Donald Trump loses all his bluster on customs tariffs. Trump can no longer intimidate foreign countries after the Supreme Court rejected his emergency reciprocal tariffs. Republicans and the White House complained that Trump “lost his influence” when the court ruled that no president could compensate and impose tariffs unilaterally.
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CNN’s Aaron Blake explained that Trump could collapse his entire house of tariff cards if he continues to try to use Section 122:
And his stated alternative, whereby he would institute a 15% global tariff under different authority, could easily fail – and take his entire tariff strategy with it.
Indeed, the law on which it now relies, section 122(a) of the Trade Act of 1974, was intended to respond to different situations. These are not trade deficits, which the Trump administration cited to justify the now-rescinded emergency tariffs, but rather a serious “balance of payments” deficit.
The problem is that the Trump administration has already argued that Section 122 does not apply to trade deficits, which is why the president had to use urgency to impose his own tariffs. The 122 tariffs are not unilateral and must be renewed by Congress, but Senate Democrats immediately slammed the door on that possibility.
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