Trump First-Term Economy Chiefs Refrain From Backing Tariff Plan

Two of President Donald Trump’s top economic chiefs from his first term refrained from backing his current approach of jacking up import duties on a range of trading partners to levels unseen in decades.

“The problem right now is we don’t have certainty” on tariffs, Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary from 2017 to the start of 2021, said Wednesday at the Bloomberg Invest forum in New York. “My own view on the tariffs would be that, if he wants to do something, I like the idea of the 10% tariff across-the-board.”

Rather than such a universal levy, Trump ...