INTERNACIONAL
Trump wagers US economy in high-stakes tariff gamble at 100-day mark
President Donald Trump campaigned for a second term on pledges to lower prices, create jobs and impose tough tariffs on imports, especially from China.
Dubbing himself the «Tariff Man» last fall, he told an audience at the Economic Club of Chicago, «To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.» However, in his first months in office, it is unclear whether Trump can, or should, implement the harsh reciprocal tariffs he announced in April against dozens of countries.
Now, 100 days into his second term, economists told Fox News Digital they see these proposed reciprocal tariffs as politically motivated, unnecessary and failing to secure the benefits from U.S. trading partners that Trump had been hoping for.
CHINA IS ‘CAVING’ TO TRUMP’S TRADE WAR STRATEGY, EXPERT SIGNALS
President Donald Trump holds a «Foreign Trade Barriers» document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo)
Instead, they warned, Trump’s tariffs could grind billions of dollars in trade to a halt between the world’s two largest economies, disrupt global supply chains and risk torpedoing the U.S. economy into a major slump or recession.
When Trump took office, chances of recession «were probably about 10%,» Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, told Fox News Digital in an interview. «Now, they’re up to around 55%.»
It is unclear whether Trump will continue to push through with these unpopular tariffs, which are slated to take force in early July. In the near-term, uncertainty and volatility remain.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on March 28, 2025 amid President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Short-term tariff impact
Trump announced tariffs on April 2, dubbed «Liberation Day.» The announcement included both a 10% universal baseline tariff and plans to enact larger tariffs on dozens of other countries, including China.
These new import taxes immediately sent stock markets into free-fall, triggering one of the largest single-day S&P 500 losses since World War II, and prompting deep and unyielding uncertainty over possible next moves.
«The only thing that’s happened that has pushed the odds of a recession up so high, so fast, is chaos coming from out of the White House,» Wolfers said.
Trump subsequently paused the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to encourage the administration to make «deals» with countries on trade and encourage more investment in U.S. manufacturing. Even so, some prices have already risen in anticipation of higher costs under the new tariff regime.
Uncertainty has also played a role. Trump’s tariff announcement in April prompted a number of large container ships to abruptly halt their shipments to the U.S. earlier this month and turn back to their original ports. This means that more consumers will see a price hike for everyday products, likely at certain big-box retailer stores like Walmart or Target, as early as next month.
These price hikes are «not showing up tomorrow, but will show up over the next few months, as scarcities develop and American retailers have to find other sources – that might take a while,» David H. Feldman, an economist and professor at William & Mary College, said in an interview.
TRUMP’S ULTIMATUM TO FEDERAL WORKERS: RETURN TO OFFICE ‘OR BE TERMINATED’
President Donald Trump arrives for a presentation ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 15, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
While Trump says tariffs will target foreign competitors and reduce the trade deficit, the costs will fall mostly on working- and middle-class Americans who buy the bulk of imported goods.
Wolfers said Trump’s focus on the trade «deficit» is based on a common misconception.
«What that means is we sell China a small amount of stuff, and they sell us a large amount of stuff,» he explained. However, for every dollar bill that goes to China, the U.S. gets something for it that Americans want to buy, like T-shirts.
«We have a dollar deficit – but we have a stuff surplus.»
Potential for deescalation
There are few signs that Trump’s tariffs will deliver the gains he sought, such as onshoring U.S. production or securing better trade deals, particularly with Asian countries.
Instead, experts warn these countries are likely to circumvent U.S. markets and supply chains over time.
«If these tariffs stay in place, there will be hardly any trade between the U.S. and China,» by the second half of the year, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior non-resident fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in an interview.
Roughly $650 billion in annual trade between the two countries is at risk, along with knock-down effects on global commerce in the long term.
WORLD LEADERS REACT AS TRUMP RE-ENTERS THE WHITE HOUSE
President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump’s tariffs also discard decades of international understanding that has depoliticized trade disputes, Feldman said.
The U.S. is «moving from a system that at least was based on mutually acceptable rules of behavior to a system that does not have that as its anchor,» Feldman, whose research focuses on global trade policy, told Fox News Digital. That shift allows the government to target foreign nations individually and offer selective tariff relief to firms and industries «if they do ‘our’ bidding,» he argued.
«America is now master of the shakedown.»
