President Donald Trump’s tariffs — and his 90-day reprieve — are disrupting global trade patterns as countries hurried to ship products to the United States to avoid levies, according to a report. A variety of businesses around the world rushed to ship goods in the first few months of the year before Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariff policy on April 2. As a result, in the first quarter of 2025, U.S. imports surged more than 40 percent, new data shows. One week after his policy announcement, the president issued a 90-day pause on most tariffs while raising China’s to as high as 145 percent. Businesses around the world are now trying to meet the new July 9 deadline. After the reprieve, imports from the European Union nations are set to face levies of 20 percent while many Asian countries are set to face levies of around 40 percent. Roger Lund, owner of the Pennsylvania holiday store The Christmas Haus, said he typically imports a container of 20,000 Christmas baubles, nutcrackers, lights and other items in late July, he told the Wall Street Journal. But due to the looming tariffs, he changed plans, scheduling his container to leave Germany, on June 2. He hopes the cargo will arrive at a port in Baltimore by July 8 to dodge the higher prices. “Quite frankly I still don’t know if we’ll make it,” he told The Journal. “It is maddening as a business owner who relies on certainty to plan my budgets.” IrishAmerican Whiskey plans to ship 14,000 bottles from England to New York on May 5, hoping they arrive within 10 days, Michael McKay, a director of the company, told the Journal. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, workers at a furniture manufacturer are working overtime to meet a 25 percent uptick in orders due to pressure from U.S. importers aiming to beat the July deadline, the outlet reported. The international trade deficit — the difference between imports and exports — hit a record high of $162 billion in March, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data. To put matters in perspective, that figure was $92.8 billion at this time last year. “The tariff front-running is exactly what the U.S. didn’t want happening,” Melanie Debono, senior Europe economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, told the Journal. “The U.S. wants to limit trade [deficits] with everyone else.” When declaring a national emergency over the U.S.’s foreign trade policy on April 2, the White House said: “President Trump refuses to let the United States be taken advantage of and believes that tariffs are necessary to ensure fair trade, protect American workers, and reduce the trade deficit—this is an emergency.” The U.S. gross domestic product shrank in the first quarter by 0.3 percent, down from an increase of 2.4 percent at the end of 2024, according to a Commerce Department report Wednesday. This contraction reflects the surge in imports. “Today’s [trade] numbers do really highlight the risk that it may well be a negative GDP print and that is obviously setting us up for a very weak 2025,” James Knightley, chief international economist at ING Bank, told the Financial Times. “This is a big stockpiling effort to get ahead of tariffs... but we expect this to unwind pretty soon: ports data is already slowing.” The GDP figure marks the worst quarter for the U.S. economy since 2022, as the country was still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump blamed his predecessor after the Commerce Department’s report was released: “This is Biden.” “The stock market in this case is, it says how bad the situation we inherited,” he said. “This is a quarter that we looked at today, and I, we took, all of us, together, we came in on January 20th.”