The Trump Tariffs Are Dead. Long Live The Trump Tariffs.
The peculiar thing about news these days is that we’ll spend months waiting for something, but then, when it finally arrives, it will end up feeling completely ephemeral and trivial. Such was the case last week when we wrapped up the week with a 6-3 ruling from the Supreme Court striking down most of Donald Trump’s tariffs. What does this mean? I’m rarely a Monday morning quarterback, but I do suspect that the answer will be, as in the case of many other court rulings: very little.
The TLDR of the ruling is that IEEPA wasn’t an appropriate tool to use to impose tariffs (zero people are surprised by this) and that maybe it’s kinda messed up when Congress abdicates its Constitutionally-delineated responsibilities and the President styles himself as a king. Shocking! Liz Dye noted from reading the court ruling that it seems that many of the justices, uh, kinda sorta hate each other. Who could possibly hate Samuel Alito, Jr., or Clarence Thomas? Clearly not Harlan Crow.
The president, for his part, claimed that the Supreme Court has been taken over by corrupt foreign influences. A commenter suggested that John Roberts should make sure his mortgage paperwork is in order.
Questions in the past 72 hours have thus asked things like, “now that the tariffs have been declared illegal, will the government refund that money to the entities that paid the tariffs?” Scott Bessent doesn’t want to talk about it. The government, of course, doesn’t have that money. They’ve already spent it on tax breaks for billionaires and giant companies– the same companies, they’re bragging, are funding the illegal construction of the Trump ballroom. No one’s getting a refund.
If they did, the refund would also inevitably not get back to consumers. It would just create more profits for the companies that paid the tariffs in the first place. It’s almost as though we live in a perpetual upside-down and there’s very little this government will do that is actually going to have a demonstrable net positive for workers and the working class.
Of course, no one should be surprised by this.
Makes me wonder what those millions of voters were thinking when they voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
But until we figure that out, is the president backing down? Nope. He’s decided he’s going to use a non-IEEPA authority to impose– wait for it- more tariffs. Are the tariffs working? Well, turns out they’re not (again, something that should surprise no one). They have shrunk the trade deficit with China specifically– but the trade deficit is as big as ever, and not getting smaller.
The largest tax increase in American history turns out to have done little for the economy other than drive up costs for households, cause a great deal of uncertainty (and even hundreds of bankruptcies for businesses and farmers), and stoke fears that the global order that the United States laboriously built since 1945 is going to fall apart, creating a power vacuum that will cede space to authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. Fortunately for Xi and Putin, though, they have a friend in Donald Trump, who declared in a press conference Friday, that, “I can do whatever I want.”
