Donald Trump is a habitual liar, but perhaps one of his biggest lies was his campaign promise that he’d bring down the cost of living on day one of his presidency. Instead, by slapping sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries around the world and launching a global trade war, President Trump has essentially placed a huge tax hike on Americans.

To be clear, a tariff on imported goods is a sales tax.

One of his biggest lies was that he’d bring down the cost of living on day one his presidency

Despite what the administration wants you to thinkforeign governments don’t pay the tariffs for goods shipped to us — American companies that import those goods do. And those companies are likely to pass their higher costs onto American consumers. That means Americans will pay more for goods entering the United States from foreign countries, including food, clothing, home appliances and cars.

And it’s not just foreign goods that will cost Americans more money. Many of America’s most successful businesses produce their products abroad and ship them to the United States to be sold. For example, Nike products are primarily manufactured in Vietnam and Indonesia. Under the administration’s new tariff regime, products coming from each country will now be taxed at a whopping 46% and 32%, respectively.

When you apply this across the entire American economy, the results are devastating. The average American household is expected to pay nearly $5,000 more per year out of pocket as a consequence of these new tariffs. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are pushing new tax cuts for Elon Musk and Trump’s MAGA billionaire donors.

And when the average American household decides to cut back on spending because it can’t afford the “Trump tax,” small local businesses — your corner bakeries, family-owned restaurants, independent grocers or small apparel shops that are the backbone of our communities — will struggle to stay open.

Trump’s tariff policy has no clear purpose, no stated goal and no strategy. One day it’s a negotiating tacticthe next it’s a revenue scheme to rebuild American manufacturing. What we do know is it doesn’t work — American families pay more, we alienate our allies, and the American economy suffers.

One need only look at Trump’s first administration to know this is a farce. The tariffs he placed on imported steel in 2018 did little to resuscitate domestic steel production or create new manufacturing jobs.

This leads to a real risk of a global recession, and the world will rightly lay the responsibility fully at America’s feet.

If anything, this trade war will cost the United States jobs as countries respond with retaliatory tariffs. China has responded to Trump’s tariffs, with tariffs of its own on American imports. All this leads to a real risk of a global recessionand the world will rightly lay the responsibility fully at America’s feet.

Our strongest economic partners are suddenly looking elsewhere for partnership. Our European allies are poised to retaliate. China, Japan and South Korea — three historical adversaries — have begun talks to respond jointly against U.S. tariffs. In just one week, $10 trillion in global market value vanished. Trump has alienated the United States, and for what, to burn the retirement savings of Americans? If this is the art of the deal, the American people are getting the short end of the stick.

If all this seems like too much power for a president to wield single-handedly, to be able to bring the economy down by fiat, that’s because it is. The Constitution is explicit that the power to tax and tariff falls squarely within the legislative branch.

To enact his tax hike on the American people, President Trump is bypassing Congress by fabricating a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But IEEPA has never been used to enact tariffs, and the supposed “threat” to use IEEPA doesn’t exist. The only national emergency this country faces today is Trump’s abuse of power and disregard for the law.

But Congress can act: IEEPA has a safeguard. Any member of Congress can force a vote to terminate the president’s IEEPA authority. And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

Will Republicans rubber-stamp the president’s reckless trade war — or stand up for their constituents?

This week, I introduced a resolution that, if not acted upon within 15 days, will force the House to vote on ending the sham national emergency and halt Trump’s devastating taxes.

This is a defining moment. Will Republicans rubber-stamp the president’s reckless trade war — or stand up for their constituents and protect them from higher costs and the greatest self-imposed economic downturn in modern history? The American people deserve answers and deserve relief. Democrats stand ready to provide it.

Rep. Gregory W. Meeks

Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, a Democrat who represents New York’s 5th Congressional District, is the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

This article is the fourth in a five-part BLN Daily series, “The Future of NATO.” With the Trump administration attacking allies, removing troops from European training missions, handing Ukraine’s bargaining chips to Russia and refusing to guarantee European security even as “backstop” — we’re asking five crucial questions about the future of NATO, the U.S. and Europe.

