MuleyFever
WKR
This was taken during the tariff kickoff meeting at the White House where they set initial tariff numbers.Lawsuits have already been filed. Trump issued these tariffs under the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, but, reportedly, that is a statute that authorizes presidents to order sanctions as a rapid response to international emergencies. The IEEPA reportedly does not allow a president to impose tariffs on the American people. It also questionable if "the whole world" (*except for Russia) is not too broad of a use to justify being a threat to national security.
There are also a number of reports that the Trump admin used Chat GPT or similar AI platform to generate the tariff math. I haven't tried it for myself, but apparently if you reverse engineer these tariffs, you find an oversimplified calculation that several major AI chatbots happen to recommend and you can recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff" which happens to align with what was presented in the Rose Garden. If you happen to plug these numbers into Gemini, you apparently get a page full of explanations as to why this oversimplified approach could backfire along with the formulas.
At this moment, it is difficult to imagine that many companies will take any sort of immediate measures to move production as there are simply too many unknown variables. Will the tariffs last days, months or years? Does the president actually possess the power to issue these tariffs? Will they be undone as fast as they were implemented. Will they survive midterm elections? Will they survive a 4 year admin cycle? Is 4 years enough to justify reinvesting in production vs. riding out a global recession? All unknowns.

I do think there was a chart that showed some tariff math from the White House.