The president’s minions have trawled the statutes to restore roadblocks to trade. The invocation of Smoot-Hawley looks especially dangerous
Donald Trump may have found the killer weapon to punish countries at will: by imposing tariffs on their exports to the United States.
The president has been looking for a new tool since February, when the supreme court struck down tariffs he slapped on virtually all of America’s trading partners based on the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the spurious grounds that the US faced a variety of national emergencies. It’s become a parlor game among policy wonks to predict what new legal justification he would deploy to replace them.
Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He writes the newsletter Being There on Substack
