World news
Subterms
More stories
- in US Politics
Ukrainians who fled war fear deportation under Trump: ‘I am young, I want to live’
Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Danyil packed everything he could in a bag and traveled 15 hours by bus from the Zakarpattia region in western Ukraine to the Czech Republic.He fled the war at 17, just as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Now aged 20, he watches from the US as the war drags on. In December, Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 370,000 have been wounded in the war.“I didn’t want to die young,” said Danyil, whose last name the Guardian is withholding due to concerns for his safety if he returns to Ukraine now.His view of current, US-brokered negotiations are: “There are peace talks now but unless the Russian government is overthrown nothing is going to change. They will continue to bomb.”After 10 months of working in a Czech automobile plant in the northern region of Liberec, Danyil traveled to the US on 4 January 2023, thanks to a Biden administration program, Uniting for Ukraine, that offered a temporary sanctuary to Ukrainians fleeing the Russian aggression.But soon after Donald Trump took office again in January, he suspended the Uniting for Ukraine policy, pausing admissions under the program and barring those already in the US from renewing their two-year work permits and deportation protections.Weeks later, the Trump administration paused all immigration applications for further relief by those who arrived under Uniting for Ukraine and other Biden-era processes that relied on a policy known as parole and Trump has blocked pathways to permanent legal status.The moves have pushed hundreds of thousands into a state of insecurity after they were welcomed to a safe haven.As of December 2024, the US had 240,000 Ukrainians with US sponsors under the Uniting for Ukraine program, including Danyil, according to government figures obtained by the Guardian.Unable to renew their parole status or apply for another temporary legal status, Danyil and the other thousands of immigrants could lose their permits and could end up undocumented and vulnerable to deportation.Danyil said his parole status ended at the beginning of this year and while he has applied for renewal, he hasn’t received a response from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.“I don’t want to stay here illegally but I don’t want to go back to Ukraine. I am afraid, I am young, I want to live,” he said.Because Ukrainian newcomers were only given permission to live in the US for two-year increments, many applied for other legal shelters, including Temporary Protected Status (TPS).Earlier in January, Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, extended Ukraine’s designation for TPS through October 2026. As of September 2024, 63,425 Ukrainians had been granted TPS in the US.Danyil said he applied for TPS this March, but has not yet received a response.Trump has directed the Department of Homeland Security to re-evaluate TPS designations of all countries, and his administration has already announced it will phase out protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries under ongoing armed conflicts.In response, the agency has said that it would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans welcomed into the US under another Biden-era sponsorship known as CHNV.More recently, the US district judge Edward Chen in San Francisco blocked the Trump administration from terminating the temporary protection program for 350,000 Venezuelan migrants.But with continued administration efforts to repeal protection for immigrants in the country, advocates are worried that officials could also discontinue Ukraine’s TPS designation, leaving Ukrainians afraid to go back to a country still at war with no other valid status in the US.“That’s what has really threatened the safety of over 240,000 Ukrainians,” said Anne Smith, the executive director at Ukraine Immigration Task Force, a nonprofit organization that has helped families from Ukraine find refuge in the US.“There’s a great danger of being deported, and if not deported, then placed in detention for a long time. Given the majority of the Ukrainians who came here on Uniting for Ukraine under humanitarian parole, there really are no legal avenues available to them unless either the Department of Homeland Security lifts the processing of applications suspension or Congress decides to act,” she added.On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, introduced a bill that would offer Ukrainians who were granted parole, like Danyil, a temporary guest status, regardless of when they arrived in the US.“When the war started, Republicans across the country opened their hearts and communities to desperately fleeing Ukrainians, even actively petitioning President Biden to protect them from deportation. So far, not a single Republican has cosponsored my bill. But I urge them to join this simple act of American compassion. Standing up to dictators and speaking out for victims of war should never be a partisan issue,” Durbin said in a recent press release.Illinois is now home to 57,000 Ukrainians brought to the US under Uniting for Ukraine and another 65,000 reside in New Jersey and New York.The Leonid Foundation, named after a Ukrainian man who was killed in Mariupol during the Russian assault of 2022, has helped more than 3,000 Ukrainian refugees relocate to New Jersey since the war started, according to Anna Move, the organization’s president.The foundation helped Danyil find a home in central New Jersey. He works mounting television sets in people’s homes and is saving money hopefully to go to college. Meanwhile, he assists wounded Ukrainian soldiers who come to the US to get their prosthetics.He said: “A lot of people like me dream of staying in the US because there’s an opportunity. I am afraid of going back, I’ve seen those soldiers.” More
- in US Politics
She’s a waitress raised on a farm – can Rebecca Cooke win a key Wisconsin seat?
