President Trump’s newest tariffs apply to 99% of US imports: ‘If countries are on the right path, they have a certain level of tariff’
With President Trump’s 10% global tariffs having expired on July 24, the president has followed through on his pledge to maintain elevated import taxes on dozens of U.S. trading partners.
On July 23, the Trump administration announced a plan to use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to enact new tariffs on America’s top 60 trade partners, a move that applies fresh taxes on 99% of U.S. imports, MarketWatch reports. The new tariffs went into effect on Friday, July 24 at 12:01 a.m. Eastern.
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Out with the old tariffs, in with the new
This new tariff initiative will apply 10% levies on countries that have forced labor bans, as well as a 12.5% tariff on countries that do not have such bans.
“President Trump is asking all trading partners to join the United States in eliminating forced labor from global supply chains,” the office of Jamieson Greer, a U.S. trade representative, said in a statement shared with MarketWatch.
“If countries are on the right path, they have a certain level of tariff, about 10%. And if they’re not on the right path, it’s a slightly higher tariff of 12.5%,” Greer told CNN.
A report from CBC states the 10% tariff will be applied to imports from 16 U.S. trading partners including Canada, the U.K., the European Union, El Salvador, Argentina, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Imports from the 44 other countries — including South Korea, Japan, India, Vietnam and Singapore — will be hit with the 12.5% tariff.
In February 2026, the Trump administration relied on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a global tariff of 10% for the next 150 days, a period that expired on July 24. This specific tariff strategy came after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs.
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‘We’re not in favor of sweatshops’
As MarketWatch reports, the new Section 301 tariffs won’t be added to existing taxes on aluminum and steel, as those levies were imposed using another section of American trade law. Some agricultural imports are also exempt from the new tariffs.
In June, while conducting an investigation into Section 301, Greer’s office reportedly accused as many as 60 trading partners of “failing to prevent the importation of goods produced with forced labor,” MarketWatch reports.
“We’re not in favor of sweatshops, and we don’t want anyone else to be in favor of it either,” Greer told CNN after the new tariffs were announced, CBC reports.
However, some aren’t convinced that concerns over forced labor present a legitimate case for new tariffs on American trading partners, saying those concerns could simply be a legal workaround to replace the tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
For example, Congressman Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, says Trump’s new tariff motivations are “too convenient to be taken seriously.”
“Forced labor is a real and pervasive problem in our supply chains and demands serious enforcement,” Neal said in a news release shared with the CBC. “It should never be cheapened into a pretext for a tariff policy built on dubious legal theories and personal grievances.”
