Trump’s Tariff Policy: ‘Dealmaker’ under Pressure
Published in Frankfurter Rundschau
(Germany) on 30 May 2025
by Karl Doemens (link to original)
Intervention from U.S. courts is making Donald Trump’s tariff policy completely unpredictable.
The dizzying tempo of events has been the defining feature of Donald Trump’s second administration from the beginning. The president had just railed against elite Harvard University, then declared that Kremlin head Vladimir Putin was crazy. It doesn’t matter that he previously had said the opposite. The strategy developed by right-wing mastermind Steve Bannon is called “flood the zone with shit:” push out so much crap that there is no room for any other topic in public discourse.
The pace has picked up even more drastically recently. Increasingly, courageous judges are sending signals to the potentate in the White House, criticizing his deportations, his bulldozing of federal agencies, and his freeze on visas. With a spectacular ruling, a New York trade court skewered the heart of Trump’s economic policy: it found that unlimited tariffs could not be legally justified by a 1977 law about emergency powers. Shortly thereafter, an appeals court ruled that the tariffs could remain in effect until a final decision is reached.
Whoever wants to find the rhyme in the tariff orgy in Washington thus needs to account not only for the president’s wild obsession and ludicrous back-and-forth, but for the unpredictable cliffs of the U.S. judicial system. Trump will drive the conflict forward until it reaches the conservative-majority Supreme Court. With the obsessiveness of a criminal in his conviction, he will look for opportunities to apply new tariffs with different justifications. And by directing his verbal attacks at the supposedly left-wing extremist judges — some of whom Trump had himself appointed — he is laying the groundwork for delegitimization and for potential noncompliance with future rulings.
It seems extremely unlikely that the president will change course as a result of the legal challenges. That would not only go against the character of the political street fighter who, when faced with resistance, just hits back harder. The tariffs are also a core part of his America First ideology, according to which the U.S. has, for centuries, been taken advantage of and plundered by foreign powers.
Now Trump is selling the tariffs on imports to his loyal base as a miraculous cure-all. They will supposedly create jobs for American workers, undermine the drug trade, make the U.S. geopolitically more independent, and generate trillions in revenue for the nation. In fact, they present the president especially with inconceivable powers of blackmail and self-dealing through the sale of exemptions.
So the world needs to brace itself for more confusion and unpredictability in U.S. trade policy. In recent months, Trump himself rolled the dice to get percentages for the tariffs. For corporations that depend on supply chains and foreseeable costs, that was catastrophic enough. Now the courts are also at the table. There will be no predictability in the coming months.
For the Europeans who are standing in the spotlight of Trump’s economic fury, it means just one thing: They need to present themselves with self-confidence and cannot let themselves be intimidated. Under no circumstances should they make concessions. The chaos in the tariff policy is increasingly putting domestic pressure on Trump. The president needs a transatlantic “deal” more desperately than the old continent does.
The dizzying tempo of events has been the defining feature of Donald Trump’s second administration from the beginning. The president had just railed against elite Harvard University, then declared that Kremlin head Vladimir Putin was crazy. It doesn’t matter that he previously had said the opposite. The strategy developed by right-wing mastermind Steve Bannon is called “flood the zone with shit:” push out so much crap that there is no room for any other topic in public discourse.
The pace has picked up even more drastically recently. Increasingly, courageous judges are sending signals to the potentate in the White House, criticizing his deportations, his bulldozing of federal agencies, and his freeze on visas. With a spectacular ruling, a New York trade court skewered the heart of Trump’s economic policy: it found that unlimited tariffs could not be legally justified by a 1977 law about emergency powers. Shortly thereafter, an appeals court ruled that the tariffs could remain in effect until a final decision is reached.
Whoever wants to find the rhyme in the tariff orgy in Washington thus needs to account not only for the president’s wild obsession and ludicrous back-and-forth, but for the unpredictable cliffs of the U.S. judicial system. Trump will drive the conflict forward until it reaches the conservative-majority Supreme Court. With the obsessiveness of a criminal in his conviction, he will look for opportunities to apply new tariffs with different justifications. And by directing his verbal attacks at the supposedly left-wing extremist judges — some of whom Trump had himself appointed — he is laying the groundwork for delegitimization and for potential noncompliance with future rulings.
It seems extremely unlikely that the president will change course as a result of the legal challenges. That would not only go against the character of the political street fighter who, when faced with resistance, just hits back harder. The tariffs are also a core part of his America First ideology, according to which the U.S. has, for centuries, been taken advantage of and plundered by foreign powers.
Now Trump is selling the tariffs on imports to his loyal base as a miraculous cure-all. They will supposedly create jobs for American workers, undermine the drug trade, make the U.S. geopolitically more independent, and generate trillions in revenue for the nation. In fact, they present the president especially with inconceivable powers of blackmail and self-dealing through the sale of exemptions.
So the world needs to brace itself for more confusion and unpredictability in U.S. trade policy. In recent months, Trump himself rolled the dice to get percentages for the tariffs. For corporations that depend on supply chains and foreseeable costs, that was catastrophic enough. Now the courts are also at the table. There will be no predictability in the coming months.
For the Europeans who are standing in the spotlight of Trump’s economic fury, it means just one thing: They need to present themselves with self-confidence and cannot let themselves be intimidated. Under no circumstances should they make concessions. The chaos in the tariff policy is increasingly putting domestic pressure on Trump. The president needs a transatlantic “deal” more desperately than the old continent does.
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