President Donald Trump had spent days escalating a trade war with China.
Tariff rates climbed. Markets convulsed. Advisers delivered competing recommendations as businesses struggled to understand how high the penalties on Chinese imports might go.
Then, according to New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, Trump discovered something startling:
His own tariffs had reached 145%.
And he reportedly had not realized it.
“At one point, he didn’t realize how high China’s tariff burden had gotten,” Haberman said during an appearance on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.
When Trump learned the figure, she said, his reaction was one of disbelief.
The revelation stopped podcast host Sam Fragoso in his tracks.
“Just to clarify,” he asked, “he is surprised about his own numbers?”
“Correct,” Haberman replied.
The exchange offered a remarkable glimpse into the chaotic decision-making behind one of Trump’s most consequential economic policies. Rather than describing a carefully calculated tariff strategy built through modeling and detailed analysis, Haberman portrayed a process driven by instinct, competing personalities and numbers that could change with the president’s mood.
Her account comes from Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, the book she co-wrote with fellow Times reporter Jonathan Swan. The authors say their reporting was based on more than 1,000 interviews conducted while examining Trump’s second administration.
The tariff confrontation began with Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement in April 2025.
The White House initially imposed a 10% baseline tariff on imports from most countries, along with higher rates for selected trading partners. China retaliated, prompting Trump to raise American duties repeatedly as the confrontation intensified.
By the peak of the escalation, most Chinese goods faced combined new tariff burdens commonly described as reaching 145%, although some products faced different rates because of earlier duties and industry-specific measures. The administration later said certain Chinese products could face total tariffs as high as 245% when older trade penalties were included.
According to Haberman, Trump continued raising the pressure for roughly a week after the original announcement.
The process was not smooth.
Advisers including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade adviser Peter Navarro reportedly presented the president with competing figures and arguments.
Trump sometimes dismissed the numbers placed before him, Haberman said, and looked instead to aide Natalie Harp—nicknamed the “human printer” because she frequently supplied him with printed material—to produce information he considered more reliable.
The result, according to the book’s portrayal, was a tariff policy shaped less by a stable formula than by Trump’s personal reactions.
Haberman recalled another moment when the president discussed China and abruptly instructed aides to “put them in for 10.”
“That’s not a formula,” she said. “That’s a gut feeling.”
That characterization matters because tariffs are not merely symbolic punishments directed at foreign governments.
They are taxes collected on imported goods, generally paid initially by American importers. Companies may absorb those costs, pressure suppliers to lower prices or pass the expense to consumers through higher prices.
A sudden shift from 10% to 50%, 100% or 145% can therefore disrupt supply chains, delay investment and force companies to make decisions involving billions of dollars.
Trump has long argued that tariffs protect American industry, pressure foreign governments and encourage manufacturing to return to the United States.
But Haberman’s account suggests the president may not always have been fully aware of the cumulative rate created as separate tariff actions were stacked upon one another.
That claim has not been independently confirmed by Trump or the White House.
Trump has attacked Regime Change as fiction and “fake news,” while directing personal insults at Haberman and Swan. The administration has not publicly accepted their description of the tariff discussions.
The official record nevertheless confirms that the tariff escalation moved rapidly.
Trump imposed new China duties, increased them after Beijing retaliated and temporarily paused higher country-specific tariffs on many other nations. China remained the major exception during the initial pause.
The United States and China later negotiated a temporary reduction. In May 2025, Washington agreed to suspend some of the additional duties while retaining a lower reciprocal tariff, and Beijing agreed to reduce its retaliatory measures during the negotiating period.
Haberman said Trump’s retreat came only after growing instability in financial markets—particularly concern in the bond market—made the economic risks impossible for the administration to ignore.
That sequence creates the most damaging interpretation of her story.
The president was not merely surprised by an obscure technical detail.
He was allegedly shocked by the scale of an economic weapon he had personally ordered into place.
For Fragoso, the idea was so extraordinary that it required immediate confirmation.
Trump was surprised by his own tariff numbers?
Haberman’s answer was unambiguous.
“Correct.”
If her reporting is accurate, the moment reveals a presidency in which enormous economic decisions could emerge from intuition, escalation and personal impulse—while officials around Trump scrambled to calculate the consequences afterward.
The tariffs were presented publicly as evidence of strength and strategic control.
Behind closed doors, Haberman says, the man imposing them was looking at the final number with the same shock as everyone else.
