Trump Considers Slashing Tariffs On China, Administration 'Very Close' To Deal With India

President Donald Trump is considering cutting tariffs on China as part of a deal that would bring down tensions in the bruising trade war. 

The administration is considering slashing the levies on China, with one senior White House official telling The Wall Street Journal the new rate would be somewhere between 50% and 65%, a steep cut from the current 145% fees.

The plan would be similar to a tiered approach proposed by a House committee on China late last year, the official said. That plan included 35% taxes on Chinese imports not deemed a threat to national security and at least 100% tariffs on goods considered strategic to America’s interests. 

After reports of the potential tariff relief, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that the United States wouldn't make any unilateral changes to trade policy. 

"As I’ve said many times, I don’t think either side believes that the current tariff levels are sustainable, so I would not be surprised if they went down in a mutual way,” he said after giving a speech at an Institute of International Finance event in the nation's capital, Bloomberg reported. 

Bessent also said that the U.S. and India were "very close" to reaching a trade agreement. 

Earlier in the day, White House officials had tried to tamp down any speculation about a potential easing of tariffs, but the news still helped to lift all three major stock indexes by at least one percentage point each.

“President Trump has been clear: China needs to make a deal with the United States of America,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the WSJ. “When decisions on tariffs are made, they will come directly from the president. Anything else is just pure speculation.”

As Trump's trade team tries to hammer out deals, a dozen states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York on Wednesday in an effort to stop the White House's tariff policy, the Associated Press reported. The states allege that the levies are unlawful because they're subject to the president's “whims rather than the sound exercise of lawful authority.”

Trump had signaled on Tuesday that he was open to reducing the tariffs on China, calling the current rate “very high” in an Oval Office press conference.

“It will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero,” he said.

U.S. port operators expect the trade war, and specifically the tariffs on China, to significantly dent container traffic this year. Officials at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle roughly 35% of all containerized cargo, expect volume to fall by at least 10% as early as May, with further declines through the year, Bloomberg reported. 

The Southern California Leadership Council and the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., which published the traffic forecasts, said China’s retaliatory 125% tariffs were also likely to weigh on outbound port traffic. 

Container bookings from China to the United States have already fallen 60% in the three weeks since tariffs on China took effect, Ryan Petersen, CEO of the scalable shipping and logistics provider Flexport, said in a thread on X.

The current tariff regime will reduce economic activity by $2T, lead to the failure of thousands of small businesses, upend supply chains and result in supply shortages, he said. 

“Everyone breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Trump said tariffs on China would be much much lower than 145%. Now we just need him to act quickly to avoid creating insane surge pricing and covid level logistics bottlenecks as this bubble of cancelled orders gets rebooked,” Petersen wrote. 

Onshore, demand for warehouse space is already being impacted by the tit-for-tat trade battles. But the industrial sector may avoid significant disruption because three-quarters of logistics real estate demand is tied to regional and local consumption, Prologis researchers said in a note this week.

“While global trade remains integral to the logistics ecosystem, U.S. logistics real estate demand is fundamentally anchored in domestic consumption,” the report’s authors wrote. “This foundation provides enduring stability amid shifting trade flows and evolving policy.”

UPDATE, APRIL 23, 5:20 P.M. ET: This story has been updated with comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, details about a newly filed lawsuit and the stock market's daily performance.