Tariffs are Trump’s favorite plaything – and his justifications are absurd | Steven Greenhouse

5 hours ago 6

With the midterm elections less than four months away, it’s a precarious time for Donald Trump and Republicans: Trump’s war against Iran is going badly, his approval ratings are in the toilet, gas prices are soaring and pushing up inflation, and nation after nation is furious about Trump’s insults, bullying and ugly American unilateralism.

So amid all this mess, what does Trump do? He turns to his favorite economic plaything: tariffs. On Monday, Trump signed orders to slap a 50% tariff on many Canadian goods, and four days later, he imposed across-the-board 10% or 12.5% tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries. Trump was no doubt thumping his chest, while millions of people overseas were dumping on him for yet another unnecessary, hostile act.

Too bad for Republicans, and most Americans, though, because Trump’s fixation on tariffs will only worsen their troubles. Trump’s new tariffs will push up prices – let’s not forget that tariffs are taxes on imports, and US consumers will pay those taxes. A corollary of that: Trump’s tariffs will worsen Americans No 1 economic concern: affordability. In bad news for typical Americans, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump’s tariffs will increase costs for the average US household by $1,100 each year. The tariffs are also likely to push Trump’s approval ratings deeper into the sewer. If Trump thinks these tariffs are going to distract Americans from thinking about the Epstein files or the disastrous mess he’s made with his Iran “excursion”, he’s deluding himself. The American people aren’t going to forget those things.

It’s hard to tell whether Trump’s repeated use of tariffs is a fixation or an addiction. Emperor Donald I evidently loves tariffs because he can use them to clobber other countries whenever he wants. They’re a powerful cudgel he won’t let go of. Trump imposed his new tariffs on more than 80 countries on the very day that another set of tariffs he slapped on dozens of countries was due to expire. To paraphrase the actor Charlton Heston, I can imagine Trump saying: “I’ll give up tariffs when you take them from my cold, dead hands.”

With these new tariffs, Trump is again engaged in his delusional, destructive tariff tomfoolery. They’ll push up prices, squeeze Americans’ wallets and anger other countries. Trump said his tariffs would boost US manufacturing, but the US has lost 75,000 factory jobs since he returned to office, with many executives complaining about all the herky-jerky uncertainty Trump has wrought. Assessing Trump’s effects on the economy, Atsi Sheth, the chief credit officer for Moody’s Ratings, told the New York Times :“Volatility and unpredictability is the new normal.”

Like so much that Trump does, his new tariffs are clearly based on pique and false premises with lots of shamelessness and absurdity thrown in. After the US supreme court overturned Trump’s me-against-the-whole-world tariffs in February, Trump, refusing to let go of his tariff toy, turned to other strategies. To justify his new 50% tariffs against Canada – which are piled atop numerous other tariffs he’s imposed on a country that was long the US’s closest ally – Trump relied on a never before used provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a widely derided 1930 law that greatly worsened the Great Depression of a century ago. With this new tariff, placed on hockey sticks, paper, plywood, dairy products and many other Canadian goods, Trump invoked a Smoot-Hawley provision that allows retaliation against countries that engage in trade discrimination against the US.

In making that case, Trump’s exhibit No 1 is something rather preposterous, or should I say rather shameless? After Trump imposed high, punitive tariffs on Canada last year, 11 of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories halted liquor imports from the US because they were so irate about those tariffs along with Trump’s outlandish and belittling statements that he wanted to make Canada the 51st state. The White House called this ban on US liquor illegal discrimination, while Canadians view it as a type of traditional trade retaliation that countries engage in when another country – here the US – slaps tariffs on them, a situation made worse by the fact that Trump’s tariffs against Canada are an egregious violation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump also insists that Canada has improperly discriminated against the US because Canada imposed a 25% tariff on select US-made cars after Trump slapped a 25% tariff on Canadian-made cars.

He is essentially telling Canada: I have a right to punch you in the nose whenever I want. But if you punch me back, that’s illegal discrimination against the US. That’s the logic of America’s leading stable genius, who also offered another far-fetched justification for his decision: “We’re going to put a big tariff on Canada because of the smoke,” he told reporters on Friday, referring to wildfire smoke that has crossed the US border.

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, isn’t happy about Trump’s painful, new 50% tariff. “We won’t back down,” he said on social media. “The fastest and only way to get US alcohol back on Ontario shelves is for the U.S. to drop its illegal tariffs on Canada.”

As for the new tariffs hitting more than 80 countries, Trump, who over the years has shown next to no concern about worker exploitation, turned rather surprisingly to the issue of forced labor to slap on those tariffs.

After the supreme court overturned his Liberation Day tariffs, Trump hit dozens of nations with a replacement tariff that would expire after 150 days. Eager to follow the boss’s wishes and impose a new tariff as soon as that one expired, Trump’s toadies uncovered a trade law provision that lets Washington punish countries that fail to take enough action against forced labor. No surprise here: Trump’s US trade representative issued a report that made the boss happy. That report found that dozens of countries, including Canada, the UK, Australia, Norway, Japan and China, plus the European Union, were not doing enough to enforce a prohibition against forced labor. That report pointed to forced labor in producing rice in Myanmar, tobacco in Malawi, and cotton and polysilicon in China.

It’s deeply perplexing that Trump is punishing some of these trading partners. Norway has pioneered laws to crack down on forced labor in overseas supply chains, while the European Union’s new ban on goods produced with forced labor will take effect in December 2027. Canada already bans imports made with forced labor, and is moving to strengthen that prohibition.

It’s not as if Trump has shown much concern before about worker exploitation or forced labor. In 1998, Trump agreed to pay $1.375m to settle a lawsuit brought by undocumented Polish workers who said they were underpaid for their work demolishing a department store to make way for Trump Tower in New York. Some trade experts criticize Trump for slamming all these longtime allies about forced labor even as he is pushing vigorously to improve ties with China, which the Biden administration found to have serious forced labor problems in its Xinjiang region.

Trump’s newfound concern about forced labor rings especially hollow considering that his administration chopped more than $500m from the labor department’s efforts to investigate and fight against forced labor, child labor and human trafficking. “This was a completely indiscriminate meat ax that was taken to these projects, and workers will suffer,” said Thea Lee, who served as the labor department’s deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs under Biden. Bemoaning that $500m-plus in cuts, Kelly Fay Rodriguez, who was Biden’s special representative for international labor affairs, told Equal Times. “Unfortunately, it is extremely likely that child labor and forced labor practices will increase. We know these problems are endemic but … we’ve wiped out the resources and the prioritization for fighting them.”

Imagine a world where Donald Trump truly cared about worker exploitation and forced labor. He would be pushing to raise the absurdly low $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage – something he has never lifted a finger to do. He would be increasing, rather than cutting, the number of safety inspectors for mines and factories. He would be pushing to strengthen – instead of repeatedly moving to weaken – the nation’s labor unions, long the most effective voice in fighting against worker exploitation. He would be pressuring China’s President Xi Jinping to stop all the forced labor in his country. But that would be a make-believe Donald Trump – he cares far more about what’s good for billionaires than what’s good for workers.

Bottom line: there remains far too much forced labor in the world – more than 27 million children, women and men are in forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization. It would be great if Donald Trump sincerely seized on that issue rather than used it as an insincere pretext to clobber other nations with tariffs.