“I will pass landmark legislation that will be known as the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. If they charge US, we charge THEM — an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount. Under the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, other countries will have two choices — they'll get rid of their tariffs on us, or they will pay us hundreds of billions of dollars.”
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Independently re-verified. Trump personally led and drove sweeping 'reciprocal' tariffs as the centerpiece of his second-term trade agenda, imposed April 2, 2025 by Executive Order 14257 (and modified by EO 14326, July 31, 2025) — both confirmed live on whitehouse.gov invoking IEEPA and a declared national emergency, NOT the promised 'Trump Reciprocal Trade Act' legislation. No such statute passed: the closest bill, H.R. 735 'United States Reciprocal Trade Act' (119th Congress), was merely introduced, and Trump chose executive action over pursuing it. The reciprocity was also not the promised 'same exact amount' — rates were derived from a trade-deficit formula rather than matching foreign tariff levels. On Feb 20, 2026 the Supreme Court (6-3, Learning Resources v. Trump) held IEEPA does not authorize tariffs and struck the reciprocal tariffs down; IEEPA tariffs terminated Feb 24, 2026, after which Trump pivoted to a temporary Section 122 surcharge — showing he continued driving the policy. This is squarely CHAMPIONED: he actively LED/drove the effort well beyond a single vote, which is why it exceeds ATTEMPTED/PARTIAL. It is not FULL because no legislation was enacted, reciprocity was imperfect, and the tariffs were judicially invalidated. Adversarial nonpartisan check: a politician of either party who made their signature promise the centerpiece of their agenda, drove it aggressively by executive action, achieved it temporarily, then saw it struck down by the Supreme Court with no legislation passed would fairly receive CHAMPIONED (not FULL) under the same standard. Confidence held at 0.66 to reflect the genuine CHAMPIONED/PARTIAL boundary tension given the promise literally demanded LEGISLATION that never materialized. All three cited sources are real, live, and support the outcome.
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