Cheap goods ‘not essence of American dream’, Trump official says amid tariff price fears

Buying cheap products is “not the essence of the American dream,” Donald Trump’s top economic official has declared, amid warnings that the US president’s trade wars risk increasing prices.

The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, defended the new administration’s aggressive trade strategy on Thursday, two days after it imposed sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico and hiked duties on China.

Top retail CEOs have cautioned the move would swiftly lead to higher prices for US consumers. Trump, too, has acknowledged there would be “a little disturbance” as a result.

During an appearance at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Bessent conceded there could be what he referred to as “a one-time price adjustment” as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” he said. The American Dream is “the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, economic security”, he added. “For too long, designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.”

It comes a few days after Bessent said he was “laser-focused” on high prices in the US. At the weekend, he announced the treasury would recruit an “affordability czar” to help address the issue.

“I think President Trump said that he’ll own the economy in six or 12 months, but I can tell you that we are working to get these prices down every day,” Bessent told Face The Nation on CBS.

The US president has already watered down key parts of this week’s US trade onslaught, suspending tariffs on Mexico and Canada for carmakers on Wednesday, before temporarily halting tariffs on most goods from Mexico on Thursday.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to bring down prices rapidly for consumers, and declared during a joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening that he was “fighting every day” to “make America affordable again”.