Will the Trump tariff wars end by 2028? We asked economists.

The Herald Scotland

21-04-2025

Trump has enacted a flurry of tariffs in the early days of his administration. Tax rates now range from zero (on certain exempted products, such as duty-free items from Canada and Mexico) to more than 100% (on many imports from China, among other trade targets).
Tariff policy seems to shift almost daily. It's tough to predict where the rates will sit in a week, let alone in three years, at the end of Trump's term.
But it's a question worth asking. Consumers want to plan future car and iPhone buys. Retailers want to predict where prices are headed on clothing and computers. Manufacturers want to divine where to build their next factory.
We asked four economists and academicians to predict what Trump's tariff policy may look like in 2028, and what factors might shape it.
Here's what they told us. These are their comments in full, edited for clarity.
Colin Grabow, associate director, Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute
No crystal ball is needed to see that tariffs will almost certainly be higher in 2028 than when President Trump took office in January - the only question is by how much. Another outcome would be deeply surprising. For America, the tariff man cometh.
Between his first term and the early days of his second, Trump has managed to bury the United States under an avalanche of tariffs. The onslaught has been so extensive that the United States now has its highest average tariff rate in over a century - and more seem on the way. Digging the United States out of this mess will take some doing.
Unfortunately, few seem eager to grab shovels.
Congressional Republicans are highly reluctant to cross a leader who remains incredibly popular within the party, while Democrats have traditionally been more supportive of protectionist policies favored by organized labor. Assembling a veto-proof coalition to restore sanity to US tariff policy is a tall order.
Absent such an intervention, President Trump's de facto tariff switch is likely to remain in the 'on' position. Although some relief could be found in 'deals' with certain countries, or as part of a market-calming exercise, a complete unwinding is deeply improbable.
Josh Bivens, chief economist, Economic Policy Institute
In 2028, average tariffs could be 5% - about double their level when Trump took office. Or they could be 25%, or even higher than that.
The fact that nobody can say with any certainty where tariff rates will be is absolute poison for every business and family in America trying to make plans for their future.
Should you build a new factory? Buy a new home? Take out loans for your kids' college? Choose a different industry to work in? All these crucial decisions depend on the state of America's interconnectedness with the rest of the world.
Until this is clarified - and truly clarified, not subject to the ever-changing whims of one man - all Americans will be held in limbo, and this will crush economic growth.
Most economic policies create winners and losers. The Trump tariff policy is almost entirely creating losers, unless some insiders are timing their stock market purchases around advanced knowledge about new announcements and pauses. What was once unthinkably dumb and corrupt now seems entirely possible.
Bernard Yaros, lead U.S. economist, Oxford Economics
It's difficult, if not impossible, to know where tariffs will end up in 2028. However, a safe bet would be to assume that the significantly higher tariffs on China will remain in effect, as decoupling from the world's second-largest economy seems to be one of the administration's clearest goals amid the chaotic rollout of reciprocal tariffs this month.
Sector-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum, motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts, and others will likely stick as well. Yet, it's probable that the across-the-board reciprocal tariffs on all countries other than China and all products outside certain sectors will either get significantly watered down or go away by 2028.
The administration could water down these reciprocal tariffs via further exemptions, targeted toward consumer goods, in a bid to mitigate the inflationary impact.
On the other side of the 2026 midterms, you could craft a scenario in which enough lawmakers on both sides of the aisle turn against the reciprocal tariffs and a supermajority in both chambers of Congress overrides a presidential veto to vote down the reciprocal tariffs.
Robert Gulotty, associate professor of political science, University of Chicago
In 2028, the Trump administration will be in campaign mode and may be trying to take actions that limit blowback from tariffs.
In the previous Trump administration, this meant using ad hoc authorities to allocate billions of dollars of cash to farm communities affected by Chinese retaliation.
My research with Anton Strezhnev suggests that those efforts moved voters in the 2020 election, particularly in rural communities. They will likely try again.
We also saw reversals on the tariffs themselves, as exemptions on steel and aluminum were granted to Canada and Mexico in advance of the approval of a renegotiated NAFTA.
However, I worry new cash disbursements and targeted tariff exemptions will have little effect on the overall state of trade policy for the U.S.
Unless things dramatically change by 2028, the world will have gone through four years of dramatic and unpredictable policy swings. Measures of formal trade restrictions, like the average tariff, mean little for firms that cannot guess whether their customers will face a tax or not.
There may be an appetite for some kind of global deal to reduce this uncertainty, but who would bother negotiating a treaty with a government that is unconstrained by scraps of paper?"