Wisconsin’s third congressional district has voted for Donald Trump every time he’s been on the ballot, but the moderate Democrat Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm, thinks she can flip the state’s most competitive seat next year.Last year, Cooke outperformed other Democrats when she tried to unseat incumbent Derrick Van Orden, a retired US Navy Seal who attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol and shouted “lies” during Joe Biden’s 2024 state of the union address. She lost the race by less than three points.She’s trying again. She launched her 2026 campaign in March, amid constituent anger at Van Orden for refusing to face questions at in-person town halls. She is doubling down on the campaigning that worked for in November, hitting the pavement across the western Wisconsin district.In the soul-searching among Democrats over the future of their party, Cooke aligns with the moderate Blue Dog coalition led by Washington state representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who told Mother Jones that after she endorsed Cooke, Van Orden “shoulder-checked me on the floor”.But Cooke rejects a label within the party, calling them “somewhat harmful” and polarizing in her district. She tells voters that she thinks lawmakers in DC are either too far left or too far right, and that there need to be more regular folks willing to work across the aisle to get things done. The idea resonates with people, who tell her they’re over the polarization and chaos. She needs votes from people across the political spectrum to win in the moderately right-leaning district.Cooke’s resumé is the kind often cobbled together in small towns across the US: she works as a waitress, she ran a retail business and an Airbnb business, she worked on Democratic campaigns, and she started a non-profit to support female entrepreneurs. She first ran for the congressional seat in 2022, losing in the Democratic primary, then again in 2024, beating out two other Democrats to take on Van Orden.She has been waitressing since she was a teenager, she said. “I love that work. I love the hospitality industry. I think there’s so much dignity in hospitality work, and it’s something that allows me being able to work at night, to be able to campaign all day.”She said her “more working-class” background aligns with the district but upsets her opponents, who have brought up her work on Democratic campaigns. The National Republican Congressional Committee has repeatedly called her a “sleazy political activist” and said she is lying about her background.“I’d love them to see the car that I drive around, and the place that I live,” she said. “Anybody that knows me knows that I’m not rolling in dough by any means.”Cooke grew up on a dairy farm, but her family had to sell their cows because of how competition affected the price of milk. Losing the farm wasn’t just losing a business, she said. “It’s just very much a part of our way of life, and we’ve lost thousands of dairy farms in Wisconsin.”In June, farmers around the state will host breakfasts to promote dairy farming. She said she’ll be at every dairy breakfast she can get to in the district, shaking hands and introducing herself.“I don’t know what people’s political background is, but when I’m shaking their hand, I’ll say: ‘I’m Rebecca Cooke, I grew up on a dairy farm,’ and I tell them a little bit about my background,” she said. “By the end of the conversation, they go: ‘So, what party are you from?’ And I would rather that question if they’re agreeing with me on similar values.”Cooke said she thinks Democrats need to bring people back into a big tent through pragmatism and detailing how their agenda would help Americans afford their housing and groceries.The party needs to create its own “prosperity gospel instead of just demonizing the right”, she said. “What are we going to do better? And how are we going to help people find their path to the middle class?” Democrats need to be bold, fresh and and willing to be “more uninhibited”.“I really think the change that we want to see has to come from the inside out and not from the outside in,” she said. “We need to look to our communities to solve these gaps and this vacuum and work to recruit people to be those strong voices and to run for office.“It shouldn’t be like, this is coming from the national party, and this is what you should think or do. It should be, this is what’s coming from our communities, and this is what we want the party to do.” More
- in US Politics
Democratic attorneys general sue Trump over ‘illegal’ voting order
