Gov. Gavin Newsom announced April 4 that he will seek trade negotiations with foreign leaders to spare California from retaliatory tariffs.

Newsom said he wanted to seek negotiations in response to President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which could trigger retaliatory tariffs with severe economic consequences. China, one of the United States’ largest trade partners, declared a 125% levy on U.S. goods April 11 in response to Trump’s 145% tariff, according to CNBC.

Newsom said in a video posted to social media platform X that he believes California should be exempt from tariffs because Trump’s actions do not represent California’s government or its nearly 40 million-person population.

He also cited the reach of California’s economy, saying that it has the largest gross domestic product of any U.S. state and is the fourth-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP.

Kimberly Clausing, the Eric M. Zolt chair in tax law and policy at the UCLA School of Law, said that despite the fact California may experience excessive disruptions from the tariffs, Newsom’s pursuit will likely be difficult because of the state’s subsidiary status and potential challenges with identifying the source of items.

“Tariffs are done at the federal level, not at the state level,” she said. “We have no jurisdictional authority in California to have a different tariff than what the U.S. government is collecting.”

Since many goods produced in the interior of the country are shipped out of California’s Port of Long Beach, it would be hard to identify the state from which a given product originally came, Clausing said.

Ariel Burstein, a professor of economics at UCLA, said tariffs may hit California college students severely because the goods they are more likely to buy – like electronics, clothing and cars – are imported from countries whose prices are increasing because of American tariffs.

Matilde Bombardini, a professor of business and public policy at UC Berkeley, also said in a written statement that tariffs imposed by the Trump administration will influence students’ buying patterns.

Along with reaping the impacts of increased consumer prices and decreased product variety, students will be threatened by the suspension of “de minimis” exemptions, which allow consumer goods worth less than $800 to be tariff-free, Bombardini said in the statement.

“Students, being generally of lower income, will suffer,” she said in the statement.

Consequently, previously low-cost packages that were not subject to tariffs are now vulnerable to them, Bombardini said in the statement. Not only does this increase prices for consumers, but it may cost the American government more money to collect the taxes, according to PBS.

Burstein said the effects of the current administration’s tariffs are already being felt in California and beyond. He added that the stock market has fallen as an immediate response.

“It reflects something about the earnings of the firms and the profits,” Burstein said. “The risks of a recession have gone up after these announcements. … On the other hand, today, the March retail sales were announced, and those went up unexpectedly. And the reason is, I think, that people anticipate higher prices because of the tariffs in the future.”

Since his initial statement declaring California will explore economic negotiations independently, Newsom has also sued Trump over the tariffs. This makes California the first state to legally challenge the president’s ability to unilaterally establish trade policies that the state alleges will cause significant harm to the state’s economy and residents, according to Politico.

“The manufacturing footprint in this state is disproportionately impacted by the tariffs,” Newsom said in an April 16 press conference. “No state is poised to lose more than the state of California.”