Liberation Day retributory tariffs imposed by Trump impact 185 countries

Donald Trump declared Wednesday, April 2 “Liberation Day”, the day Trump unleashed a massive flurry of reciprocal tariffs impacting 185 nations. Exports from Sri Lanka had tariffs of 46% levied on exports, mainly from the apparel industry, which accounted for nearly 70% of the estimated $ 3.4 billion in exports to the United States last year.

Sri Lankan exporters fear that such an increase in tariffs will suppress demand for our products among price-sensitive US retailers and consumers. Major players in the apparel industry like MAS Holdings, Brandix and Hirdaramani will face pressure on their profit margins; smaller exporters may be forced out of business.

There is little doubt that these tariffs will have serious adverse consequences to Sri Lanka’s already fragile economy.

In the preamble to his announcement detailing increased tariffs at the Rose Garden, Trump said that this Liberation Day “is one the most important days in our nation’s history, the day we declare our economic independence”.

Trump warned against retaliation against these increased tariffs, threatening that “you will suffer more than us”. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also advised victims of the increased tariffs to take a deep breath, bend over and enjoy the Trump tariff experience without trying to fight back.

Despite these threats, Trump’s tariffs will certainly be met with retaliatory action from allies and adversaries alike. As the head of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen said, “the European Union, the world’s largest single market, must also defend itself against profound disruptions to global commerce that would result from Trump’s isolation of the United States, adding, “If you come against one of us, you come against all of us”.

Trump continues to ignore the advice of economists, who have already predicted that the trade war likely with the unilateral imposition of these tariffs will most likely precipitate a global recession. This illiterate economic strategy will devastate the economies of not only nations worldwide, but of the United States itself. There will be increased inflation and higher consumer prices in the United States, at least in the short term, thus making a mockery of the basic election promises which won Trump the 2024 election.

The likely economic chaos follows an intelligence breach of historic proportions perpetrated by the most senior members of the Trump Cabinet, including Vice-President Vance, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Secretary of State Rubio, Treasury Secretary Bessent, Director, National Intelligence Gabbard, Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Security Adviser, Michael Waltz.

Waltz committed the original sin of “inadvertently” inviting Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic, to a top-secret cabinet meeting on a Signal chat group, an encrypted channel for text messaging. The use of such an unsecured service for discussion of highly classified communications is the epitome of criminally negligent stupidity. Defense Secretary Hegseth initially lied, immediately confirmed by Trump, that no classified information was discussed at this top-level meeting on an unsecured channel.

The Atlantic immediately exposed this lie by publishing copies of the actual transcripts of the meeting that these senior Cabinet officials were discussing, on the Signal channel. Top-secret information about a strike against the Houthis in Yemen. War plans, timing of attacks, aircraft and weapons systems to be deployed, targets and other sensitive information, available even to the enemy, two hours BEFORE the attack. The release of this information served to put the lives of American soldiers in harm’s way, and the whole operation in jeopardy.

As Late-Night Talk Show host Stephen Colbert joked, it’s as if Winston Churchill said, “We will fight them on the beaches at precisely 3.05 p.m. 30,000 of our troops will fight them on the landing grounds at these exact coordinates. We will never surrender!

“Hey, how did the Germans get here so fast?”

To date, no one has been held accountable for what has been probably the most egregious release of top-secret intelligence information in the nation’s history. And no one probably will, following the Trump time-tested mantra of Distract, Delay and Deny.

None of the nation’s allies will share sensitive intelligence information with such a fractured intelligence community in the future. What with Trump’s threats of retributory tariffs and invading sovereign nations, the US will not be America First, as Trump has promised. It will be America Alone.

At a time when the Trump administration is losing the confidence of the American voters, as evinced by the vast number of Town Hall meetings held in protest; when even some Republican members of Congress are beginning to feel a faint stiffening of their spines; the Democratic Party is still running at all-time low national approval rate of 27%. Even the approval of registered Democrats for their own party is barely above sea level.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, helped Trump win the presidency with campaign contributions exceeding $280 million in the last few months before the election. He has been awarded the powers of Co-President and is the head of the newly and unconstitutionally formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), given the task of eliminating government waste, fraud and abuse.

Musk has promised to uncover $1 trillion in federal waste within six months. After two months, he has found waste amounting to $8 billion, a multitude of zeros still to come! And these items of “waste” he claims to have eliminated include the immediate suspension of funding for US AID, the main source of US assistance of food and medicines to poverty-stricken nations worldwide, a universally admired wellspring of US compassion and soft power. All the while, companies owned by Musk and his billionaire buddies are making hundreds of billions of dollars with the award of government military and other contracts.