President Donald Trump has never concealed his antipathy toward alliances, particularly NATO. Speaking to reporters at the White House in March, he more forcefully than ever cast doubt on his willingness to defend NATO allies and questioned their commitment to defending the United States.

“Do you think they’re going to come and protect us? They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure,” he mused, adding: “If you’re not going to pay your bills, we’re not going to defend you.” Although the United States allocates roughly 3% of its GDP to military expendituresTrump has demanded all other NATO member states reach the 5% mark in order to be considered in good standing with him or be effectively abandoned.

So, is NATO’s famous Article 5 collective-defense commitment dead and buried? The traditional reading of it, a cornerstone of U.S. statecraft since World War II, seems to be.

Trump is taking a sledgehammer to 75 years of consensus understanding of Article 5. The article in the North Atlantic Treaty reads, in part, “an armed attack against one or more [members] … shall be considered an attack against them all.”

Article 5 is more complicated, as we shall see, but decades of American strategic thinking, to the gratification of other NATO members, emphasized this passage to make guaranteed collective military self-defense essential to the logic of the NATO alliance. To maintain credibility against Soviet aggression in treaty-specified regions, Cold War-era Washington essentially threw a mighty conventional military (and even nuclear) umbrella over all NATO allies, literally drawing lines that could not be crossed.

The emphasis on the implied commitment of collective self-defense in the initial language of Article 5 was an important element in the surreal but effective “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) understanding between Moscow and Washington. That understanding prevented nuclear or any other direct conflict between the global superpowers during the Cold War, despite decades of intense confrontation and hair-trigger standoffs, especially the Cuban missile crisis.

But there has always been another interpretation of Article 5, which notes that it specifies only that each NATO member state will take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Read literally, Article 5 does not commit any state to do anything it does not “deem necessary.”

Trump is taking a sledgehammer to 75 years of consensus understanding of Article 5.

Trump is tapping into the very sentiments of huge numbers of war-weary — and somewhat isolationist — Americans in the wake of World War II. This constituency of Americans impelled Washington to insist on the vague language of Article 5, despite intensive European efforts to make collective defense more mandatory or even automatic. Citing the congressional authority to declare war, among other factors, then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson insisted in 1949 that the Washington treaty “naturally does not mean that the United States would automatically be at war if one of the other signatory nations were the victim of an armed attack.”

Treaties are interpreted according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. It holds that a treaty “shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning” of its words “and in the light of its object and purpose.” Seventy-five years of consensus surely ought to be sufficient to define Article 5’s objects and purposes.

But once the Cold War ended, it was arguably only a matter of time before some Americans would begin reading Article 5 with an emphasis on the latter passages. It’s a cliché to observe that Trump has turned NATO into a protection racket, but there isn’t a better metaphor.

The credibility of NATO providing a collective military and nuclear umbrella is, at best, on life support. A new administration could try to restore the traditional emphasis on the collective defense passages, but Trump let the genie out of the bottle. It’s not going back inside easily, since many Americans think NATO has served its purpose.

Ironically, the only time Article 5 was invoked was on behalf of the U.S. after 9/11. But in Trump’s world, what have you done for me lately?

The collective-security reading of Article 5 was indispensable to avoiding a superpower conflict and nuclear holocaust, despite the Cold War, and allowing the Washington-led West to essentially prevail in the standoff against the USSR and its own alliance. Yet it’s almost impossible to imagine the Trump administration coming to the military defense of Poland or the Baltic states in the event of Russian aggression, since he paints this as the sad story of a massive rip-off.

This is all a huge win for Vladimir Putin and other malefactors, and a disaster for U.S. interests, power and influence. If Trump keeps this up much longer, Article 5 will indeed be dead and buried, and effectively the NATO alliance along with it.

HUSSEIN IBISH

Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.