The massive new tariffs announced Wednesday, which Donald Trump referred to as “Liberation Day,” have been fairly poorly received across the board. Markets collapsed on Thursday, and the tariffs have been denounced by everyone from foreign leaders to Wall Street analysts to even some members of Trump’s own party.
Also, it appears Trump’s teams may have designed the tariffs in a nontraditional way: By using an AI large language model such as ChatGPT.
An X user named DC Investor said he was able to recreate the tariff formula using ChatGPT.
“It also told me that this idea hadn’t been formalized anywhere before, and that it was something it came up with ffs Trump admin is using ChatGPT to determine trade policy,” the user said.
ffs it’s true
i was able to duplicate it in ChatGPT. it also told me that this idea hadn’t been formalized anywhere before, and that it was something it came up with
ffs Trump admin is using ChatGPT to determine trade policy 😂😭 https://t.co/wAcORePTqy
— DCinvestor (@iamDCinvestor) April 3, 2025
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ffs it’s true
i was able to duplicate it in ChatGPT. it also told me that this idea hadn’t been formalized anywhere before, and that it was something it came up with
ffs Trump admin is using ChatGPT to determine trade policy 😂😭 https://t.co/wAcORePTqy
— DCinvestor (@iamDCinvestor) April 3, 2025
Another X user, financial journalist James Surowiecki, noticed another pattern in the tariffs.
“Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.
So we… https://t.co/PBjF8xmcuv
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 2, 2025
“This tweet is correct, but it’s actually worse than I thought: in calculating the tariff rate, Trump’s people only used the trade deficit in goods,” he added in another post. “So even though we run a trade surplus in services with the world, those exports don’t count as far as Trump is concerned.”
Whatever they did, it appears clear that the tariffs were poorly designed.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
