During his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump frequently invoked what he called his favorite word: “tariff.”
“The most beautiful word in the entire dictionary of words is the word ‘tariff,’” the eventual presidential election winner said at one rally. “I love tariff.”
“I think they're beautiful. It’s gonna make us rich,” he added.
“They need a PR agent to straighten out that word. If I was Mr. Tariff, I would say, ‘Please get me a PR agent,’” he said at a Detroit campaign rally.
“You have other words that are damn nice, like ‘love,’” he said at another campaign event. “But I tell you: I think it’s more beautiful than ‘love.’”
“Love is the most, and religion, they’re the number one, two. You can switch them back and forth any way you want,” Trump said during a Turning Point Action conference. “But the third-most beautiful word is the word ‘tariff.’”
But, according to a Washington Post report that published Monday, Trump’s advisers are planning significant changes to his tariff policy, watering down Trump’s promise of universal tariffs on every import to the U.S. Instead, the plan, which is not final, is now for the new administration levying import taxes on “critical imports,” a term which is still ambiguous and whose definition is not readily available. Trump himself took issue with the Post story, declaring on Truth Social that it was “fake news” but not disputing the underlying premise.
