressions of perspective by investor Bill Ackman by noting two days of market trades as a final judgment on the tariffs.

Two days! It’s insane.

Reminded me of Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War was lost in the midst of the Tet Offensive, which was one of the most lopsided military disasters in the history of warfare. Cronkite was categorically wrong in his judgment, and near-treasonous in his abuse of his position to spread defeatism when it wasn’t warranted.

This isn’t a column about media malpractice, however. Because where the tariffs are concerned, the liars who matter are people like this woman…

Europe is ready to negotiate with the US.

We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods.

Because we’re always ready for a good deal.

But we’re also prepared to respond with countermeasures.

And protect ourselves against indirect effects through trade diversion. pic.twitter.com/hpZ77TXH4B

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) April 7, 2025

Ace of Spades quite reasonably called Ursula von der Leyen “the unelected dictator of Europe,” and also noted that she’s limiting this zero-for-zero tariff offer to industrial goods, because the EU’s objective remains to freeze American agricultural products out of Europe. Here’s another example of this, from the UK…

Britain doesn’t want to lower food standards.

Doing a trade deal with Trump means allowing a tsunami of substandard foods which decimate public health and food security.

USA deal also causes huge problems for Northern Ireland.

Say NO to being Trumped! Write to your MP… pic.twitter.com/R4bE3N95E3

— Liz Webster (@LizWebsterSBF) April 6, 2025

Imagine hearing lectures about food quality from the culinary wasteland that is Great Britain.

And what underlies this, with emphasis on the “lies,” is that the Euros and the rest of the people now performatively scrambling to make a zero-for-zero deal with us on tariffs aren’t really offering a surrender at all.

Food safety regulations, VAT taxes the revenues of which are rolled into producer subsidies, “net-zero” environmental red tape, and other things, are the real trade barriers being used to abuse American producers in this country.

It isn’t just tariffs that make a Chevy Tahoe cost $175,000 in Norway.

Peter Navarro was on CNBC on Monday talking about another malefactor along these lines, Vietnam. You may have seen that the Vietnamese are offering a zero-for-zero trade on tariffs, and Navarro noted how dishonest those offers are…

Peter Navarro:
President Trump will negotiate with countries offering to drop their tariffs to zero but they must also remove non-tariff trade barriers against American products.
“Let’s take Vietnam. When they come to us and say we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us… pic.twitter.com/NYD51Mp6CP

— Paul Furlong (@MDMPaul) April 7, 2025

The transcript of Navarro’s appearance, via RealClearPolitics, shows just how insidious all this is…

PETER NAVARRO: So when you ask if we’re willing to negotiate, the president will always listen. But let’s understand what the problem is.

When you have a country like Vietnam — let’s take Vietnam — when they come to us and say, “We’ll go to zero tariffs,” that means nothing to us because it’s the non-tariff cheating that matters.

Let’s do Vietnam. They sell us $15 for every $1 we sell them. About $5 of that $15 is China trans-shipping to Vietnam to evade their tariffs.

What does Vietnam do? They dump into our markets, killing our shrimpers, our people who make metal brackets, kitchen cabinets, agricultural products. They engage in intellectual property theft. They have the biggest number of cases — aside from China — at the Department of Commerce on dumping.

So the point is, anybody who wants to come talk to us, talk to us about lowering your non-tariff barriers.

Vietnam has a 10 percent VAT. Europe has a 19 percent VAT. We can’t compete against that. We have tried.

Let me just make this point. We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT tax relief, and they’ve told us no. Every single time. We’ve won case after case at the World Trade Organization on things like our agricultural products — pork, beef, and corn — and they think…

CNBC HOST: What we’re all trying to understand is: if there are going to be negotiations, and you’re saying zero is not enough, what is enough?

PETER NAVARRO: Zero is a small first start.

CNBC HOST: Okay, okay, then what is enough?

PETER NAVARRO: Let me answer that question. Let’s take them one at a time. We’ve got plenty of time.

So what is enough?

Okay, you take any given country — they’re like fingerprints. They all cheat us in a different way. So here are the things they cheat us on. Some of them engage in currency manipulation. Some of them have a hefty VAT tax. All of them dump into our markets. All of them engage in heavy export subsidies and government subsidies. All of them put up these phony technical and phytosanitary barriers to our Ag products, our autos, and everything in between. Many of them steal our intellectual property. A lot of them run sweatshop labor, including forced child labor. They have pollution havens.

So when you say to me, “What do we want from them?” We want fairness. We don’t want them to kill American workers by inundating us with this non-tariff cheating.

And it would be really refreshing to have the media talk more about that. This zero-tariff thing — it’s a misdirection. It’s the non-tariff barriers.

We could certainly attack these people in kind with a host of onerous regulations, predatory subsidies, and other non-tariff trade barriers. That isn’t what Trump is doing. He’s taking a far more straightforward approach. The Trump administration built a schedule based on the U.S. trade deficit with each of the countries in question and imposed tariffs based on the structural disadvantage they impose on our producers. (RELATED: The Dismal Science and the Trumpian Tariff Hullabaloo)

Which generates, back to the original set of liars mentioned on this page, coverage like this…

Trump Trade Adviser Moves Goalposts on Tariffs Despite Warnings https://t.co/hQtnSz1t60

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) April 7, 2025

Navarro never moved the goalposts. The administration has been clear from the beginning that trade barriers of multiple kinds were in the crosshairs, and not just monetary tariffs. Objectively, it would be stupid and ineffective to simply match our trade partners’ tariff for tariff. In fact, that would simply encourage even more cheating by way of regulations and other measures that wouldn’t be defined as tariffs.

But the lies keep mounting.

Interestingly, though, while the markets are roiling (something which most Americans aren’t overly concerned with, either because they aren’t in the markets or because they take a longterm investment strategy and recognize what a fantastic buy-the-dip opportunity the current turmoil offers), there isn’t such a major hue and cry among the public at present over Trump’s tariffs.

We had protests across the country, which appeared to have been driven in no small part by a pay-for-play guarantee from left-wing non-profit groups (and how much funding from China fueled those activities? Inquiring minds wish to know…), but for an economic and political crash we hear so much about how things seem awfully calm.

Maybe wait and see. And maybe don’t make Cronkite’s mistake and declare the trade war lost or that Trump is the bad guy when the opening zero-for-zero gambit is so transparently dishonest.

Nice try, you liars. You aren’t up against idiots. You’ll have to deal with America on a much more even keel than that.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: A Tariffic Week

Coddled Princesses and Stupid-Party Simps Is Not How We Make an American Revival

Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending

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