Thursday marked an important anniversary: It was one year since Donald Trump summoned the press corps to the White House Rose Garden — before its destruction — to declare “Liberation Day.” That afternoon in 2025, with his shellacked coif flapping against his bronzed forehead in the wind, the president held up hastily-assembled poster boards bearing the names of the world’s countries and territories.
Trump announced he was imposing “reciprocal” tariffs on all of them, even the ones with which the U.S. had a trade surplus — America’s trading partners, its adversaries, tiny countries that are basically subsistence economies and even small islands inhabited only by penguins which, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, are not involved in foreign trade. The tariffs were large and had no legitimate rationale, the numbers seemingly drawn at random. When asked for the formula that was used to determine how each country would be charged, the White House provided this:
