Trump is discovering trade wars are hard to win

Whoops!

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump's trade war with China is proving a lot harder to win than he anticipated.

It's not for lack of effort, of course. The president has already imposed 25-percent tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese exports to the United States. He's teed up another $200 billion worth of 10-to-25-percent tariffs, and he's toying with another $267 billion worth of them. Should Trump go through with the last threat, it would effectively mean U.S. tariffs on everything China exports to the U.S.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.