Trump’s Liberation Day Attempts to Put Americans in Shackles

President Donald Trump promoted his much-awaited tariff announcement as “Liberation Day,” but there is nothing about his current spate of actions that improves economic freedom for Americans. In fact, he is subjugating American businesses and consumers with a 10 percent across-the-board tax on nearly everything they purchase from abroad, in addition to increasing tariffs against specific trading partners by up to 50 percent, claiming that these are “reciprocal” duties.  

But take a look closer, and the math simply does not add up. For example, take South Korea, a country the United States has a trade agreement with. South Korea’s average tariff on the United States since signing the Korea-U.S. Trade Agreement is near zero. So where does Trump get a whopping 50 percent in reciprocal tariffs? The formula behind the charges does not even include tariffs. Instead, it is simply the bilateral trade deficit divided by exports from the foreign partner, then divided by two, to be “nice,” as Trump quipped yesterday. 

This administration has shown time and again that it is willing to cherry-pick numbers to justify any trade action it may want to take. It is not clear, for instance, why Trump slapped 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but only 10 percent on China in his first tariff action. Not surprisingly, with all this talk about rebalancing U.S. trade partnerships to make them more “reciprocal,” no one in the administration seems to mention the high tariffs the United States imposes on peanuts (131.8 percent), tuna (35 percent), many dairy products (20 percent), light trucks (25 percent), and wool sweaters (16 percent). This does not even include the highly protectionist U.S. sugar industry, and the countless tariffs that the United States imposes through trade remedies.  

Furthermore, the administration has a broad and expansive view of what constitutes a trade barrier, including things that are not barriers to trade, such as the Value-Added Tax. In fact, this week, the U.S. Trade Representative released a report claiming that “trade barriers elude fixed definitions.” If that is true, then trade rules and trade agreements simply do not matter because they rest on shared interpretations of behavior that discriminates against trade and that which does not. When there is a dispute about those interpretations, trade agreements include a way to resolve those disagreements by looking at the definitions in the treaty.  

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Trump administration’s view of trade barriers seems to suggest that treaties it has signed with U.S. trading partners simply do not count for anything, and that the United States is above the rule of law when it comes to the very international trade rules that it created. If that is the case, why would any country sit down to negotiate any deal with Trump? 

An even deeper indication that the president has no respect for rules is the fact that he used emergency authorities to enact this new round of tariffs. The use of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) in this way is not only a shocking abuse of power, but unconstitutional. President Trump unilaterally imposed the biggest tax increase on Americans since the 1940s, with the average tariff jumping to levels not seen since 1909. This is a historic shift—and unlike past episodes, just one person decided the entirety of the United States’ economic future, telling Americans what they can and cannot buy, and who they can and cannot do business with.  

Nothing is liberating about these tariffs, and Congress should not let President Trump get away with them. In fact, while Trump was making his announcement, the Senate debated the IEEPA tariffs on Canada, and voted to end the national emergency associated with it, 51-48. Four Republicans were brave enough to join in support. The following day, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) introduced legislation that would require the president to notify Congress before making tariff changes, and to provide an explanation for that action. If the tariffs continue, Trump not only opens himself up to multiple lawsuits, but he also faces defections from his own party as renewed interest in Congress for reining in some of the president’s delegated tariff authorities gains steam.