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As economists and journalists I've seen so far have been just unable to find any real basis for Trump's claimed external tariffs being "responded to", mostly describing them with terms like "magic" or "apparently unfounded", here is the first person professionally within the relevant fields I've seen who claims to have a solid explanation for how the numbers were made, either astonishingly incompetently or more likely plain deceptively, from James Surowiecki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Surowiecki).

White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai claims that "No we literally calculated tariffs and non tariff barriers", while in its claims Trump-administration has reclassified EU's VAT (value-added tax) as a non-tariff barrier while that is just not true, VAT isn't a trade barrier but instead an evolved form of what in USA is "sales tax" mess which isn't mentioned in the other direction by Trump and representatives.

The exception seems to be when a place has no/very low trade with USA, so their crazy calculation can't be reasonably applied, they just declare 10% anyway, like e.g. Heard Island and McDonald Islands with population total of 0,
except for Russia which isn't included and they claim it's because Russia is sanctioned so trade is low, but that didn't stop them from putting other places on the list.

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