Tariffs Tussle: Why Trump won't bow to some obscure trade court
Attack the court. Attack the media. Attack the globalists.
» OPINION & ANALYSIS
The Trump trade tussle will continue. It has to. Until he says it’s over.
It was a fight, with the entire world, that he picked. And it will be over when he senses maximum political benefit — or that he has lost control of the situation but can, to his loyal base, save enough face to keep them in his gold-plated corner.
There have been multiple reported accounts of Trump learning from mentor Roy Cohn that one should never admit defeat and should always attack.
So no federal trade court is going to get away with wiping out most of Trump’s April 2 global and reciprocal tariffs with a single ruling. The court might have, with its ruling, handed the mercantilistic president a way out of the politically unpopular import duties for Trump.
But not before he attacks, via the appeals process. Attack the court. Attack the media. Attack Democrats. Attack the globalists, especially!
Attack!
Your correspondent has predicted Trump eventually would climb down from his sweeping reciprocal import duties, writing here recently that 10 percent for most countries and something like 100 percent for China would be Trump’s most likely landing spot.
And there’s evidence that prediction is tracking nicely, though the 100 percent fee for China now looks more likely to land somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent.
But as media members and Democratic lawmakers howl that the federal trade judges’ ruling means the president will have to end the trade war, his team was making clear he had already given them the attack order.
“The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday.
Attack!
The Supreme Court justices, including three right-leaning ones Trump appointed, also were “unelected.” So the administration’s attorneys likely will want to omit that when and if the high court takes the tariffs case.
***
The sun had barely risen Thursday in Washington before another top Trump aide laid out the attack plan.
Kevin Hassett, Trump’s chief economic adviser, told Fox Business the inevitable: The administration plans to appeal a U.S. Court of International Trade ruling that blocked many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to a senior White House official.
“Well, what's going to happen is, first, we're going to see what happens on appeal, and we're very confident in our success there,” he said.
Hassett defended the president’s use of his office’s emergency powers as the legal underpinning of the import duties, saying “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of mostly Chinese fentanyl and Chinese fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada.”
Attack!
“And the idea that having more people die from fentanyl than died in the Vietnam War, that that's not an emergency that we need to use every [executive] power that we have to try to address, is ludicrous to me,” he said, contending the fentanyl rationale was the one on which “we actually have the most authority for doing what we're exactly doing.”
Attack!
The White House aide’s comments came after the three-judge panel on Wednesday concluded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 does not allow for “unbounded authority.” The court ruled that the statute could not be used to impose “unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”
The ruling left in place many item-specific duties, like ones Trump has slapped on steel and aluminum. But it would block most of the sweeping global and reciprocal tariffs he put in place on April 2.
Hassett also claimed the president and administration have other “measures that we could take with different numbers that we could start right now.”
The top White House economic adviser floated other authorities Trump could tap into to put the tariffs back in place, but noted using those would take some time. He did not specify which alternative authorities could eventually be employed.
“There are different approaches that would take a couple of months to put these in place and using procedures that have been approved in the past or approved in the last administration,” Hassett told the network. “But we're not planning to pursue those right now because we're very, very confident that this [ruling] really is incorrect.”
Attack!
***
As it prepares an appeal, Hassett said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and other Trump negotiators would continue seeking revised trade arrangements with a long list of countries and the European Union.
Trump administration trade officials have finalized three potential deals with other countries that are awaiting Trump's review and final decision, he said.
Those possible pacts are "basically ready for the president's decision. I don't know if people have had that conversation with him yet, but yes, there are many, many deals coming," he told the network. "And there were three that basically look like they're done."
On rocky negotiations with the EU, Hassett pinned the blame on the bloc’s member countries.
“The European Union, the problem that they have that a lot of other countries don't have is, since they're an aggregation of a whole bunch of countries, that they themselves within the EU disagree about what we should do,” he said. “And so, part of the problem with the negotiating strategy of the EU is that they can't make up their own minds on many issues.”
Translation: Deflect blame, then …
… Attack!
***
Several hours later, Leavitt — fitting clad in fire red — came out on the attack.
during Thursday’s press briefing, a clear signal of a couple things: a) the boss likely was watching; and b) Trump isn’t going down on this matter without a big legal fight.
”The President's rationale for imposing these powerful tariffs was legally sound and grounded in common sense. President Trump correctly believes that America cannot function safely longterm if we are unable to scale advanced domestic manufacturing capacity,” she said.
Attack!
She accused the obscure trade judges with having “brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump, to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.”
“These judges failed to acknowledge that the president of the United States has core foreign affairs powers and authority given to him by Congress to protect the United States economy and national security,” the press secretary added.
Attack!
Leavitt has a point on the latter comment, but it’s far from a given that five Supreme Court justices will side with the administration’s stance that America’s trade arrangements with the rest of the world represented a direct and imminent threat to the country’s “economy and national security.”
The high court moves slowly, generally at a pace no swifter than a trot.
In the meantime …
… Attack!