Comment by bakuninsbart

A tariff is a tax specifically on foreign goods. It is an artificial barrier to trade used to make domestic products more competitive. VAT is a tax applied to all products equally, so it isn't a trade barrier. You might be able to construe a convoluted argument that it is easier for domestic companies to work through domestic regulation, but that's pretty weak.

The US seems to have simply taken the value of the trade deficit with a country, divided it by total imports from that country, and used that as the tariff percentage. So in their logic, wherever there is a trade imbalance, this must be explained by barriers to trade. So in a sense this is also a repudiation of the core hypothesis of global free trade as an ideology: That, if countries trade freely with one another, they can specialise on certain production and a virtuous cycle makes everyone richer. In Trump's ideology, trade is a zero sum game, and having a trade deficit means that you are losing.