Musk is especially aiming at dismantling and privatizing Medicare, Social Security and other federal programs vital to the welfare of the nation’s students, the ailing, the vulnerable and the elderly.

The stock market is at the lowest levels since 2020, and sinking on a daily basis; inflation and grocery prices are rising. US Immigration authorities are deporting undocumented immigrants purely on suspicion, without due process, flouting the rulings of the judiciary with impunity. The nation’s international reputation is in shambles with Trump’s threats of acquiring sovereign nations by military force, the imposition of retributory tariffs which threaten to precipitate a trade war to rival the Great Depression. All this in just over two months. Where the nation will end at the end of Trump’s second term, a long 46 months looming ahead, is everybody’s nightmare.

The only countries applauding Trump’s policies are Russia and Israel. Russian President Putin is certain that Trump will force Ukraine to surrender unconditionally, and leave him free to achieve his dream of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is equally confident that his great buddy will continue to help him with the genocide/displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, when the One-State solution of the Promised Land of Israel would finally have become a reality.

So what are the Democrats doing while all this chaos, corruption, stupidity, cruelty and sheer incompetence are being paraded in public? Nothing. Actually, less than nothing. Which is the advice given by one of their most senior advisers, James Carville, who suggested that the Democrats should roll over and play dead while the Republicans commit Hara Kiri. The only problem with this strategy is that while the Republicans will certainly destroy the nation’s middle class and democracy if left to their own devices, they will also ensure the billionaires will continue enjoying their lifestyles in a kleptocracy run by Trump/Vance and the oligarchs. Just like Putin’s Russia.

The results of last Tuesday’s local elections in Wisconsin and Florida gave Democrats some reason to celebrate. They won a vital Wisconsin Supreme Court seat convincingly, in spite of Elon Musk spending a record $26+ million, which made this state election the most expensive in the nation’s history. The Republicans held two ruby-red House seats in Florida with greatly reduced margins. Results perhaps not quite strong enough to predict an immediate and violent backlash against two months’ performance chaos of Trump and Musk. But results indicating that the majority of voters, Democrats, Independents, even some Republicans are deeply concerned about where the country is headed. There are rumors that Congress is considering bipartisan legislation to rein in Trump’s ill-conceived tariff policies.

The Democratic Party may at last be rediscovering a voice to progress towards the logical conclusion to The New Deal of Frederick Delano Roosevelt, who introduced the germ of the concept of Socialist Democracy during the Great Depression in the 1930s. An ideology which blends the most creative, productive features of capitalism with the compassion of socialism. An ideology currently followed by every developed nation in the world, the progress towards which was abandoned by the United States in 2016.

I am not going to waste any time on the myriad felonies Trump committed after his defeat in 2020. I am also not going to dwell on the ineptitude of the Democrats on their failure to persuade President Biden to keep the promise he made in 2020, that he would run as a transition, one-term president, and hand over the leadership of the Party to the younger generation of Democrats in 2024.

When it became publicly obvious that Biden no longer had the physical nor mental capacity to cope with the toughest job in the world, and was finally “persuaded” to withdraw, it gave even his excellent replacement, Vice-President Kamala Harris too little time to mount a successful presidential campaign. And a convicted felon, the worst president in the nation’s history, was amazingly elected to the presidency for a second term.

The past is done, but the Democrats are still making the same mistakes, still playing nice, still taking knives to a contest which has escalated from a gunfight to one in which the enemy will use military might, if necessary.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is today an evergreen 83-year-old, miles more mentally and physically agile and millennia ahead in integrity and patriotism than The Demonic Donald, has teamed up with the future of the Democratic Party, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC). They are rallying the Democrats, exhorting them to fight harder, with more purpose, to be more ruthless, if they are to defeat this existential threat, not only to the nation’s democracy, but to the future of the planet.

New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker set a good example of the necessity for Democrats to fight harder, by filibustering for a record 25 hours on the Senate floor, explaining the dangers the nation is facing. A brave effort, but the time for words is over. It’s now time for nationwide action.

All the Democrats are asking for is a just and equitable society with a safety net to cover all the citizens of the nation, the rich and prosperous, the white and colored and the poor and vulnerable, alike. A society akin to the other 29 of the world’s developed nations, which rank as happier nations in which to live than the richest and most powerful country in the world.

A demand for an equitable society which the Christians of America are reviling as being too “woke”. They are too stupid to understand that the God they worship, Jesus Christ, was the “wokest”, the kindest of them all.

The United States, bursting with sanctimonious hypocrisy, calls itself a Christian, God-fearing nation, but it is the one that has completely betrayed the sacred Gospel of Jesus Christ. While those other, happier nations, which, thank God, are fast espousing the realities of science and atheism, are the ones that observe those enlightened and compassionate teachings.

by Kumar de Silva