US Customs agents began collecting President Donald Trump’s unilateral 10 per cent tariff on all imports from many countries yesterday, with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week.
The initial 10pc “baseline” tariff to be paid by US importers took effect at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12:01am ET (7.01am Bahrain time), ushering in Trump’s full rejection of the post-World War Two system of mutually agreed tariff rates.
“This is the single biggest trade action of our lifetime,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, a trade lawyer at Hogan Lovells and former White House trade adviser during Trump’s first term.
Shaw told a Brookings Institution event on Thursday that she expected the tariffs to evolve over time as countries seek to negotiate lower rates. “But this is huge. This is a pretty seismic and significant shift in the way that we trade with every country on earth,” she added.
Trump’s Wednesday tariff announcement shook global stock markets, wiping out $5 trillion in stock market value for S&P 500 companies by Friday’s close, a record two-day decline. Prices for oil and commodities plunged, while investors fled to the safety of government bonds.
Among the countries first hit with the 10pc tariff are Australia, Britain, Colombia, Argentina, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A US Customs and Border Protection bulletin to shippers indicates no grace period for cargoes on the water at midnight on Saturday.
But a US Customs and Border Protection bulletin did provide a 51-day grace period for cargoes loaded onto vessels or planes and in transit to the US before 12:01am yesterday. These cargoes need to arrive by 12:01am on May 27 to avoid the 10pc duty.
At the same hour on Wednesday, Trump’s higher “reciprocal” tariff rates of 11pc to 50pc are due to take effect. European Union imports will be hit with a 20pc tariff, while Chinese goods will be hit with a 34pc tariff, bringing Trump’s total new levies on China to 54pc.
Beijing on Saturday said “the market has spoken” in rejecting Trump’s tariffs after it hit Washington with a slew of countermeasures, including extra levies of 34pc on all US goods and export curbs on some rare earth minerals.
“China has been hit much harder than the USA, not even close,” Trump said yesterday on social media. “THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.”
Shortly after posting the comment, Trump was spotted arriving at his Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, reading a New York Post article covering China’s retaliation to Trump’s tariffs and the stock market “crash.”
Some world leaders moved quickly to strike a deal with Trump to avert economic disruption while others weighed countermeasures.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to visit the White House tomorrow, sources said, as unspecified goods from the country face a 17pc tariff under the new policy.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was reportedly seeking a telephone conversation with Trump. Tokyo faces a 24pc levy.
Vietnam, which benefited from the shift of US supply chains away from the communist China after Trump’s first-term trade war with Beijing, will be hit with a 46pc tariff and agreed on Friday to discuss a deal with the Trump administration .
The head of Taiwan’s National Security Council was in Washington for talks with the Trump administration that were expected to include the tariffs, a source said. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te huddled with tech executives on Saturday to discuss how to respond to the 32pc duty it faces on its products.
Italian Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti warned on Saturday against the imposition of retaliatory tariffs on the United States, saying at a business forum near Milan that doing so could cause damage.
Canada and Mexico were exempt from both Trump’s latest duties because they are still subject to a 25pc tariff related to the US fentanyl crisis for goods that do not comply with the US-Mexico-Canada rules of origin.
Trump is excluding goods subject to separate, 25pc national security tariffs, including steel and aluminum, cars, trucks and auto parts.
His administration also released a list of more than 1,000 product categories exempted from the tariffs. Valued at $645 billion in 2024 imports, these include crude oil, petroleum products and other energy imports, pharmaceuticals, uranium, titanium, lumber and semiconductors and copper. Except for energy, the Trump administration is investigating several of these sectors for further national security tariffs.
Meanwhile, China’s state-run media has taken to the internet with AI-generated videos, featuring dancing robots and fraught consumers, to chide President Trump and tariffs they say threaten high inflation and economic distress for Americans.
“‘Liberation Day’, you promised us the stars. But tariffs killed our cheap Chinese cars,” an automated female voice sings in a video on the website of China’s CGTN, a state-run English-language broadcaster, over a shot of a woman at a kitchen table staring at an empty fork.
The two-minute, 42-second clip, referring to Trump’s use of ‘Liberation Day’ for the day of his tariff announcement, was captioned with a warning: “Track is AI-generated. The debt crisis? 100 percent human-made.”
Another video posted on the X.com page of state-run news agency Xinhua, also generated by artificial intelligence, shows a robot named TARIFF that chooses to self-destruct rather than follow its creator’s orders for high tariffs that bring “trade wars and unrest”.
China has sharply criticised the US tariffs, which have triggered the biggest stock market rout since the pandemic, and retaliated on Friday with import duties and export curbs of its own.
Economists say consumers are likely to see higher prices due to the trade war and that the US economy could enter a downturn, while some US trade partners are putting their own levies on American products - effects that Trump has called a “disturbance”.
The CGTN video, which displays lyrics in English and Chinese over images of car factories and humanoid robots dancing in burned-out streets, makes a more dire assessment of the situation.
“You taxed each truck, you taxed each tire. Midwest burnin’ in your dumpster fire,” the automated voice sings.
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