President Trump Extends the Tariff Deadline – One More Time

The Trump Administration has extended the international tariff negotiation deadline by another three weeks – giving countries until August 1 instead of July 9 to come to a deal.

The Left is of course using this as yet another opportunity to chant their catchphrase of the moment – “TACO” – which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

This it fascinating to watch, as the left thinks it can get away with levels of astounding hypocrisy.

If President Trump had enforced the July 9 timeline, they’d shout that he’s raising taxes on Americans by unreasonably holding to an impossible schedule. If he had given the foreign countries a year or two instead of mere months, they’d shout that he’s kicking the can down the road so he never really meant it.

The fact is, anything the President does on this subject can be twisted into something unacceptable if one wants to do so, because the subject is completely new. There is no precedent at all for this administration’s noble effort.

We must remember this: global trade is based on a fiction – that the WTO has carefully designed a global series of agreements that enable “fair trade” among nations. It’s simply not true.

What the WTO has indeed managed to do is to implement a universal “harmonized classification” system so that similar codes (the first six digits of a ten digit number) are used in every country to identify every imaginable thing (from raw materials to finished products, from chemicals to machinery, from foods to toys), so that importers and exporters can predict what a buyer’s import duty will be. The classification rules, valuation rules, and documentation rules are harmonized enough that international commerce can move along reasonably smoothly.

But that doesn’t really equate to fairness. Not at all.

Some countries only charge the duty determined by that harmonized classification, and charge nothing beyond that.

But most countries add a host of other charges that the international community has never made the slightest effort to regulate.

In addition to a reasonable-sounding duty rate of five or ten percent of the goods’ value, some countries charge Customs handling fees ranging from half a percent up to ten or twenty percent. Some countries charge import VATs or other taxes of another fifteen to thirty percent. Some countries charge another five or ten percent for clearance bonds or anything else they feel like making up.

As a result, there are plenty of countries that look like they only charge a small import tax, a duty of three or five percent, but then by the time you add up everything Customs assesses on the import, it turns out to be well over fifty percent of the shipment’s value.

The WTO would say these other charges are none of their business; they just want to make sure the duty piece is fairly assessed. To say that relying on the WTO to protect our interests is like putting a guard dog on just one gate of a large farm, while leaving five other gates unmanned, would be putting it mildly.

Besides, none of these import duties or shipment fees really address the big problem: the non-tariff barriers that so many countries put in the way of imported goods.

In order to introduce a product into a foreign country, simply finding a willing buyer or distributor isn’t necessarily enough. Most of our major trading partners – such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the Arab nations known as the Persian Gulf states – have rigorous preapproval programs requiring testing and marking and approvals, and all sorts of coding that has to appear on both the product and its package, just to allow their own countries’ importers to be legally permitted to import the product.

Such programs cost tens of thousands of dollars at minimum, often hundreds of thousands of dollars per product line, serving to keep the products out of their economy for good. Those five or ten percent import tariffs pale in comparison to these regulatory burdens, which often require not just the redesign and reprinting of the data sets printed on boxes or clamshells, but also new tooling to imprint such approvals onto the product itself, or its power supply or control box, or all of the above.

All these and more are the non-tariff barriers that the Trump administration was trying to counter when the “reciprocal tariff” project was begun on the President’s “Liberation Day.” The SASO approval process for the Middle East. The CE mark for Europe. The UKCA mark for Great Britain. Requirements to test and declare insane percentages of recyclable content in a product’s packaging, requirements to contract an “Authorized Representative” in-country.

The USA requires some such steps for high risk products like foods and drugs, but we otherwise open up our markets to the world.

Every such program makes it harder for a small company, a niche product, or a startup to break in; every such program serves as an infinitely greater barrier than the standard import duties that we’ve spent a century talking about as if they were the only issue in international trade.

The Trump agenda has been to expose these barriers, to show that we’ve never really had anything close to free trade before, and that numerous countries, through their regulatory overreach, are actually making international trade less free by the hour.

And note that this exposure isn’t only going to help the United States; it will also help the small producers, small businesses, and niche products of countless other countries that have also been frozen out by these outrageously expensive levels of red tape. If a small business in America can’t afford to spend six figures each getting his products approved for the EU, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Vietnam, what are the odds of a similar small business in Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile or Philippines being able to clear these hurdles?

Too much of the world has stood aside and watched as China has crowded out the rest of the world and attracted all the world’s manufacturing to itself. President Trump and his second administration are making the first real effort by anyone to stop the long march into a world of closed economies in which nobody can sell anything except for China – because nobody else can afford the price of entry.

President Trump’s effort here isn’t just about the USA – it’s about broadening the opportunities to manufacture for the world, so that more of the third world, especially Latin America and the rest of Asia, can finally compete with China for a shot at the marketplace of the developed world.

Oh, we are realistic; we don’t expect the Trump administration to receive stacks of love letters from third world trade ministers who’ve been increasingly shut out for years due to the bureaucrats of the west and the cheating of China. The Trump administration knows they won’t be awarded any Nobel prizes or UN commendations.

But at least we the voters of America should appreciate how President Trump is working to leverage our own import market to help obtain greater opportunities for not only our own exports, but the exports of other Low Cost Countries that China has frozen out of the world economy.

The Trump Administration is trying to bring some degree of fairness to a planet that had been going in the wrong direction. They Trump Administration has earned the right to massage the dates, deadlines, and expectations as much as they need to, in the interest of this noble pursuit.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant.  President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

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