President Donald Trump on Thursday used a medical metaphor to describe the status of his “reciprocal tariffs” plan implemented on what he dubbed “Liberation Day.”  

“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” Trump wrote on TRUTH Social. “THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened more than 1,000 points lower on Thursday morning after Trump unveiled his most severe levy of tariffs yet during a White House Rose Garden ceremony a day earlier, but administration officials remained optimistic in early morning TV interviews. They touted an anticipated impact of onshoring U.S. manufacturing and further bolstering American jobs. 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN the United States “is no longer going to be cheated by foreign nations around the world,” reiterating that Trump had declared the issue a “national emergency.” 

SENATE APPROVES RESOLUTION AGAINST TRUMP’S CANADA TARIFFS HOURS AFTER ‘LIBERATION DAY’ EVENT

“We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit and counting. We’ve had 90,000 factories close in the last couple of decades,” Leavitt told CNN. “Since 1997, Americans have been put out of five million manufacturing jobs. These are not just statistics. These are real American lives that have been impacted. And it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it. This is going to restore more wealth, more jobs, more economic prosperity to our great country.” 

Leavitt said that the countries targeted by Trump’s reciprocal tariffs have had “70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to.” 

“They have ripped off American workers. They have taken our jobs overseas,” Leavitt said.

She also told CNN that Trump has already launched a “massive deregulatory agenda” that has “saved the American taxpayer millions of dollars.” Leavvitt said that the president is “unleashing the might of our American energy industry,” arguing that a stifled energy industry drove inflation during former President Joe Biden’s administration. 

Vice President JD Vance told Fox & Friends on Thursday morning that critics during Trump’s first term warned that tariffs would be inflationary, but instead inflation dipped to 1.5% until the “four terrible years of the Biden administration.” Vance said the “globalist economy” has resulted in the United States “incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us.” 

An American flag is displayed on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, Feb. 24, 2025.  (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

“To make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,” Vance said. “That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices, and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.” 

SOME COUNTRIES TARGETED BY TRUMP TARIFFS SEEK NEGOTIATIONS, CHINA SAYS ‘NO WINNERS IN TRADE WARS’

The vice president said the “Joe Biden globalist pathway” has resulted in the U.S. having $2 trillion in peacetime debt and deficits and manufacturing “disappearing,” promising that Trump is taking the country in a different direction. 

Addressing criticism from Wall Street following Trump’s “Liberation Day” event in the White House Rose Garden, Vance said, “a lot of people have gotten rich from American jobs moving overseas, but American workers have not gotten rich” and American companies “have not gotten wealthy from the increasing growth of foreign competitors manufacturing overseas.” 

“They charge us ridiculous tariffs. They engage in a lot of non-tariff practices like currency manipulation,” Vance said. “That has been awful for Main Street in the United States of America.” 

President Donald Trump signs two executive orders during a Make America Wealthy Again event in the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On concerns about tariffs potentially driving up costs, Vance said the administration is “fighting very hard to bring prices down” and usher in “the biggest deregulation in the history of this country.” 

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News that “when tariffs come into place, foreign goods may become a little more expensive, but domestic goods do not.” 

“For the first time in your lives, you’re going to actually think about the Americans who make the products, the Americans who produce these products and work in these factories,” he said. “It’s time for us to take care of them instead of taking care of the world.” 

Trump said that his administration secured about $5 trillion of committed investment, which Lutnick told CBS meant “people are going to start building factories right now.” 

“That means all that construction work begins now,” Lutnick said, vowing that the president’s plan would build on the 150,000 jobs already added to the U.S. economy in March. “That starts to employ Americans today. You’re going to see plants being built, factories rebuilding. All shifts are going to be running hot across America now. You’re going to see employment leaping starting today.” 

The self-professed “Make America Great Again” president is yet again reaching back to some bad old days in his chaotic quest for this never-defined national greatness. And yet again, Donald Trump is shaming what actually is (was?) a great nation.

With punitive tariffs this week, he’s ushering in not his promised “Golden Age” but a global trade war. Predictably, consumers and businesses are collateral damage, suddenly facing higher prices, layoffs, depressed retirement accounts and fears of recession. Some “Liberation Day.”

