New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman recounted a moment on Sunday’s episode of the podcast “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso” that left the host doing a double-take: President Donald Trump, she said, did not realize how high his own tariffs on China had climbed.
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The account comes from Regime Change, the book Haberman co-wrote with fellow Times reporter Jonathan Swan. She said the rate on Chinese goods reached 145% before the president registered how far it had gone, and that his reaction was disbelief.
“At one point he couldn’t — he didn’t realize how high China’s tariff burden had gotten,” she said. “It was up to 145%. And his reaction was, you know, like ‘Holy s—.’ At another time he was just talking about China, and he says put them in for 10. So that’s not a formula; that’s a gut feeling.”
“Just to clarify, just so we have this, he is surprised about his own numbers?” the stunned host asked.
“Correct,” Haberman confirmed, saying the president is not a China hawk and is eager to reach a deal.
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By her telling, Trump kept escalating for about a week after last year’s Liberation Day rollout and pulled back only when the bond market neared a meltdown, pausing the levies on most countries while China’s stayed at 145%. At another point, she said, he floated a 10% rate for China seemingly off the cuff.
Haberman described a process driven by instinct instead of thoughtful analysis, with advisers including trade adviser Peter Navarro, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick handing the president competing figures. Trump waved some of them away, she said, and turned to aide Natalie Harp — the human printer, in the book’s telling — to produce the real ones.
Regime Change, built on more than 1,000 interviews, has drawn repeated attacks from Trump, who has called the book fiction and gone after Haberman by name.
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