A coalition of 19 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Thursday, arguing that a recent executive order signed by the president that seeks to overhaul the nation’s elections was “unconstitutional, anti-democratic, and un-American”.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, challenges several provisions of the far-reaching executive order issued last week, including the proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and new rules requiring all mail ballots be received by election day.The attorneys general accuse the president of overstepping his authority and allege that the order “usurps the states’ constitutional power and seeks to amend election law by fiat”.Among the defendants named in the lawsuit are Trump, the attorney general Pam Bondi and the United States Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency charged with helping to improve election administration and ensuring voting accessibility and security.The state attorneys general say they are asking a judge to declare the provisions “unconstitutional and void”.“The president’s executive order has no legal justification and far exceeds the scope of his constitutional authority,” the California attorney general Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said during a press conference on Thursday afternoon.“Let me be clear: Trump is acting like he’s above the law. He isn’t. He’s violating the US constitution. He can’t, which is why we’re taking action.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the lawsuit, the attorneys general repeatedly cite the elections clause of the constitution, which says that states set the “times, places and manner” of elections. The clause allows Congress to pass federal voting laws, which House Republicans are racing to do, but “nowhere does the constitution provide the president, or the executive branch, with any independent power to modify the states’ procedures for conducting federal elections”, the attorneys general assert in the complaint.California was joined by the Democratic attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.Aaron Ford, the Democratic attorney general of Nevada, said Trump’s executive order was not only unconstitutional but “unnecessary”. He said that all US states had a “vested interest” in ensuring a fair election process.“To insinuate otherwise and to seek to impose restrictions based on these insinuations, is political gamesmanship. Frankly, it’s illegal political gamesmanship,” Ford said during the press conference with Bonta.“Blackmailing states with the removal of election security funding unless we comply with the order is a far more damaging and harmful threat than any perceived dangers the president is peddling falsehoods over.”Trump’s elections order, described by White House staff secretary Will Scharf as “the farthest-reaching executive action taken” in the nation’s history, also faces legal challenges brought by the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, and Senate and House Democratic leaders, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by two nonprofit organizations, the Campaign Legal Center and the State Democracy Defenders Fund.These lawsuits were filed in the US district court for the District of Columbia.Trump, a prolific spreader of election falsehoods who sought to overturn his 2020 defeat on the baseless claim of a stolen election, has said the order is necessary to protect US elections against illegal non-citizen voting. Instances of noncitizens casting ballots in federal elections – a felony crime – are exceedingly rare. Yet Trump and Republicans have continued to amplify the myth.Trump’s order stated that the US had failed “to enforce basic and necessary election protection”, despite reports by elections officials that the recent elections have been among the most secure in US history.“The president seemingly had no qualms with the result of the last election and happily took office for a second term,” Bonta said. “That’s because our elections are secure.” More
- in US Politics
Trump news at a glance: Tariffs send US markets tumbling to worst day since Covid crash
Global financial markets were roiled by Donald Trump’s latest tariff announcement – with trillions of dollars knocked off the value of the world’s biggest companies and heightened fears of a US recession.In the US, the main indices saw their worst one-day falls in five years as the president claimed that “the markets are going to boom” in response to his sweeping tariffs.The scale of the sell-off highlights just how alarmed investors are by the tariffs, and the fears they could lead to a recession.