Trump is making American companies offers they can’t refuse. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:
U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs under the false claim that certain trade imbalances with other countries created a national emergency.
This is contested in courts and should have no legal standing. As the U.S. constitution explicitly says:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, …
Congress has not been asked to and has not consented to the arbitrary tariffs imposed by Trump since he, on April 2, declared his fake ‘Liberation Day’.
Moreover, Trump did not impose tariffs to balance trade. He immediately weaponized them by trying to to impose (archived) U.S. policy goals, as well as interests of individual companies, on foreign countries:
This month, State Department officials considered demanding that U.S. trading partners vote against an international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the oceangoing container ships that are the backbone of global trade. In a draft “action memo,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was told that department officials had sought “to inject this issue into the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations” with maritime nations such as Singapore.
That move came after administration officials this past spring debated broadening trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations, including by requiring Israel to eliminate a Chinese company’s control of a key port and insisting that South Korea publicly support deploying U.S. troops to deter China as well as Seoul’s traditional rival, North Korea, the documents said.
Administration officials saw trade talks as an opportunity to achieve objectives that went far beyond Trump’s oft-stated goal of reducing the chronic U.S. trade deficit. In the first weeks after the president paused his “reciprocal” tariffs April 9 to allow for negotiations, officials drew up plans to press countries near China for a closer defense relationship, including the purchase of U.S. equipment and port visits, the documents said.
Tariff impositions have thus become a form of blackmailing at large.
