President Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers – from small, poor countries like Laos and Algeria to wealthy U.S. trading partners like Canada and Switzerland. They’re now facing especially hefty taxes – tariffs – on the products they export to the United States starting Aug. 7.

The closest thing to winners may be the countries that caved to Trump’s demands — and avoided even more pain. But it’s unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run — even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump’s protectionist policies.

“In many respects, everybody’s a loser here,’’ said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School.

Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America’s enormous economic power to punish countries that won’t agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do.

“The biggest winner is Trump,” said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. “He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeeded – dramatically.’’

Everything goes back to what Trump calls “Liberation Day’’ – April 2 – when the president announced “reciprocal’’ taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% “baseline’’ taxes on almost everyone else.

He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs — all of which is now being challenged in court.

Winners will still pay higher tariffs than before Trump took office

Trump retreated temporarily after his Liberation Day announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate.

Eventually, some of them did, caving to Trump’s demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs for the privilege of continuing to sell into the vast American market.

The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States — up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The U.S. demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the UK for 19 straight years.

The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low single-digit rates they paid last year — but lower than the tariffs he was threatening (30% on the EU and 25% on Japan).

Also cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola’s tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%. And while Trump administration cut Taiwan’s tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt.

“20% from the beginning has not been our goal, we hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,” Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei Friday.

Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he’d announced in April, but the damage may already have been done there.

Bashing Brazil, clobbering Canada, shellacking the Swiss

Countries that didn’t knuckle under — and those that found other ways to incur Trump’s wrath — got hit harder.

Even some poorer countries were not spared. Laos’ annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria’s $5,600 — versus America’s $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy.

Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn’t like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for trying to lose his electoral defeat in 2022. Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it’s imported every year since 2007.

Trump’s decision to plaster a 35% tariff on longstanding U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Switzerland was clobbered with a 39% import tax — even higher than the 31% Trump originally announced on April 2.

“The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington” to make a deal, said Wolff, now senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re clearly not at all happy.’’

Fortunes may change if Trump’s tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his Liberation Day tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law.

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wend its way through the legal system, and may likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump’s justifications for the tariffs.

“If (the tariffs) get struck down, then maybe Brazil’s a winner and not a loser,’’ Appleton said.

Paying more for knapsacks and video games

Trump portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who try to pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits — or risk losing market share in the United States.

But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab.

Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Ford, Best Buy, Adidas, Nike, Mattel and Stanley Black & Decker, have all hiked prices due to U.S. tariffs

“This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,” Appleton said. “Sneakers, knapsacks … your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.’’

Trump’s trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. And that will impose a $2,400 cost on the average household, the lab estimates.

“The U.S. consumer’s a big loser,″ Wolff said.

____

AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this story.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Tea, a provocative dating app designed to let women anonymously ask or warn each other about men they’d encountered, rocketed to the top spot on the U.S. Apple App Store this week. On Friday, the company behind the app confirmed it had been hacked: Thousands of images, including selfies, were leaked online.

“We have engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and are working around the clock to secure our systems,” San Francisco-based Tea Dating Advice Inc. said in a statement.

404 Media, which earlier reported the breach, said it was 4Chan users who discovered an exposed database that “allowed anyone to access the material” from Tea.

The app and the breach highlight the fraught nature of seeking romance in the age of social media.

Here’s what to know:

Tea was meant to help women date safely

Tea founder Sean Cook, a software engineer who previously worked at Salesforce and Shutterfly, says on the app’s website that he founded the company in 2022 after witnessing his own mother’s “terrifying” experiences. Cook said they included unknowingly dating men with criminal records and being ”catfished” — deceived by men using false identities.

Tea markets itself as a safe way for women to anonymously vet men they might meet on dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble— ensuring that the men are who they say they are, not criminals and not already married or in a relationship. “It’s like people have their own little Yelp pages,” said Aaron Minc, whose Cleveland firm, Minc Law, specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment.

In an Apple Store review, one woman wrote that she used a Tea search to investigate a man she’d begun talking to and discovered “over 20 red flags, including serious allegations like assault and recording women without their consent.” She said she cut off communication. ”I can’t imagine how things could’ve gone had I not known,” she wrote.

A surge in social media attention over the past week pushed Tea to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store as of July 24, according to Sensor Tower, a research firm. In the seven days from July 17-23, Tea downloads shot up 525% compared to the week before. Tea said in an Instagram post that it had reached 4 million users.

Tea has been criticized for invading men’s privacy

A female columnist for The Times of London newspaper, who signed into the app, on Thursday called Tea a “man-shaming site” and complained that ”this is simply vigilante justice, entirely reliant on the scruples of anonymous women. With Tea on the scene, what man would ever dare date a woman again?”

“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten hundreds of calls on it. It’s blown up,” attorney Minc said. “People are upset. They’re getting named. They’re getting shamed.’’

In 1996, Congress passed legislation protecting websites and apps from liability for things posted by their users. But the users can be sued for spreading ”false and defamatory” information, Minc said.

In May, however, a federal judge in Illinois threw out an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by a man who’d been criticized by women in the Facebook chat group “Are We Dating the Same Guy,″ Bloomberg Law reported.

State privacy laws could offer another avenue for bringing legal action against someone who posted your photograph or other personal information in a harmful way, Minc said.

The breach exposed thousands of selfies and photo IDs

In its statement, Tea reported that about 72,000 images were leaked online, including 13,000 images of selfies or photo identification that users submitted during account verification. Another 59,000 images that were publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages were also accessed, according to the company’s statement.

No email addresses or phone numbers were exposed, the company said, and the breach only affects users who signed up before February 2024. “At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that additional user data was affected. Protecting tea users’ privacy and data is our highest priority,” Tea said.

It said users did not need to change their passwords or delete their accounts. “All data has been secured.”

Lawyer Minc said he was not surprised to see Tea get targeted. “These sites get attacked,” he said. ”They create enemies. They put targets on themselves where people want to go after them.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo