When U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer testified before Congress, he gave us a rare moment of, perhaps unintentional, Trump Administration transparency:
“The specific authorities this administration is using have changed, but the trade strategy has not… We are committed to continuing to use tariffs and to negotiate deals to support the re-industrialization of our economy, protect American workers and increase their wages and shrink our trade deficit.”
Translation? “We don’t care what the law actually says, what statutory triggers are required, or what fake justification we have to draft this week. We're going to impose tariffs no matter what the courts say and we dare you to try and stop us.”
It is bad-policy, made in bad faith, stripped of any pretense of economic sense or Constitutionality. Whatever the political exigency - and make no mistake, this is about politics, not economics - the administration simply pulls the tariff hammer off the shelf and swings it at whatever political nail they think will excite the MAGA base today. Unfair trade practices! Tariffs! Need to raise revenue! More tariffs! National security! More tariffs! Negotiating leverage! More tariffs! Trade deficits! More tariffs! Drug trafficking! More tariffs! Reshoring manufacturing! Way more tariffs!
And for what? Tariffs will not bring manufacturing back to the US. Alienating allies will not enhance national security. Tariffs will not create new jobs and they won't raise real wages. And they won't shrink the trade deficit, a metric economists have spent decades explaining isn't a scorecard. Politicians love them anyway because they sound good on the campaign trail. It is hard to get a politician to understand something when his power depends on his constiuents not understanding it.
Ordinarily, courts give executive agencies the benefit of the doubt out of deference to presidential discretion. But how can judges turn a blind eye when officials like Greer explicitly admit that the legal rationale is just a rhetorical fig leaf for an emperor who's clearly naked as a jaybird? In the original fable, it took a child to state the obvious while a court full of sycophants cheered the King's imaginary wardrobe. Is there no one left in the Republican Party with the guts of even a child?
Jamieson Greer said the quiet part out loud. The administration's tariff policy is immune from economic evidence and legal niceties. They're playing a shell game, shifting their legal justification from one law to another, hoping no one notices that their tariff policy is a sham.
