America's Talking - 2025 Year in review: Tariffs

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

The Center Square staff discuss the developments in Trump's tariff policies throughout 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAleb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. 2025 is drawing to a close, and while there was a lot of huge news this year, one issue that has spanned the news cycle the entire year is tariffs. When President Donald Trump took office back in January, he began imposing a wide array of tariffs on U.S. trading partners. Joining me to discuss this is the Center Square's tariff guru, Brett Rowland. Brett, you've been following President Trump's ongoing are on again, off again tariffs all year, including the legal challenges that are now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where do you want to start? I think we should start a little bit before Trump took office back in January 2020 or 2025 in the lead up to the presidential election. And all throughout his campaign speeches, Donald Trump talked extensively about tariffs and how he would use them, although we really didn't. getting any idea of exactly how the president would deploy them until after he took office in March and then really April 2nd was the big day but we got a preview in March of what some of the tariffs might look like the reciprocal tariffs went into effect on April 2nd and that was sort of a shock for the entire world countries with some countries were certainly caught off guard by the high rates on import duties and that led off

essentially a massive deal-making campaign from Trump, where he went around, well, world leaders came to him from around the globe trying to make better deals. And a number of them succeeded, including the EU, Japan, and a number of others. But not everyone was able to make a deal, and those tariff rates are still in effect. Economists have said that they are pushing up prices for U.S. consumers. and a number of businesses have said that they would have to, including large retailers like Walmart and Home Depot, have said they'd have had to raise their prices in response to those tariffs. But there's still a lot here. So in addition to the sort of on again, off again, complicated rollout that we saw in April and then in the months that followed,

tariff rates have generally settled down now with the exception of more recently Trump removed about 200 food products from from tariffs. So essentially expanded the exemptions for what would be taxed and what wouldn't be. And most of those products were either things that we don't have enough of in the U.S. or can't grow here such as bananas. But it was the first indication that Trump is paying attention to how his tariffs are affecting consumer prices. And for many months, the White House insisted that tariffs wouldn't affect those prices.

And we saw that that wasn't quite the case. So Trump has reversed course on a limited basis. But it's clear, I think it's clear to me that even if the Supreme Court, which is hearing the case over Trump's tariff authority, even if the court rules against him, I think that Trump will come back and find a way to impose tariffs under different authorities that have been granted to him. So I don't think we're going to see those go away no matter what the ruling is. Let's talk about that a little bit. A number of states, mostly blue states, and some business groups, including small business owners, filed suit against the chair tariffs. The businesses themselves

said that the tariffs could lead them to go out of business because the products they sell aren't made in the USA. They're made overseas. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments. It's gone all the way to the Supreme Court. They've heard arguments, and a decision is pending. Just tell us briefly about that. So two lower courts said ruled against them. It went up to the Supreme Court. We've heard the oral arguments in that challenge. The Supreme Court did agree to take the case on an expedited basis, but just what that means in terms of timing, we don't know yet. So the, The court heard its oral arguments in November were guaranteed a decision before June, but how quickly that will come is unclear so far.

These businesses have taken issue with Trump's tariffs. They've essentially said that they're pushing up prices. They could force some of these companies to go out of business completely. And the businesses have really pushed back in terms of their response. And a number of high-profile businesses, including Costco, have filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade to seek refunds, should those be allowed if the Supreme Court does not find that Trump has the authority to implement these tariffs. So there's a lot riding on this decision. And Trump himself has called it the biggest case before the Supreme Court. He at one point was going to attend that oral arguments, although he didn't end up doing so.

Scott Besson instead. But Trump's, and it's clear today, you know, he mentioned the tariffs this morning. He's telling everyone to pray for the Supreme Court as this decision comes down, which I think is an indication of how important this is to his administration, to both his domestic and foreign agendas. One thing Trump says he wants to do with the billions of dollars the U.S. collected from the tariffs money is send dividend checks out to certain lower income or middle income Americans. What's the status of that? So we don't know too much about that. He has proposed that.

The White House says it's 100, he's, you know, moving all, all his levers to get that accomplished. But it's going to take an active Congress here to get those checks out the door. Now, Trump has also proposed a number of ways to spend this money. He's said that he wants to get rid of income taxes or at least shift the income tax burden away from American families. But the rebate check is controversial. also because the tariffs aren't expected to generate as much money as the rebate checks will cost. So, and I guess for the skeptical Americans, they could see it as getting the money they've paid

in higher prices back through a tax refund, but no matter how you look at it, the proposal that Trump's put forth with very few details so far would cost about $600 million, about half of what, about twice as much as what the tariffs would bring in. There's some real problems on that end, too, and we need to see more involvement from Congress, which we haven't seen yet. We've seen Congress come close to blocking or overturning tariffs at some junctures, but we have not seen them get behind yet a massive tariff refund, as Trump has proposed, about $2,000 per family. Just when those checks would come, he hasn't said, but he said it would be late 2026 if it does happen. But again, Kevin Hassan said earlier this week that it's going to take Congress is going to have to get involved. Brett, thank you for joining us today.

Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.