Let's go live to CNN's senior White House reporter, Kevin Liptek.

So, Kevin, what is the president saying about this potential escalation here?

Yeah, and it's a major escalation in this tit-for-tat tariff war between Washington and Beijing.

Remember, Pam, last week, President Trump applied that 35 percent reciprocal tariff on China.

China retaliated, applying its own 34 percent tariff on the United States.

Now President Trump saying this, if China does not withdraw its 34 percent increase above their already long-term trading abuses by tomorrow, April the 8th, the United States will impose additional tariffs on China of 50 percent, effective April 9th.

He goes on to say that, additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated.

And I just want to break down the math for you here, Pamela, because, remember, President Trump had already applied a 20 percent tariff on China for its role in the fentanyl crisis.

He applied that 34 percent reciprocal tariff last week.

That goes into effect later this week.

Now he's threatening this additional 50 percent retaliatory tariff on China, this tit-for-tat back and forth.

That would bring the total tariffs on China by the United States to 104 percent, which is a huge number, China the world's second largest economy, one of the United States' largest trading partners.

This could have a serious effect for American consumers, given the amount of goods that come into the United States.

And I think just as we have seen today, the market's clearly looking for some kind of off-ramp here, for some kind of easing on the part of the president.

This shows that the president is very much committed to this tariff plan, exactly not what the markets were looking for, Pamela.

Yeah.

No, you're absolutely right.

And, you know, the White House has been talking about all these countries, when the 50 countries have come and reached out to the president, wanting to negotiate.

But the White House is also sending these mixed messages on whether the president is willing to negotiate.

Where do things stand on that front?

Yeah.

It seems to be this, that the president is willing to talk to these countries about potential trade deals, but that the bar will be very high for him to lift these tariffs.

That seems to be the combination of what you're hearing from White House advisers today.

We do know this morning that the president spoke to the prime minister of Japan, that country looking to ease up some of the tariffs on them, saying that they will be sending a high-level delegation to the United States to talk about trade.

The president will also discuss this with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, later today.

He imposed a 17 percent tariff on Israel last week.

But in a way, that's a cautionary tale.

Remember, Netanyahu lifted customs duties on U.S. imports to Israel, but the president went ahead with that tariff anyway. Exactly.

That's absolutely right.

Kevin Lipchak, thank you so much.

Wolf?

All right, Pamela, I want to get some more of the breaking news right now.

Joining us, Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley of Illinois.

Congressman, thanks so much for joining us.

First of all, what do you make of the president's decision to escalate his trade war once again?

Do you see any chance for an off-ramp before this gets a whole lot worse?

I don't see it coming from the president of the United States.

You talk about a very strange world we live in.

I'm, what, the liberal Democrat from Chicago, agreeing with headlines from The Wall Street Journal, the dumbest trade war in history.

I'm very concerned, as are my constituents, with extraordinary cost increases, a recession, and the volatility in the markets that create uncertainty and great economic peril for our country.

I think the bigger concern right now is it's part of a larger issue where this country, through the president, thinks that we can stand alone.

Four percent of the world's population, we're going to be less secure financially, and we're going to be more vulnerable in every other way from threats from across the seas.

I do want to start by talking about this sort of tit-for-tat trade war between the U.S. and China.

Obviously, a lot of threats in the air between both countries.

Donald Trump now threatening to slap an additional 50 percent tariff on China if China does not pull back its 34 percent tariff hike.

Just explain to us the potential consequences and which economy stands to lose more from this escalating trade war.

Well, it's hard to know which is going to lose more, but it's easy to tell you which consumers will lose more, and that's us, right?

I mean, we consume in the United States and throughout the West huge amounts of Chinese goods for everyday life.

Think about, just to take the most basic example, an iPhone, which now markets at, what, $1,100 for the newest models of them.

And if you ended up doing the 50 percent hike on components, you're probably adding another $500 or so to that.

And of course, there's everything you're looking at at Walmart and much of what you're looking at on Amazon.

So these would flow through.

What really sort of struck me about President Trump's Truth Social posting, which was just less than an hour ago, was if you know much about the Chinese structure and about Xi Jinping, the idea of setting him a deadline to back down in 24 hours, he's not going to do that.

He's not going to end up looking weaker to Donald Trump.

It's just not in the DNA of the Chinese leadership right now, because he will think that will transfer to the confrontation over Taiwan or something else.

So I don't think the ultimatum strategy is likely to work.

And David, we had Rahm Emanuel on last week, and he said the irony here is here's a president who campaigned on ending all wars and he's starting one.

And he said, no, it's not a combat war involving F-16s or anything like that.

But it's a trade war.

And if you think about one of the purposes that free trade or any type of trade relations and trade alliances serves is to hopefully avoid physical wars as well.

And you have a president now who has fired his U.S. cyber security chief, cyber command chief, because of a conspiracy theorist apparently reportedly coming to the White House and suggesting he's not loyal.

You have a president who continues to conflate friend and foe and in saying that even our friends are treating us worse than our foes.

Just give us a sense of where that puts us in terms of security risks here in the United States.

Sure.

Well, first of all, I mean, just any reading of the history of the past century is trade conflict can frequently spill into military conflict.

We've seen that happen time and time again.

It was a source of the War of 1812 with Britain.

Right.

But you also saw elements of that in World War One and so forth.

Separate and apart from the history lesson here, the conflation of our adversaries with our allies is bound to come back and haunt the United States.

I think, you know, what is our greatest military strength as a country beyond our nuclear weapons, which you can't really go use?

And the answer is it's our alliance system.

Who is it that we have tariffed heavily in the course of this?

Japan and South Korea, who are linchpins of the effort to contain Chinese expansion, to say nothing of North Korea.

Why poison that relationship?

I don't know.

And if the president turned around and said, well, this is about trade, not about politics, go explain what we heard over the weekend about why it was that he did not put any tariff penalties on Russia, because we're in the middle of a negotiation for peace in Ukraine.

By the way, there are tariffs that were put on Ukraine.

So obviously, politics has entered into the setting of these tariffs and yet not with our main allies in Europe or Asia.

All right, David Sanger, live for us there.

Thank you.