You like bananas, you got ’em.
With Trump and GOP approval ratings plummeting, the White House yesterday announced that you can soon fatten your pantry with bananas after a spate of tariff reductions on four countries. The reductions also cover coffee, beef, and certain textile and apparel products.
The tariffs are part of trade deals with four countries in Latin America — Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
The day before the tariff announcements, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News: “You’re going to see some substantial announcements over the next couple of days in terms of things we don’t grow here in the United States, coffee being one of them, bananas, other fruits, things like that. That will bring the prices down very quickly.”
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The “very quickly” part shows how concerned — perhaps desperate — the admin is about the American public’s concerns about affordability.
Just a week ago, Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, one of whom had four years ago come within a whisker of winning, were routed.
A communist masquerading as something called a Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, routed his mainstream opposition in New York City by emphasizing affordability issues in food, rents, transportation, child care, and other daily living expenses.
President Trump may have been correct in his assessment of tariff imbalances between the U.S. and foreign nations, but his sledgehammer approach to fixing the problem is on the brink of creating a worldwide Trumpcession.
Time to pull back on the tariff wars, which the administration appears to be doing in baby steps.
