New Tariffs Hit Friday

Plus: Wealthy parents appease their zoomer socialist children, public broadcasting gets saved (by private donors), and more...

Starting August 1: President Donald Trump will likely impose another round of tariffs, with rates up to 50 percent, on Friday.

Some of these rates were announced on "Liberation Day" in April, then paused for 90 days until July 1, then paused another month, possibly to give countries more time to negotiate deals. To make matters more confusing, some countries have negotiated a later effective-by date (like China, which will incur new tariff levels starting August 12).

Some deals seem pretty set: "European capitals are putting a brave face on the trade deal they struck with President Donald Trump, which will see the European Union accept a 15% tariff on most of its exports to the US while reducing levies on some American products to zero," reports Bloomberg. But, of course, this is somewhat worse than the status quo before Trump took office: Trade barriers between the E.U. and U.S. were…next to nonexistent, so the 15 percent tariff only looks good if you're anchored by Trump's threats.

Trump also recently announced tariff rates with Indonesia (19 percent) and Japan (15 percent, which also applies to auto imports and is lower than the 25 percent auto import rates he announced in April that apply to other countries). But, truth be told, the rates you are likely to feel the most are those imposed on major trading partners China (30 percent), Canada (35 percent), and Mexico (30 percent).

"White House officials say the rates would apply to imports from the two countries that are not covered under a trade deal that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. But the president's aides have cautioned that a decision on the matter is not final," reports The New York Times. The president "first targeted Canada and Mexico in February, announcing a 25 percent import tax on all arriving goods, which the president justified by saying the two nations had not sufficiently helped to combat the flow of fentanyl. Facing blowback domestically and abroad, he later paused and modified that arrangement to exempt items that are covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A." So, in other words, certain agricultural products and textiles might be exempted. So either your avocados, tomatoes, and cotton garments will get a lot more expensive, or they won't; you'll find out soon. But not today, because they don't yet know, and can't commit to a specific framework for how certain goods will be handled.

If you have whiplash, just know that everyone else does too.

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Scenes from New York: Meet the "Gen Z New Yorkers selling their parents on Mamdani." Prominently featured: A 27-year-old woman who was insulted by a guest at her parents' party in the Hamptons due to her Zohran Mamdani vote, and who happens to be the daughter of an influential Democratic donor.

"I endorse the change in spirit, of my daughter and her friends," her father told The New York Times. "They have been so disillusioned for so long, by climate change, by gun violence and on and on. If this is the way that someone reacts to a thoughtful person like Caitlin, then I wanted to respond to that by making a donation to someone that she and her friends love." So, reading between the lines, this is a means of…simply giving his daughter whatever she wants. A thoughtful political back-and-forth between the generations this is not. (I would like a companion piece to this that involves a 60-year-old who has amassed great wealth giving their beneficiary children economics lessons, so that they too can go forth and prosper and build things, but I may be waiting a long time for this type of piece.)

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QUICK HITS

• Would you like a humanoid robot for just $5,900?
• "The public broadcasting system in the United States suffered a seismic shock last week when Congress eliminated roughly $535 million a year in federal funding for PBS, NPR and local stations across the country," reports The New York Times. But listeners and viewers have predictably rushed to fill the gap: Some 120,000 new donors have contributed roughly $20 million recently, with annual donations so far totaling $70 million higher than 2024's sums.
• "There's a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America's veritable cornucopia of smokin' hot Applebee's waitresses," writes Emma Camp, throwing cold water on some recent gender-politics discourse.
• "This construction project was on time and on budget," writes Tim Reid for Reuters. "Then came ICE."
• True!

It's always hard to comprehend that people from the past were just as vividly alive as we are https://t.co/1eHxugtQg5

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) July 28, 2025