White House Official Says More Than 50 Countries Reached Out About Tariffs

A top White House economic adviser said Sunday that more than 50 countries have contacted the Trump administration to initiate negotiations over a broad swath of tariffs that were announced last week on nearly every nation in the world.

“They’re doing that because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariff,” he told the outlet.

Last week, Trump announced a minimum of 10 percent tariffs on all trading partners, as well as higher levies for about 60 nations—typically half of what each levies against the United States. The higher tariffs are due to take effect on April 9.

Canada and Mexico were exempt from the latest tariffs due to already being subject to tariffs of 25 percent that were announced several weeks ago. Those tariffs were levied in a bid to curb illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking into the United States via its southern and northern neighbors.

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Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te on Sunday offered zero tariffs as the basis for talks with the United States, pledging to remove trade barriers rather than imposing reciprocal measures and saying Taiwanese companies will raise their U.S. investments.

Elsewhere in the Sunday interview, Hassett said that U.S. economic data has shown that “we just had one of the stronger jobs reports I’ve seen in a long time,” suggesting that the tariffs could be leading to America jobs.

The jobs data “was about 50 percent better than markets expected. It’s the second one in a row,” he said. “We’ve created already something like 10,000 auto jobs since President Trump took office, and I just got word—anecdotal word last night that auto plants are adding second shifts in the U.S. in order to respond to these tariffs these days.”

Hassett said he did not expect a big hit to consumers because exporters were likely to lower prices “because it depends on supply and demand … elasticity of supply and demand,” he said. “And again, if you thought consumers are going to pay that tax, then you should be puzzled about why it is that countries are upset about it.

“The bottom line is that China entered the WTO [World Trade Organization] in 2000. In the 15 years that followed, real incomes declined about $1,200 cumulatively over that time,” Hassett said.

“And so, if cheap goods were the answer—if cheap goods were going to make Americans real wages, real welfare better off, then real incomes would have gone up over that time. Instead, they went down because wages went down more than prices went down.”

Since the tariff announcement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a combined 4,000 points on April 3 and April 4. The Nasdaq plunged 5.82 percentage points, and the S&P 500 also posted a similar decline, dropping 5.97 percent, on April 4.

Reuters contributed to this report.