President Donald Trump gestures to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on April 3, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Trump spoke a day after announcing sweeping new tariffs targeting goods imported into the U.S. on countries including China, Japan and India. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Next steps
After market backlash, Trump appears to be warming to the idea of easing his proposed 145% reciprocal tariffs on China, which has vowed to impose its own retaliatory measures on U.S. goods.
Economists say he is more likely to do so if the economy sours, or he sees a major drop in poll numbers, if the past is precedent.
Still, any path to deescalation remains uncertain. Just last week, China denied Trump’s claim that the two countries were negotiating a tariff deal, after he asserted in an interview that he had reached «200 deals» on trade.
Economists believe Trump will at least partially scale back the tariffs before July but warn he is playing a high-stakes game of brinkmanship that could hit U.S. consumers and businesses hardest.
«What I worry about is that the immediate impact of uncertainty is on business investment in trade-exposed industries, leading to a recession,» Feldman said. «But it could get worse, if it transmits into a financial panic. And if everyone starts to say, ‘geez, I got to get into gold and cash, I can’t be in Treasury bills.’ If we move into a flight to cash, all bets are off.»
Should that happen, he said, «We could slide into 2008 all over again.»
A television broadcasts market news on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York on Friday, April 4, 2025. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump has refused to concede that his early days have been anything but a major success.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, he touted his first 100 days as «very successful,» saying «people [are] writing that it was the best first month, and best second month, and really the best third month» for a U.S. president.
He dismissed stock market volatility and rising inflation as temporary «market fluctuation,» calling it a «transition period» that would level out.
When asked if he would consider it a win if tariffs remained as high as 50% on imports a year from now, Trump said he would.
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«Total victory,» he said.
«Everybody is going to benefit.»
Trump’s First 100 Days,Donald Trump,Politics,Trade,Taxes
INTERNACIONAL
Gran Bretaña desanda el Brexit: analizan un visado común para los jóvenes y un plan comercial y de seguridad con la UE
Cumbre UE-Londres, el 19 de mayo
Defensa, migración y el regreso de los jóvenes
Keir Starmer busca acercarse a Europa sin enfurecer a Trump. Foto: Reuters Producto de un mundo inestable
El acuerdo con Trump
La diplomacia del golf
The massive power outage that wreaked havoc in Europe is being blamed on a pair of likely solar plant breakdowns in southwest Spain, a report said.
By 7 a.m. local time Tuesday, more than 99% of energy demand in Spain had been restored, the country’s electricity operator Red Eléctrica announced. Portuguese grid operator REN said on Tuesday morning that all the 89 power substations had been back online since late last night and power had been restored to all 6.4 million customers.
Red Eléctrica said it identified two power generation loss incidents in southwest Spain – likely involving solar plants – that caused instability in the Spanish power grid and contributed to a breakdown of its interconnection to France, according to Reuters.
The economic cost of Monday’s blackout across the Iberian Peninsula could range between $2.5 billion to more than $5 billion, it cited investment bank RBC as saying.
POWER RESTORED TO HALF OF SPAIN AS TRAVEL DECIMATED
A car drives down an unlit street in Lisbon, Portugal, during a nationwide power outage on Monday, April 28. (AP/Armando Franca)
«We have never had a complete collapse of the system,» Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised address Monday night.
Emergency workers in Spain said they had rescued some 35,000 passengers on Monday who were stranded along railways and in underground tunnels.
Video that aired on Spanish television showed people evacuating metro stations in Madrid, and empty stations with trains stopped in Barcelona. Spain’s parliament was also left in the dark, public broadcaster RTVE reported.
The ATP Tour said play at the Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended for the day due to the power outage.
In Portugal, several Lisbon subway cars were evacuated, courts stopped working and ATMs and electronic payment systems were affected. Traffic lights in Lisbon also stopped working during the outage.
REN, Portugal’s grid operator, described the incident Monday as a «rare atmospheric phenomenon.»
WALL STREET BANKER WASHES UP DEAD ON PARADISE BEACH WEEKS AFTER DISAPPEARING ON VACATION
People wait on a platform as metro operations resume partially in Madrid, Spain, on Tuesday, April 29, following the nationwide power outage. (Reuters/Violeta Santos Moura)
«Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high-voltage lines, a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration,» it was quoted as saying. «These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.»
