Updated July 08, 2025 at 17:48 PM ET
President Trump this week has been firing off letters to global leaders that threaten new, high tariff rates and also announcing them via social media — an approach that represents a radical and potentially risky approach to trade.
It began Monday with two letters — to the leaders of Japan and South Korea — posted to Trump's Truth Social account, informing them that he plans to impose new tariffs on their exports to the U.S. beginning Aug. 1. Twelve more tariff threat letters went up, followed by an executive order that officially pushes back a July 9 deadline for tariff deals he set in the spring to Aug. 1.
Trump and his economic officials said months ago that he would make potentially dozens of tariff deals before July 9. But since then, they have only struck two such deals — with the UK and Vietnam. Tuesday, Trump tried to rebrand his new letters as tariff deals.
"A letter means a deal," Trump said in an open Cabinet meeting. The administration has said tariff negotiations are underway with multiple countries. But now, it is issuing a standard letter to multiple countries, listing specific new tariff rates for each one.
"We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way," Trump said.
The letters are the latest example of how Trump has uprooted U.S. trade policy by aggressively using tariffs, approaching trade as a zero-sum game.
Since World War II, the U.S. had generally moved away from tariffing and towards free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement or bilateral agreements with individual countries, says Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth University. The U.S. would put up trade barriers only in specific instances, he said.
"We'd protect certain sectors — when there's dumping, when there's a national security concern, when there's a downturn in the industry," Irwin said. "That's been the exception, not the rule, but Trump has turned that on its head."
Trump prefers making bilateral deals on tariff rates — or outright imposing tariffs without dealmaking — over the multilateral trade deals that past administrations pursued, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership. That trade agreement would have included 12 Asia-Pacific countries. It was complex, the result of nearly a decade of negotiation — talks started in 2008, in the George W. Bush administration and continued through Barack Obama's two terms to when Trump took office in 2017 and pulled the U.S. out of TPP talks.
Multilateral trade deals can cover a range of complicated topics, such as labor and environmental standards. Trump's approach to trade via tariffs is much simpler — he focuses on tariff rates and trade deficits both in negotiations and in these letters.
As a result, Trump's tariffs are very different from trade deals such as TPP, NAFTA, and USMCA — the last of which was negotiated in Trump's first term.
According to Trump, the potential benefits of these tariffs include reducing other countries' trade barriers, including tariffs and other regulations, giving U.S. exporters more foreign consumers. The president has also said an ultimate goal of these tariffs is to boost U.S. manufacturing, though many economists are skeptical about how successful that goal might be.
Meanwhile, the costs of tariffs are real, and will be paid upfront by U.S. companies, which will likely pass some of those costs on to consumers.
The deal Trump announced with Vietnam last week, for example, sets tariff rates at 20% for Vietnamese goods. That is lower than the 46% Trump imposed on April 2, but it is also far higher than where tariffs were prior to Trump taking office. Back then, average U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese goods were around 3%. That means the cost for U.S. consumers of goods from Vietnam — which include machinery, appliances, clothing, and shoes — may soon be markedly more expensive than they have been.
In addition, bilateral tariff deals may not be the most efficient way to achieve Trump's goals.
"U.S.-Vietnam trade restrictions would today be very, very low if Trump hadn't walked away from TPP in 2017," said Scott Lincicome, an expert in trade at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.
What Trump has announced so far
In the letters posted to social media Monday, Trump wrote that "the United States of America has agreed to continue working with" the countries, "despite having a significant Trade Deficit with your great Country." He later added, "Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal," as justification for the new tariff rates.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that more letters will be released in the following days. The letters posted so far are all nearly identical to each other, aside from country names and tariff rates. (For the full list of the new tariff rates Trump has announced so far, click here.)
The White House has clarified that the new tariffs will not be imposed in addition to the various tariffs Trump has imposed on broad classes of goods. For example, steel and aluminum — currently tariffed worldwide at 50% — from any of these countries will still be tariffed at 50%.
While Trump often frames tariffs as being paid by other countries — in the South Korea letter, he says that "we will charge Korea" a 25% tariff — that is not the case. Tariffs are taxes paid to the U.S. government by companies in the U.S. for imported goods or components. As a result, the cost of tariffs is often passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Trump has regularly said that these rates were meant as retaliation against other countries' protectionist measures.
In his letters, Trump added that goods that are transshipped — meaning they are made elsewhere but shipped through any of the fourteen countries — will be subject to higher tariffs. And should either country decide to impose a reciprocal tariff, Trump said "whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 25% tariff that we charge."
However, Trump informed the countries that their goods could avoid these new tariff rates if their countries' companies choose to manufacture their goods in the U.S.
But beyond moving factories to the U.S., Trump's form letters raise the question of what, if anything, other countries might be able to do to convince Trump to lower his tariffs.
"If you look at all the letters that were issued yesterday, they were extremely broad brush," said Irwin at Dartmouth. "They don't say, 'We don't like this one aspect of what you're doing. Get rid of it or we'll retaliate.' "
A brief history of Trump's recent tariff talk
The new tariff letters are the result of months of uncertainty, stemming from an April 2 executive order in which Trump imposed tariffs on nearly every country worldwide. Trump announced those tariffs with a Rose Garden event, calling April 2 "Liberation Day." The new taxes included high rates on goods from some of America's biggest trading partners, such as Vietnam and Japan.
A week later, after stock markets plummeted and economists warned of dire consequences, Trump announced he was lowering the tariffs to 10% for 90 days. After that "pause," as he called it, he set tariffs to jump back to those "Liberation Day" levels on Wednesday, July 9.
In the interim, the president repeatedly said he would make tariff deals with individual countries before July 9, at one point promising "90 deals in 90 days." Two deals have been announced to date, however, with the UK in early June and with Vietnam on July 2.
Most of the newly announced tariff rates do not differ widely from where Trump set those countries' rates on April 2. The biggest difference is with Cambodia, which faced a tariff of 49% after Trump's April 2 announcement. The new rate is 36%.
A look at the new tariff rates outlined in Trump's letters to global leaders
The new tariff rates included in the letters so far are:
- Japan — 25%
- Kazakhstan — 25%
- Malaysia — 25%
- South Korea — 25%
- Tunisia — 25%
- Bosnia and Herzegovina — 30%
- South Africa — 30%
- Indonesia — 32%
- Bangladesh — 35%
- Serbia — 35%
- Cambodia — 36%
- Thailand — 36%
- Laos — 40%
- Myanmar — 40%
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