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump insists ‘it’s going very well’ as markets crashDespite the worst markets crash in nearly five years, Trump denied the turmoil presented a problem, telling reporters: “I think it’s going very well … We’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom.”As world leaders reacted to the US president’s “liberation day” tariff policies demolishing the international trading order, about $2.5tn (£1.9tn) was wiped off Wall Street and share prices in other financial centres across the globe.Read the full storyUS markets see worst day since 2020Zooming in on US stock market, all three major US funds closed down in their worst day since June 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, had lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.Read the full storyRepublican Senate rebels decry tariffs as ‘bad policy’The first signs of an internal US political backlash against Donald Trump’s declaration of a global trade war are starting to emerge amid tanking stock markets worldwide, including on Wall Street, and widespread international criticism of the move.Read the full storyPete Hegseth faces Signal investigationThe Pentagon watchdog is launching an investigation into US defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about military operations in Yemen.The probe follows a bipartisan request from the Senate armed services committee after allegations emerged that highly precise – and most likely classified – intelligence about impending US airstrikes in Yemen, including strike timing and aircraft models, had been shared in a Signal group chat that included a journalist.Read the full storyTrump fires staffers after Laura Loomer urges him toDonald Trump fired six national security council staffers after an unusual meeting in the Oval Office where the far-right activist Laura Loomer presented opposition research against a number of staffers that she said showed they were disloyal to the US president, according to two people familiar with the matter.Read the full storyDr Oz confirmed for Medicare and Medicaid role amid cuts plansFormer heart surgeon and TV pitchman Dr Mehmet Oz was confirmed to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz became the agency’s administrator in a party-line 53-45 vote.The 64-year-old will manage health insurance programs for roughly half the country, with oversight of Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage. He steps into the new role as Congress is debating cuts to the Medicaid program, which provides coverage to millions of poor and disabled Americans.Read the full storyEnglish judge orders Trump to pay more than $800,000 in legal costsDonald Trump has been ordered by a judge in England to pay more than £620,000 ($820,000) in legal costs after unsuccessfully suing a company over denied allegations he took part in “perverted” sex acts.The US president brought a data protection claim against Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultancy founded by a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, in 2022.Steele authored a report that included allegations – all denied by Trump – that he had been “compromised” by the Russian Security Service. Mrs Justice Steyn threw out the claim in February last year and told Trump to pay an initial £290,000 in costs. Trump decided not to pay and was now ordered to pay £626,058.98.Read the full storySenators try to claw back power over tariffs Senior senators introduced new bipartisan legislation on Thursday seeking to claw back some of Congress’s power over tariffs after Donald Trump unveiled sweeping new import taxes that rattled the global economy.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
Canada will retaliate against Trump’s “unjustified, unwarranted” tariffs with a 25% tax on US vehicles, said prime minister Mark Carney. The taxes will target vehicles that are not compliant with the continental free trade deal.
The method used to calculate the most important numbers in international trade, politics and economics has left some of the world’s leading experts shocked. Here’s how they were calculated.
JD Vance said that Elon Musk would remain a “friend and an adviser” to the vice-president and Donald Trump after he leaves his current role with the so-called “department of government efficiency”.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 2 April 2025. More - in US Politics
Trump tariffs live: US markets see worst day in five years as president claims ‘stock is going to boom’
The New York stock exchange has closed on its worst day of trading since June 2020 – during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.The main indices saw their worst one-day falls in five years as Donald Trump claimed that “the markets are going to boom” in response to his sweeping tariffs.The S&P 500 index is down 4.9% at the close, which Reuters flags is the biggest one-day drop since June 2020.The Dow has also posted its biggest one-day drop since June 2020, down 4%.Meanwhile, the Nasdaq tumbled 5.9%, its worst single-day performance since March 2020.The scale of the sell-off, wiping trillions of dollars off the value of US companies, highlights just how alarmed investors are by the tariffs, and the fears they could lead to a recession.Speaking to reporters earlier on Thursday, Trump denied market turmoil presented a problem. The president said:
I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would be exactly the way it is … We’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom.
Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One today that tariffs on imported semiconductor chips and pharmaceuticals will be coming “soon”.He added that the “reciprocal” tariffs he announced yesterday have put the US “in the drivers seat.”“Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do,” he said. “If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor. They would have said no. Now they will do anything for us.”The Senate has confirmed Mehmet Oz – a former heart surgeon and TV personality – as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Oz will take the lead at the agency, which provides health care coverage to more than 160 million Americans – but which is facing significant changes as Congress debates cuts to the Medicaid coverage.For more, read on below:Volkswagen will add an import fee to its cars sold in the United States, the German automaker told its dealers today according to the Wall Street Journal.The news comes the same day Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on foreign automobiles went into effect. Volkswagen said it will announce the exact fee by mid-April.In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, the manufacturer said it wanted to be “very transparent about navigating through this time of uncertainty.”While countries around the world grapple with the meaning of the United States’s new “reciprocal” tariffs, two countries that were exempt from those particular duties – Mexico and Canada – are still preparing for the fallout of other trade decisions.Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced plans to counter Trump’s tariffs earlier today, with a focus on increasing domestic production of items it has historically imported from the US, including natural gas.Although Mexico was not named in Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs announcement, the country is still subject to a 25% tariff on automobiles, steel and aluminum.“Yesterday, something very important happened: the recognition of the free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States, which is fundamental at this moment,” she said during a speech in Mexico City.Meanwhile, in Canada, prime minister Mark Carney announced that Canada had introduced a 25% tariff on automobiles made in the United States.“We take these measures reluctantly,” he said. “And we take them in ways that’s intended and will cause maximum impact in the United States and minimum impact here in Canada.”Newly appointed as the Canadian prime minister, Carney added that he hoped to bring together a “coalition of like-minded countries” in search of an alternative to the US: “If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.”Mike Pence will receive the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in May for his refusal to go along with the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.The JFK Library Foundation shared the announcement today, saying the award will recognize Donald Trump’s former vice-president “for putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.”After Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump put pressure on Pence to reject the results. When a mob of the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the election, some chanted that they wanted to “hang Mike Pence.” Secret Service agents removed the vice-president from the Capitol, but Pence returned later to continue certifying the election results after the building was secured.The New York stock exchange has closed on its worst day of trading since June 2020 – during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.The main indices saw their worst one-day falls in five years as Donald Trump claimed that “the markets are going to boom” in response to his sweeping tariffs.The S&P 500 index is down 4.9% at the close, which Reuters flags is the biggest one-day drop since June 2020.The Dow has also posted its biggest one-day drop since June 2020, down 4%.Meanwhile, the Nasdaq tumbled 5.9%, its worst single-day performance since March 2020.The scale of the sell-off, wiping trillions of dollars off the value of US companies, highlights just how alarmed investors are by the tariffs, and the fears they could lead to a recession.Speaking to reporters earlier on Thursday, Trump denied market turmoil presented a problem. The president said:
I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would be exactly the way it is … We’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom.
As news of Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs settles in today, the president’s allies on the far-right are reacting to news that their countries will face higher duties.In Italy, premier Giorgia Meloni told state television that she believes Trump’s decision to impose 20% tariffs on exports from Europe was “wrong”, but “it is not the catastrophe that some are making it out to be”.She added that the government will meet next week to discuss its response: “We need to open an honest discussion on the matter with the Americans, with the goal – at least from my point of view – of removing tariffs, not multiplying them”.Meanwhile, Argentinian president Javier Milei – who gifted tech billionaire Elon Musk a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February – said he hoped to meet Trump this evening at the “American Patriots Gala”. In response to the tariffs, Milei posted a link to the Queen song Friends will be Friends on social media.California’s Democratic representative Eric Swalwell has joined in a handful of lawmakers in criticizing Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, writing on X:
“Trump’s tariffs are a slap in the face to hardworking Americans, jacking up prices, straining small businesses, and risking jobs. This isn’t America first; it’s families last.”
Donald Trump is continuing to face criticism from US lawmakers after his tariffs reveal on Wednesday included tariffs on barren islands near Antartica that are populated by penguins.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called the tariffs “one of the dumbest decisions [Trump] has ever made as president”, adding: “And that’s saying something.”Schumer went on to say that “Donald Trump slapped tariffs on penguins and not on Putin,” in apparent reference to Trump’s 10% tariffs placed on the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands.Similarly, Adam Schiff, Democratic senator of California, released a video address on X of featuring a baby penguin he called “George.”
The Trump administration just put a tariff on this guy. That’s right, this guy. This is George. George lived on an uninhabited island called Heard Island … and Trump just put a 10% tariff on this island which begs of course the question, ‘What did George ever do to Donald Trump and his buddies?’
This is how nonsensical these tariffs are. This is how absurd and capricious and uncoordinated these tariffs are. And while it might seem absurd and funny that they put a tariff on penguins, it shows just the reckless nature of what they are doing. They are crashing the economy and it could just not be more self-destructive. We are alienating our friends and allies and even going after poor George.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday amid tumbling US stock markets and $2tn wiped off Wall Street after his tariffs reveal on Wednesday, Trump said:
I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would be exactly the way it is … We’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom.
