US journalist James Surowiecki has a very credible theory on how the Trump administration has come up with these tariff rates (as Greg Jericho pointed out earlier the explanation of ‘non-monetary trade barriers’ combined with tariff rates didn’t make any logical sense)

Surowiecki has calculated that Trump’s acolytes have taken the trade deficit America has with nations and just halved it as a tariff rate. That is why Australia only has the ‘baseline minimum’ of 10% – because the US exports more to Australia than Australia exports to the United States.