What Trump promised with his 'Liberation Day' tariffs — and what he delivered
Ben Werschkul ·
Washington Correspondent
Mon, December 22, 2025 at 1:43 PM EST
5 min read
It was on April 2 that President Trump appeared at the White House to unveil his “Liberation Day” tariffs.
The sweeping announcement roiled markets and helped set the tone for the president’s second-term tariff push — even though many of the country-specific tariff rates he held up in a chart would soon be paused until May and then tweaked throughout the rest of the year.
Trump also made a laundry list of promises that day about what would follow his historic moves. Rereading the speech as 2025 comes to a close reveals how consistent Trump has been. He talked lovingly of tariffs that day, as he has at nearly every chance since.
“Great consistency,” Trump said in April, “because I've been talking about it for 40 years.”
But the speech also reveals — with eight months of distance — just how few of his specific promises have panned out. Here’s a closer look.
Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet
1. The immediate return of manufacturing jobs
“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already,” Trump said at one point in the speech last April.
In fact, there is little evidence of that so far. The labor market largely ground to a stop in 2025, and Trump’s oft-focused-on metric of manufacturing jobs has dropped every month since April.
The president bemoaned manufacturing job losses in the last year of President Biden’s term and pointed to some initial gains after he took office. Yet, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that about 67,000 fewer Americans were employed in manufacturing this November than in April.
Additionally, total manufacturing construction spending (a measure of how many factories are being built) has also declined all year.
Economists have pointed to a variety of causes for both the declines, with tariffs among them.
2. Shrinking national debt
Trump also promised that because of tariffs, the US will “pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly.”
It's another promise he repeats often that hasn't been realized.
The national debt on that April day, according to the Treasury Department, was about $36.1 trillion. A reading this week puts that figure over $2 trillion higher at $38.2 trillion.
3. Economic growth 'like you haven't seen before'
Tariffs also haven’t supercharged the economy to the extent Trump promised.
“These tariffs are going to give us growth like you haven't seen before, and it'll be something very special to watch,” Trump claimed in April.
The government shutdown was a significant strain on growth later in the year,
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Even so, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently projected on CBS News that, in spite of the shutdown, “we’re going to finish the year ... with 3% real GDP growth.”
That comes after real GDP increased by 2.8% in 2024.
In fact, many of the promises from Trump’s team about growth have shifted to looking forward to 2026.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick vowed recently on CNBC that “the $30 trillion US economy can grow 4%, 5%, and under President Trump, you're going to see it grow 6%.”
The tariffs Trump promised did (largely) happen
While Trump’s promises about the economic effects of his tariffs haven’t been realized, the speech is also notable for how many tariff promises he made and stuck to — at least eventually.
“We'll establish a minimum baseline tariff of 10%,” Trump promised. He followed through just a few days later with new duties that went into effect on April 5 and have stayed in place.
He added that “we will impose a 25% tariff on all foreign-made automobiles.” This is a topline rate that Trump implemented that week and — even with some amendments like a slightly lower rate for the UK — he has largely stuck to.
Other tariffs took some time but have ended up largely where Trump said they would.
On China, the president promised in April, “we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%.”
That didn’t seem likely in the days after — when tensions spiked, and some topline rates shot up to 84% within days and then to triple digits soon after that.
But a series of meetings and deescalations in the months that followed have created a current tariff setup with China that, according to a recent tabulation from Oxford Economics, places the overall average on Chinese goods as of November at 29.3% — in the neighborhood of Trump’s original promise.
The tariffs that didn’t happen
There are two tariff promises that Trump made in April that haven’t been followed through on so far: tariffs for pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.
“The pharmaceutical companies are going to come roaring back,” Trump promised in April. “They're all coming back to our country because if they don't, they’ve got a big tax to pay.”
But Trump’s long-awaited tariff on pharmaceutical goods has yet to materialize. Many imported drugs remain exempt from tariffs as 2025 comes to an end.
Chipmakers have faced a similar story with constant White House threats but no actions so far. Trump and his team have outlined massive carveouts — such as tariff concessions if a company is building in the US — that suggest delays could continue.
Reuters reported in November that these chip tariff plans are now further delayed.
Following the on-and-off nature of tariffs throughout 2025, the only thing that appears certain is that tariffs will continue to be a top variable both for the US economy and Wall Street in 2026 — and that Trump will remain their most ardent defender.
“I think you're going to remember today,” he said in April, as “a day that hopefully you're going to look back in years to come and you're going to say, he was right.”
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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