At Issue: Donald Trump has imposed blanket tariffs on virtually every country in the world, in an attempt to strong-arm foreign nations into relocating their manufacturing and production to the United States. It’s a strange, outdated, and ultimately self-defeating strategy — one that ignores where America’s real economic strength lies.

The bulk of U.S. wealth today comes not from steel or factories, but from digital services and software. If Trump were serious about raising revenue to fund his tax cuts, he could have simply imposed a surtax on America’s own digital exports — Google Ads, Netflix, AWS, Apple Services. But of course, that would mean targeting the very sector that underpins American global dominance.

So imagine, instead, the world calls his bluff:
“Fine. You want to tariff our goods into the U.S.? Then we’ll impose a surtax on all U.S. digital services and software until the end of your presidency.”

Let’s say it starts small — 2%. But maybe, knowing Trump only responds to brute force, they go bold: 20% across the board.

From Canada to Mexico, across Latin America, the Asia-Pacific, western Asia, and the African Union — a coordinated digital toll. And the U.S. tech giants? They’d pay it. Their margins are so vast, they’d absorb the blow without blinking. Trump couldn’t retaliate effectively — 90% of the world’s digital infrastructure runs on American software.

This is what global interdependence looks like. And Trump, stuck in a factory-first fantasy, seems blind to how that interdependence is both a strength — and a vulnerability.

The Working Theory

Donald Trump’s love affair with tariffs is no secret. From steel to solar panels, he’s attempted to slap levies on nearly everything that crosses an American border, in a quixotic bid to revive mid-20th century manufacturing and bully nations into producing inside the U.S. But in doing so, he reveals a deep misunderstanding of what actually makes America powerful today.

The real engine of U.S. wealth isn’t built in factories — it’s written in code. America doesn’t just export goods; it exports ecosystems: Google Ads, Microsoft Azure, Netflix subscriptions, iPhone software updates, OpenAI’s GPT models. The U.S. owns the digital rails that much of the world now runs on.

So here’s a provocative thought: what if the world turned Trump’s game on its head?

Imagine if, in response to Trump’s all-purpose import tariffs, a global coalition — let’s say Canada, the EU, Latin America, the African Union, ASEAN, even India — decided to impose a 20% surtax on U.S. digital services and software for the duration of his presidency.

Want to advertise on Instagram in Berlin? Pay the toll. Need to use AWS in Nairobi? Cough it up. Streaming The Office in São Paulo? That’ll be 20% more, please.

Could Google, Meta, and Microsoft absorb the hit? For a while, yes. Margins in tech are thick enough to pad the blow. But the political message would be devastating: You tariffed our goods. We tariffed your gold mine.

Trump may believe tariffs are a weapon of American strength — a hammer to force others into submission. But when the U.S. exports so much digital product, tariffs can just as easily become a mirror. The world can reflect the logic back.

More than that, it could spark a global acceleration toward digital independence — Europe fast-tracking its “digital sovereignty” agenda, India doubling down on its homegrown tech stack, Latin America investing in local fintech and cloud systems. The cost of alienating the world may not be a few cents on a washing machine. It might be the slow erosion of American soft power and platform dominance.

Tariffs are blunt tools. They work best when your economy is simple and your dominance unquestioned. But in a tangled, digital world, power flows in different directions — and retaliation might not come on container ships, but in the form of code, clouds, and clicks.

Trump wants to act like it’s 1985. The world doesn’t have to play along.