'He's done basically nothing': Expert scoffs on MSNBC after Trump's major 180

An expert in economics wasn't impressed Wednesday with President Donald Trump's economic approach.

Speaking to MSNBC on Wednesday, University of Michigan economics and public policy professor Justin Wolfers responded to the radical 180-degree turn Trump made on his trade war.

"So, what he's done here is basically nothing," said Wolfers with a chuckle. "What really has happened is you've seen financial markets ecstatic. And that's because what we've learned is when we face a near-certain recession, the president will actually back off. We normally take that as given, but markets really needed to be reassured about this."

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"Let me clarify something here," he continued. "This is a long way from fully backing off. The way we calculate tariffs is immensely complicated. So let me just simplify it for you. Roughly speaking, we used to have tariffs of about 1 to 2% on average in the United States. Last Wednesday, Trump imposed a set of tariffs that raised that level to about 32%."

He said he was chatting with a group of economists who said that the tariff reduction is a reduction, but it's not a good one.

"They tell me it'll only reduce the tariff rate from about 32% on average to 25%," Wolfers explained. "So, about a quarter of the problem here has gone away. But there's actually — this still leaves the United States as the most tariff-heavy industrialized country in the world. And it's not even close. We have tariffs now, on average, that are 10 times higher than those that the European Union has historically levied on others."

He repeated that's why he feels Trump has "achieved nothing."

In January 2025, tariff levels were low in just about every country around the world until Trump "jacked ours up," Wolfers said. "He's going to pull ours back down. He's going to make deals. But we saw this act in the first Trump administration. He tore up NAFTA. He basically just sticky-taped it back together and gave it a new name, the USMCA. And we all ended up back where we were to start with. That's where I think we're heading."

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