However, on Tuesday, Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET said that it had not detected any «unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena» Monday and no sudden temperature fluctuations were recorded at their weather stations.
Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s chief of operations, said the instability in the power grid caused the Spanish and French electricity interconnection through the Pyrenees mountains to split, leading to a failure on the Spanish side, according to Reuters. The news agency reported that some parts of France suffered brief power outages on Monday as well.
People sleep in a sports facility designated for people who were stuck at a train station in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, April 29. (Reuters/Bruna Casas)
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Authorities were still investigating what happened on Tuesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
INTERNACIONAL
As judge is charged with obstructing justice in migrant case, spinners cast it as an anti-Trump story
Here’s what actually happened to that Wisconsin judge.
Setting aside the spin – and there’s plenty of it from some Democrats and pundits – these are the facts.
Based on the criminal complaint, county judge Hannah Dugan had a hearing scheduled for illegal Mexican immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz – who is already facing charges of domestic abuse.
Not only that, Flores-Ruiz got into a fight with two roommates who complained that he was playing his music too loud.
Flores-Ruiz punched one roommate in the face 30 times, then hit a woman who tried to end the fight, the complaint says. Let that sink in for a minute.
WISCONSIN JUDGE’S ARREST BLASTED BY DEMOCRATS WHO PREVIOUSLY CLAIMED ‘NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW’ IN TRUMP CASES
Now let’s get to what Hannah Dugan did. (National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a highly detailed account with extensive quotes from the documents.)
First she blew off the hearing. ICE agents have the absolute power to arrest the immigrant at the county courthouse, and were closing in, but hoped to do it in a low-key manner.
Then she arranged for Flores-Ruiz to slip out a private exit, for the sole purpose of helping him avoid the federal agents. And it worked. But the agents tracked him down after a chase.
Many in the press have used the arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan as a political weapon against the Trump administration. (Mike De Sisti / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
This sounds very much like alleged obstruction of justice.
Now Dugan is entitled to the presumption of innocence, along with a healthy skepticism. We’ve only heard the government’s side of the story.
Does that sound like obstruction of justice? That’s what the judge has been charged with, along with concealing an individual to prevent an arrest.
The Washington Post yesterday made explicit what it implied a day earlier: «While many Republican supporters of the president cheered the aggressive actions, critics of the administration said the spectacle sent a chilling message.
«‘The obvious purpose of the arrest of Judge Dugan on criminal charges is to intimidate and threaten all judges, state and local, across the country,’ said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former U.S. appeals court judge.»
Many others are treating Dugan’s arrest, unusual though it is, as an outrage.
Hannah Dugan is accused of helping conceal illegal Mexican immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz as ICE agents closed in on her court. (DHS/Milwaukee Independent via AP)
Before the arrest of Flores-Diaz, the Milwaukee county executive said: «An attack on this safe, community-serving space undermines public trust, breeds fear among citizens and staff and disrupts the due process essential to our courts,» An attack, says David Crowley.
Some other quotes helpfully rounded up by Geraghty:
Minnesota Democratic Sen. Tina Smith posted: «If Kash Patel,» the FBI director, «and Donald Trump don’t like a judge, they think they can arrest them.» So this was not about alleged obstruction of justice but some kind of personal animus toward Dugan? And I doubt Trump knew anything about this.
JUDGE WHO ALLEGEDLY HELPED MIGRANT DOESN’T DESERVE ‘SPECIAL TREATMENT,’ WISCONSIN LAWMAKER SAYS
New York Times columnist David Brooks said on PBS: «It strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.» It MAY be illegal, but on what planet would the judge’s actions be deemed heroic??
And here’s one I found from Guardian columnist Moira Donegan, saying: «The Trump administration is making an example of the Milwaukee judge to intimidate critics and opponents.»
SUBSCRIBE TO HOWIE’S MEDIA BUZZMETER PODCAST, A RIFF ON THE DAY’S HOTTEST STORIES
So now the tale has morphed into an anti-Trump hit job. The president does plenty of things to intimidate critics and openly talks about it. This isn’t one of them.
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As for the politics, aren’t most voters going to be more concerned with keeping violent illegal migrants off our streets?
Media Buzz,Wisconsin,Judiciary,Immigration,Illegal Immigrants,Crime
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