By Katherine Tinsley
1:50pm PDT, Apr 8, 2025
_
In an April 2 press conference at the White House, Donald Trump announced his plan to place additional taxes on goods imported from foreign countries, but skeptics noticed the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands were included on the list of affected countries.
"The idea is that there are no countries left off [the list]," Howard Lutnick told CBS's Face the Nation while discussing the president's plan.
_
"What happens is, if you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,'' Howard Lutnick claimed.
"Any country. Like, we had tariffs — the president put tariffs on China, right, in 2018 — and then what China started doing is they started going through other countries to America,'' Lutnick continued
_
Howard Lutnick later insinuated that foreign nations are exploiting the United States' resources.
"They just built through other countries, through America. And so the president knows that, he's tired of it, and he's going to fix that," the commerce chief said.
"So basically he said, 'Look, I can't let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them,'" he explained.
_
Despite Donald Trump's confidence in his new tariffs, economists have warned that the plan could lead to a recession.
"If the president does not reverse course, he will increase the unemployment rate to recessionary levels," American Enterprise Institute Director of Economic Policy
Michael Asimow told
CNBC.
_
Director of Economics at the Budget Labs at Yale, Ernie Tedeschi, predicts "retail trade, wholesale trade and manufacturing" will experience immediate job cuts.
"When you don't know what the tariff rate is going to be an hour from now, let alone a week from now or a month from now or a year from now, how can you as a business hire and invest in that environment?" Tedeschi said.
_
While in West Palm Beach, Fla., over the weekend, Donald Trump claimed that he's in negotiations with other countries.
"I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world," Trump said, according to the Associated Press. "They're dying to make a deal."
"And I said, we're not going to have deficits with your country," he claimed. "We're not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We're going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even."
