Trump takes yet another swing at massive tariffs — this time with a new excuse

President Donald Trump is moving ahead with yet another plan to impose enormous tariffs around the world.

According to The New York Times, the new tariffs are imposed on 60 countries deemed by the administration to allow products made with forced labor into their markets. "The tariffs will range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent and take effect at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, replacing a global 10 percent duty set to lapse at the same time."

The United States, noted the report, "has prohibited the importation of goods made with slave labor for nearly a century, though it still allows prison labor under conditions that labor organizations consider coercive. In 2021, the United States passed a law banning imports from a region of China where it had found forced labor to be rampant." However, experts believe this is a pretextual argument for Trump's new tariffs.

Georgetown Law School visiting scholar Peter Harrell argued this ruling “just brings home that [the U.S. Trade Representative] is using this forced labor investigation as a pretext to impose tariffs that Trump wants to impose for his own economic theories and preferences.”

Among the affected entities are Canada and the European Union, which already have bans either in place or set to take effect, but which the Trump administration accuses of not properly enforcing.

Trump initially tried to enact global "reciprocal tariffs" based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). A string of federal courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, struck down this policy, ruling IEEPA doesn't grant the president unilateral tariff powers.

Since this defeat, Trump has been searching for other ways to enact similar taxes on imports, even as economists have warned his tariff policies are causing a slowdown of growth and worsening inflation.