On Friday, Donald Trump followed up a concerning jobs report with massive new global tariffs, driving markets down and once more raising prices on consumers for no reason after weeks of supposed trade negotiations. Like with his first round of import duties, announced in the Rose Garden on his ludicrous April 2 “Liberation Day,” these tariffs are not only chaotic and destructive, but they’re illegal.
The president is leaning on a 1977 law meant to be invoked for targeted financial actions in certain emergency circumstances to reshape trade globally.
Just the day before these newest tariffs were implemented, the administration’s lawyers had been grilled by the 11 judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, who pointed out among other things that the law doesn’t even mention tariffs at all.
If the plaintiffs, made up of states and businesses, need anywhere to look for inspiration and evidence for their legal arguments, they don’t have to look much further than Trump‘s own ramblings and social media feed, where he constantly tells the whole world that he is engaging in the tariff actions for all manner of reasons completely unrelated to any economic objectives.
So far, he’s threatened tariffs over Brazil’s domestic prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro and over Canada’s intent to recognize a Palestinian state, among other things. This is a real disparate set of rationales, but what they have in common is that they are ideological battles probably drawn from something Trump saw on TV and have nothing to do with correcting a supposed trade imbalance with those countries, already an incredibly flimsy argument to begin with.
Don’t just take our word for it; the Manhattan-based U.S. Court of International Trade — you know, the judicial entity set up specifically and explicitly to have expertise on these matters — already struck down most of Trump‘s tariff regime on the grounds that it was unlawful.
That ruling has been stayed for now, but the evidence just keeps piling on that Trump is significantly exceeding his authority. Unfortunately, even if this insanity were to be fully struck down tomorrow, we’ve had months of chaos that has indelibly damaged trade relationships as well as general diplomatic relations. The world is not going to wait for the U.S. to hash out its chaos, and other countries are already moving to reorient parts of their manufacturing and trade schemes to circumvent an unreliable United States.
Of course, this seems like one more issue headed at some point to the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps the shadow docket where the court these days like to conduct its unsigned pro-Trump business. It’s long since become clear that the high court is more interested in ideological outcomes than the uniform application of the law, but even then, siding with Trump here would be farcical.
This is the exact same court that just last year ruled that Joe Biden attempting to clear some student debt by invoking emergency powers in the context of the COVID pandemic — a real global catastrophe that killed countless people and crashed the economy while putting millions out of work — was an unlawful exercise of authority.
If that’s the case, but Trump is in his rights to wildly alter tariff policies at a whim in service to random political grievances around the world, then the law truly means nothing anymore. Let’s stop this madness while we still can, before economic forces take it out of our hands.