Separately, Trump is overseeing migrant roundups, detentions and deportations that lack any semblance of constitutional due process. His agents are sweeping up legal residents in their opaque nets, labeling the whole unidentified lot as terrorists and shipping most of them off by planeloads to a Salvadoran megaprison. Scores of families plead that the government is mistaken, and this week the Trump administration uncharacteristically did concede to one “administrative error:” It told a federal judge that it wrongly nabbed a 29-year-old Maryland man after he’d left work and picked up his 5-year-old son, who has autism.

And yet the same U.S. government that pays El Salvador millions to do its dirty work — and whose president is a strongman wannabe — told the court that it can’t get Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia out of the foreign prison and back home to Maryland.

Less noticed amid the economic chaos and extrajudicial deportations is yet another travesty that strikes at the foundation of the country’s proud legacy as a world leader — the world leader — since World War II: The ever-transactional Trump’s sordid, neocolonial attempt to extort Ukraine of its wealth of oil, gas, critical minerals and rare-earth elements as repayment for the United States’ support in the Ukrainians’ defense against Russia’s invasion.

Americans may be distracted but foreigners and global market-watchers have noticed. As Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky resists Trump’s latest one-sided demands, which dropped on Friday, Bloomberg News’ headline was “U.S. Seeks to Control Ukraine Investment, Squeezing Out Europe.” More colorfully, the Telegraph of London reported, “America holds gun to Zelensky’s head with unprecedented reparation demands.” Its article quoted Alan Riley, an expert on global energy law at the Atlantic Council, who damned the proposal as “an expropriation document” and added, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Certainly nothing like it has been seen since 1948, when the United States solidified its postwar leadership and banked global goodwill with the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt war-ravaged Europe, including former enemies. Over four years, President Truman and Congress provided bipartisan aid roughly equivalent to $175 billion today. All the while, U.S. politicians persuaded Americans that the aid they were paying for was neither selfless nor a giveaway: In reviving Europe, the United States was recovering markets for its products and stabilizing democratic allies to withstand further world wars.

As the law’s advocate, Secretary of State George C. Marshall Jr., stated, the program reflected “a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibilities which history has clearly placed upon our country.”

How far we’ve fallen. You’d have to go back several centuries — when European powers colonized and plundered Africa, Asia and the Americas — to find the sorry model for Trump’s attempt to extract Ukraine’s resources (and Greenland’s) valued at trillions of dollars. But it’s all the worse considering that Ukraine, a democratic ally, has spilled its own blood and treasure to withstand and weaken Russia, a U.S. adversary, and asks only for aid — not troops — to hold the line against would-be Czar Vladimir Putin’s dreams of empire.

In fairness, Trump is arguably following up on overtures from Zelensky last year to the Biden administration for U.S.-Ukraine cooperation in developing his country’s minerals and energy riches. But Zelensky’s offer was always in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of its security, perhaps NATO membership or American peacekeeping troops. Trump has refused to agree to that.

The tension over a security guarantee was behind Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s February Oval Office pile–on that humiliated Zelensky and sickened U.S. allies. That debacle derailed a minerals deal, but negotiations resumed in recent weeks. After all, Zelensky doesn’t have much choice — “You don’t have the cards,” Trump mocked him.

This much is true: Ukraine’s future relies on U.S. help, despite Europe’s talk of filling the void.

Trump’s 55-page proposal calls for a U.S.-controlled investment fund to develop Ukraine’s resources, including minerals such as lithium and titanium that are essential for electric cars and other products based on modern technology. From Ukraine’s half of all proceeds, it would have to repay the United States for all past aid — none of which was provided on such terms, and most of which went to U.S. defense plants for weaponry — plus 4% interest.

All with no U.S. security guarantee for Ukraine. And, just like Trump’s purported peace talks with Russia, the proposed minerals deal cuts out Ukraine’s more stalwart European allies, who, contrary to his repeated falsehoods, have collectively contributed more to Ukraine than the United States has — asking nothing in return.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters that Zelensky is “trying to back out” of a deal. He added, for thuggish effect, “If he does that, he’s got some problems. Big, big problems.”

Yes, Zelensky has big problems. But he and his country have their pride. Which is more than America will be left with if Trump has his way.

@jackiekcalmes