Bessent To Tariffed Countries: ‘Do Not Retaliate’

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered some advice to countries getting slammed with tariffs from the Trump administration — “do not retaliate.”

Those words come on the heels of President Donald Trump announcing “Liberation Day” — a 10% “baseline tariff across the board and retaliatory tariffs on some of the country’s closest allies, who he says are taking advantage of the U.S.,” Fox News reported.

“My advice to every country right now is, do not retaliate, sit back, take it in, let’s see how it goes, because, if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high water-mark,” Bessent said Wednesday in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. 

The new tariff policy could go as high as 49%, per The Hill.

Mexico, Canada and China, are being hit with 25% tariffs. However, products under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement are exempt. 

“The tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that, I guess,” Trump said. “But it would have been tough for a lot of countries.” 

Bessent said the goal is “long-term economic growth.”

“I say that what we are doing is, we’re setting the stage for long-term economic growth, that we were on our way to a financial crisis,” Bessent said. “I used to teach a history of financial crises. And with that gigantic government spending, it was unsustainable.”

“You look back in 1998, you look back in 2007, … it looked great right before everything collapsed,” Bessent said. “We have taken us off that trajectory and we are putting ourselves back onto a sound trajectory.” 

Tariffs for others include 20% on the European Union, 24% on Japan and 32% on Taiwan. 

“These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” according to a release from the Trump administration, per Fox News.