EXTRA EDITION: On Both Trade and Deregulation, Trump is Delivering His Promised Golden Age
The President has been for reciprocal zero tariffs for years. And in his first term, he eliminated more of the government's regulatory burden than anyone before him. Now he's turning on the blowtorch.
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by James Freeman
April 15, 2025
Like nearly everyone else, I’m hoping for quick resolution on trade agreements that bring tariffs down all across the globe. The world seems ready to deal. Now let’s see some art. The Wall Street Journal’s Natalie Andrews reports:
President Trump is actively considering at least 15 trade proposals with countries, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Last week, the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on so-called reciprocal tariffs to allow time to negotiate deals with nations.
“He has made clear, he wants to personally sign off on all of these deals,” Leavitt said. “There’s a lot of work to do, we do believe we can announce some deals very soon.” She did not say which nations were close to reaching a deal with the Trump administration.
What will be the provisions of such deals? Let’s hope the United States advocates the position that Mr. Trump brilliantly advanced at the 2018 Group of Seven summit in Charlevoix, Quebec. Here’s an excerpt from his closing press conference:
Q: Mr. President, you said that this was a positive meeting, but from the outside, it seemed quite contentious. Did you get any indication from your interlocutors that they were going to make any concessions to you? And I believe that you raised the idea of a tariff-free G7. Is that —
TRUMP: I did. Oh, I did. That’s the way it should be. No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be.
Q: How did it go down?
TRUMP: And no subsidies. I even said no tariffs… We don’t want to pay anything. Why should we pay?
We have to — ultimately, that’s what you want. You want a tariff-free [sic], you want no barriers, and you want no subsidies, because you have some cases where countries are subsidizing industries, and that’s not fair. So you go tariff-free, you go barrier-free, you go subsidy-free. That’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of Finance. I mean, that would be the ultimate thing.
Sadly for the world the other heads of state did not jump at the chance to enable free trade. But the president was surely speaking for all the world’s consumers in asking why we should pay. Mr. Trump continued:
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