He went on to add:
The rest of the world wants to see is there is any way they can make a deal. They’ve taken advantage of us for many years … I think it’s going to be unbelievable …
Over the last nearly 24 hours, Trump has faced widespread backlash from US lawmakers and global leaders over his tariffs plan, with senior Republican senator Mitch McConnell calling it “bad policy” while Canada – a traditional American ally – called the tariffs “unjustified” and “unwanted”.Here is the latest chart of the S&P500 as of 2pm ET on Thursday: Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican senator and former Senate majority leader, has criticized Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, saying that they are “bad policy and trade wars with our partners hurt working people most”.In a statement on Thursday afternoon, McConnell went on to say:
They are a tax on everyday working Americans. Preserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers requires working with our allies, not against them.
With so much at stake globally, the last thing we need is to pick fights with the very friends with whom we should be working with to protect against China’s predatory and unfair trade practices. That includes what we do on trade. More - in US Politics
Trump’s chaos-inducing global tariffs, explained in charts
Donald Trump’s announcement of a long slate of new tariffs on the US’s trading partners has caused chaos in global markets and threatens a global trade war and US recession.Long trailed on his election campaign, Trump’s plans were even more sweeping than many had predicted: a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and higher tariffs for key trading partners, including China and the EU.Though the tariffs won’t go into effect for a few more days, global markets have been reeling from the announcement of what’s to come.Here’s a breakdown of what the tariffs are and how they’ve affected the economy since Trump’s announcement.The new tariffsTrump’s new tariffs are twofold. First, all imported goods will be subject to a 10% universal tariff starting 5 April. Then, on 9 April, certain countries will see higher tariff rates – what Trump has deemed “reciprocal tariffs” in retaliation for tariffs the countries have placed on American exports.Keep in mind that tariffs are paid by American companies that are importing goods such as wine from Europe or microchips from Taiwan.Some of the highest tariffs will be put on imports from Asian countries, including China, India, South Korea and Japan. EU exports will also have a 20% tariff.How did the White House calculate its reciprocal tariffs? The administration said that it looked at the trade deficit between the US and a specific country as a percentage, and then considered that to be a tariff. So, for example, the value of US goods that are exported to China are 67% of the value of the Chinese goods that are imported into the US.The White House calls this definition a “tariff” placed on American goods, though a deficit and a tariff are not the same thing.It then halved the “tariff” and used that percentage to represent the new levy that the US would place on goods from that country.Canada and Mexico are notably absent from the list, despite being targets of a proposed 25% tariff. The White House said that goods covered under an existing trade agreement between the two countries will continue to have no tariffs.Targeting key trading partnersTrump and his economic advisers argue that the tariffs will strengthen US manufacturing while also lowering barriers other countries put on American goods. But the US has long been in a trade deficit, importing more goods than exporting.While increasing domestic manufacturing and relying less on foreign suppliers could strengthen the US economy in the long run, economists say that Trump’s tariffs are too aggressive and uncertain for them to actually encourage domestic investment. Instead, companies have said they will pass the cost of the tariffs on to consumers.Fear on Wall StreetMarkets immediately plummeted when exchanges started trading on Thursday morning, as Wall Street reacted to the new levies.Wall Street has been slumping for the last month as Trump introduced new tariffs and teased the ones he announced on Wednesday. All three exchanges went into correction territory in March, meaning that the indexes fell more than 10% from their recent peaks.The tariffs have also hit stock markets abroad. The UK’s FTSE 100 saw its worst day since August 2024, while markets in Japan, Hong Kong and Germany also tumbled.Leaders around the world expressed shock and frustration over the new tariffs. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called the tariffs “a major blow to the world economy”.“The global economy will massively suffer,” she said Thursday. “Uncertainty will spiral and trigger the rise of further protectionism. The consequences will be dire.”The new tariffs have also made the US dollar fall in value in relation to other major currencies.The strength of the US dollar is an important measure of how the US economy is seen by investors, relative to other economies. That the dollar has been falling shows that investors see instability in the US economy that is likely to last. More
