What Trump’s team really wants out of tariffs

News Snapshot:

is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looks on as President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on April 9, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff policy, in which he declared trade war on the entire world simultaneously, was a bizarre and nonsensical undertaking, seemingly shaped only by the president’s own whims. But since...