The average US tariff rate is now the highest it’s been since 1933, thanks to Donald Trump’s aggressive new trade policies. On The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola broke down the staggering economic and political implications of these new tariffs—with Cenk making a rare admission: He was WRONG about Trump’s motivations for tariffs.
Trump’s latest round of tariffs has jacked up rates on more than 90 countries, with no corner of the globe spared from his tariff wrath. The average US tariff rate has skyrocketed to 18.6%, up from the typical 2-3% seen in recent decades. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutznk boasted on Fox News that these tariffs could bring in $50 billion a month in revenue, but as Cenk and John point out, this is a hidden tax on American consumers.
Here are the facts about tariffs:
Who pays them? Importers write the checks, but corporations will pass the costs on to shoppers. The Yale Budget Lab estimates the average American will pay $2,400 more per year due to these tariffs.
Regressive Impact: Lower-income households spend a larger share of their earnings on goods, meaning they’ll bear the brunt of these price hikes the hardest, at a time when already over 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
Political irony: Trump is bragging about taxing his own voters while simultaneously, his tax cuts overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.
Cenk admitted he had misjudged Trump’s tariff obsession. “I thought the tariffs were largely a trick to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to get a lot of new revenue’ to offset the $4 trillion in debt from his tax cuts,” he said. “But it turns out Trump is just mental about tariffs. He genuinely thinks he can replace the income tax with them—like it’s the 1890s.”
John called the tariffs an “unforced error” by Trump, saying, “He just won by hammering Biden on inflation—and now he’s deliberately engineering higher prices. It’s the strangest political own goal of our lives.”
The economic fallout from these tariffs could indeed be severe, with stagflation (higher prices from tariffs + rising unemployment = economic nightmare) and corporate greed taking center stage, with companies like Walmart, Nike, and Procter & Gamble already signaling price hikes that will likely exceed the actual cost of tariffs.
The bottom line is that Trump’s tariffs are unsustainable, economically destructive, and politically very risky. As Cenk concluded, “Reality has a way of catching up with you. When prices spike and jobs vanish, no amount of propaganda will save him.”
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