Key Takeaways
• U.S.-Vietnam Trade Deal Announced: President Trump announced a trade deal imposing a 20% tariff on Vietnamese exports. Vietnam is the biggest overseas source of promotional products.
• New “Transshipping” Levies: A 40% tariff on transshipped goods was also announced for goods that are shipped through Vietnam but produced by another country.
• Return of Reciprocal Tariffs: The 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs is slated to end on July 9.
President Donald Trump has announced a trade deal with Vietnam as the 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs announced by the U.S. government draws to a close on July 9.
On July 2, President Trump announced in a Truth Social post, “I just made a Trade Deal with Vietnam. Details to follow!”
The deal puts in place a 20% tariff on Vietnamese exports into the U.S. – lower than the planned 46% tariffs on the country revealed during the president’s April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement, but higher than the baseline 10% tariff on all imports.
In addition, the deal places a 40% tariff on “transshipping,” which Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick explained as “if another country sells their content through products exported by Vietnam to us, they will get hit with a 40% tariff.”
There’s been no formal announcement of the deal with Vietnam beyond the president’s social media post. Vietnamese government sources told The Wall Street Journal that the two parties were still hammering out details.
“Currently, the negotiating teams of Vietnam and the U.S. are coordinating and engaging in discussions to concretize the topics covered by the two leaders,” the source said.
In his Truth Social post, the president wrote, “In return, Vietnam will do something they have never done before, give the United States of America TOTAL ACCESS to their Markets for Trade. In other words, they will ‘OPEN THEIR MARKET TO THE UNITED STATES,’ meaning that we will be able to sell our product into Vietnam at ZERO tariff.”
The goal, said Lutnick, is to benefit U.S. farmers who would be exporting products like cotton to Vietnam. In its April 2 chart showing the specific country-by-country reciprocal tariffs, the U.S. government indicated that Vietnam places a 90% tariff on U.S. goods imported into the country.
CNN reported that Vietnam ranked sixth in total goods exported to the U.S. last year with a total of $137 billion worth of products – a figure more than double the amount over the previous five years. Counselor 2025 State of the Industry data shows that 17% of suppliers who import products do so from Vietnam, the second-highest among all countries.
Vietnam is a major sourcing hub for apparel and footwear. According to the American Journal of Transportation, Vietnam’s textile exports to the U.S. alone reached $12 billion through the first three quarters of 2024, with 9.1% year-over-year growth over that same period of 2023.
“Obviously this is not good news for American consumers,” Clark Packard, a trade policy research fellow at Cato Institute, told CNN. “Certainly American consumers will ultimately bear the burden here.”
The Trump administration has struck previous deals with China and the U.K., while negotiations with Japan have stalled out, the president admitted last Tuesday. As the July 9 deadline nears, it remains to be seen if the Trump administration will make more deals as it seeks what it sees as equitable trade practices on the global scale.
