Summary
Russia was excluded from Trump’s sweeping tariff list due to existing U.S. sanctions that limit trade, White House officials claimed.
Despite lower trade volumes, countries like Syria were still included, prompting skepticism.
Trump has prioritized ending the war in Ukraine and threatened 50% tariffs on nations buying Russian oil. Russian state media framed the omission as sanctions-based, not favoritism, with some mocking Trump’s harsher stance on allies.
Ukraine, meanwhile, faces a 10% tariff despite the country’s strategic partnership with the U.S.
FFS people, sanctioned countries were not included. Somalia, Burkina Faso…also not included.
Let them deal in baseless conspiracy. Please deal in fact here.
Yep, it’s fertilizer and related exempt at inputs. Prior to the war trade with Russian was closer to $30B.
The trade sanctions exist outside of tariff policy, so it’s probably too complicated for ChatGPT (and therefore these clowns) to sort out easily.
There’s a possibility that someone used an LLM to formulate the tariff percentages. That’s not baseless, there’s evidence based on replication and similar language in the USTR site.
Which makes it a funny joke to suggest that they did the entire tariff plan top to bottom in ChatGPT.
There’s also a much stronger possibility that Trump simply didn’t want to piss off Putin.
Why are you trying to find a more complicated answer?
Less complicated is:
“Tariff rates go brrrrrr”
“But it’s hard to add this to sanctioned countries because it involves doing work.”
'Then don’t, lol, FTW. Tell Grok to leave them out."
Grok and all appointees involved are idiots
“Here’s a list of important places that need tariffs.”
And you’re back to the “list was generated by AI” conspiracy.
Well, this is an openly jokey theocratical comment, so yeah.
Maybe the fertilizer president wants freedom of fertilizer?
President Biden also took a lot of flack from Europe when he maintained trade in Russian uranium despite their putting rules into effect concerning Russian oil. There are a few things that both parties aren’t willing to give us regarding Russia.
Iran and Syria were included.
And so were uninhabited islands. I’m not saying these people are geniuses. I’m saying that Grok probably said to skip sanctioned countries and they got that mostly right.
Or, much more simply, Trump didn’t want to make Putin mad.
So then why did Somalia or Burkina Faso not make the list? Does Putin care about them? Not really.
Occam’s razor here is pretty easy to see as “Sanctioned counties, and we missed two.”
That wasn’t a comprehensive list, just 2 off the jump.
So no, the simpler answer is that sanctions simply aren’t a factor. They didn’t list every country on the planet.
Sure, whatever you need to believe with no evidence to support it. At least a 80% correlation with the sanctions list mes a touch of sense.
Claiming that Trump is constantly kissing Putin’s ass isn’t a conspiracy. It’s not even a secret…
So where’s your evidence that the list of countries was generated by AI?
There’s a pretty comprehensive article on The Verge outlining the likelihood of it bring probable.
Why? Isn’t that the easiest lowest hanging fruit possible?