A Chinese TikToker has created a sci-fi video showing what America will become under Donald Trump’s new tariffs. The AI-generated clip starts with a group of obese Americans – who look depressed and exhausted – in a production line in front of sewing machines with traditional oriental music playing in the background.
At the end of the 32-second clip, Trump’s campaign slogan pops up, saying: “Make America Great Again”. The jobs being portrayed are the type that Trump is trying to get back to the US by slapping tariffs on every other country in the world. Since Trump hit China with extra tariffs, mocking videos like this have started spreading on Chinese social media.#
The US president sparked rage in Beijing last week when he hit the country with a 34 per cent tariff on top of the 20 per cent he imposed earlier this year. He’s now added another 50 per cent, bringing the combined total to a painful 104 per cent.
And responding in kind, Beijing has today increased its tariff on goods exported to the US up to 84 per cent. China’s state media reported: “The US’ practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, seriously infringing on China’s legitimate rights and interests, and seriously damaging the rules-based multilateral trading system.
“In accordance with the Tariff Law of the People’s Republic of China, the Customs Law of the People’s Republic of China, the Foreign Trade Law of the People’s Republic of China and other laws and regulations and basic principles of international law, with the approval of the State Council, from 12:01 on April 10, 2025, the tariff increase measures on imported goods originating from the United States will be adjusted.”
In addition to the tit-for-tat tariffs, Trump’s right-hand man JD Vance said China fuelled its economy with “peasants”, which may have been inspiration for the video shared by TikToker Ben Lau. Since being shared, it’s already been viewed more than five million times.
Under the video, one user wrote: “America will become the poorest country in the world under Trump’s rule.”
Another said: “Low skilled manufacturing will never come back to the US. Highly skilled manufacturing won’t come to the US because we gutted education and don’t have the highly skilled workforce.”
Trump’s sweeping new tariffs went into full effect today. When Mr Trump announced the latest round of tariffs on April 2, he declared that the US would now tax nearly all of America’s trading partners at a minimum of 10% – and impose steeper rates for countries that he says run trade surpluses with the US.
The 10 per cent baseline had already gone into effect on Saturday. Mr Trump’s higher import tax rates on dozens of countries and territories took hold at midnight, Washington DC time (5am BST).
The steeper levies run as high as 50 per cent – with that biggest rate landing on small economies that trade little with the US, including the African kingdom of Lesotho.
Some other rates include a tax of 47 per cent on imports from Madagascar, 46 per cent on Vietnam, 32 per cent on Taiwan, 25 per cent on South Korea, 24 per cent on Japan and 20 per cent on the European Union. Some of these new tariffs build on previous trade measures.
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