Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump raised U.S. tariffs on imports from China several times, from an average of about 3 percent when he took office in January 2017 to over 20 percent by the end of 2019. As a result, the current average U.S. tariff on Chinese goods is essentially at the same level that the United States imposed on the rest of the world in the early 1930s under the Smoot-Hawley Act, a protectionist measure that many economists blame for the severity of the Gr