The Dictatorship
Trump imposes double-digit tariffs on countries before Friday deadline
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is going ahead with new double-digit tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners just as the clock runs out Friday on stopgap levies he imposed after a stinging defeat at the Supreme Court.
The United States will slap taxes of 10% to 12.5% on imports from 60 trading partners accounting for 99% of U.S. imports, charging that they have inadequately enforced bans on goods produced by forced labor.
“The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
The new tariffs will take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expire at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Trump had turned to those temporary levies after the Supreme Court struck down his biggest and boldest tariffs in February.
Now he’s tapping more durable tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974which permits the president to impose import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices. Trump used Section 301 to impose big tariffs on China in his first term, and they survived court challenges.
More Section 301 tariffs are likely coming: The U.S. Trade Representative’s office has launched a probe into whether 16 countries — accounting for 70% of U.S. imports — have overproduced goods, pushing down prices and putting U.S. companies at a disadvantage in global markets. The administration has yet to complete that investigation.
Trump, who argues that high tariffs will revive American manufacturing, last year overturned decades of U.S. policy that favored lower tariffs and ever-freer trade. Invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, he imposed double-digit tariffs on imports from almost every country on Earth, saying America’s longstanding trade deficit amounted to a national emergency.
But the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA did not authorize tariffs. The decision forced the administration to pay refunds to importers that had paid the tariffs.
In response, Trump announced 10% worldwide tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. But he can only use Section 122 levies for 150 days; time runs out on them Friday.
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The administration initially proposed the forced labor tariffs last month. Since then, some countries have tightened forced labor enforcement and qualified for lower tariffs, said a senior administration official who spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. For example, the official said, the tariff on imports from India initially was set at 12.5% but now will be 10%.
Some products — including oil and gas and fertilizer — are exempted from the new tariffs announced Thursday. Also being spared are products that qualify for duty-free status under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the North American trade pact Trump negotiated in his first term.
The tariffs drew immediate fire from critics.
“Today’s forced labor justification is too convenient to be taken seriously,” said U.S. Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. “Forced labor is a real and pervasive problem in our supply chains and demands serious enforcement. It should never be cheapened into a pretext for a tariff policy built on dubious legal theories and personal grievances.’’
Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified” in a statement. It plans to trigger its reciprocity law — which could call for retaliatory tariffs on the United States — and take a complaint to the World Trade Organization. The United States, the Brazilian government said, “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices.”
Chile’s Undersecretary for International Economic Relations Paula Estévez said that the country has “solid labor institutions, a robust regulatory framework and a firm commitment to the prevention and eradication of forced labor.” Chile faces a 12.5% rate.
“The Government of Chile considers that the application of this measure to our country is inconsistent with these standards, as well as with the technical, political, and legal background presented throughout the investigation process,” she said.
Tariffs are paid by companies in the United States that import foreign products. The importers usually try to pass along the cost by charging consumers higher prices. Americans are already frustrated by the high cost of living. So the administration is taking a risk in rolling out new tariffs ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Human rights watchers say that it’s reasonable to be skeptical of the motivation behind the tariffs. But they say the levies could make an impact on the problem of forced labor.
The tariffs are being imposed on countries that the U.S. found either failed to impose or failed to effectively enforce a ban on importing goods made with forced labor.
Forced labor is defined by the International Labor Organization Forced Labor Convention of 1930 as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself (or herself) voluntarily.”
According to the latest statistics from the ILO, which is a U.N. agency focused on human and labor rights, about 27.6 million people were in forced labor worldwide on any given day in 2021.
“We’ve gone on record for years now advocating for import bans, not as a magic bullet, it’s not a silver bullet, but as a potentially effective tool in combating forced labor across the globe,” said Martina Vandenberg, founder and president of The Human Trafficking Legal Center.
“It’s possible to be extremely critical of tariffs, as we are, and to be very concerned about blanket tariffs used as bludgeons against countries,” she said. “And yet I think it’s undeniable that there is a significant response in terms of the adoption of import bans.”
However, Vandenberg and her organization urged in testimony that the tariffs be implemented in a phased approach to give countries time to implement a ban or a plan for enforcement.
“Our concern is that the import bans will be thin slips of paper with no enforcement,” she said. “Countries need time to build import ban mechanisms that are meaningful and enforceable.”
In a statement, Dominic LeBlanc, the Canada-U.S. Trade Minister, said the move “is not unexpected.”
LeBlanc said Canada shares the U.S.’s objective of ensuring that goods produced with forced labor don’t enter the supply chain.
“We will continue engaging constructively with the United States on this matter, as well as other outstanding issues, over the coming weeks to the mutual benefit of our citizens,” LeBlanc said.
Kenya Davis, partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, said the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Acta U.S. federal law passed in 2021 that prohibits the importation of goods made wholly or in part in China’s Xinjiang region or by designated entities, is the most significant legislation related to forced labor that the U.S. has passed before the tariffs.
“The level of effectiveness is certainly up for debate, but it certainly has drawn attention to the issue of labor trafficking and forced labor,” she said. “And so, if nothing else, these import bans will serve that function of bringing greater awareness to forced labor.”
But without a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, and programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans, “I’m very cautious in my enthusiasm about the (tariffs),” she said.
Isabelle Glimcher, senior research scientist for global labor at the NYU Stern Center for Human Rights, said one flaw in the tariffs is that they focus on levying the tax on countries based on goods they import — not goods they make domestically.
But she said the impending tariffs threat has spurred several countries — such as India — to amend their foreign trade policies to include a forced labor import ban. European Union forced labor regulations due to go into effect later next year are also contributing, she said.
“Not all of these things are necessarily or wholly attributable to the Section 301 investigations, but does seem like countries are responding and starting to take all of this seriously,” she said.
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Anderson reported from New York. AP Writers Nayara Batschke in Santiago, Chile, Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo and Jim Morris in Vancouver, Canada, contributed to this story.
President Donald Trump has been trying to get E. Jean Carroll to return the $5 million (plus interest) that she finally received this month from the case in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump argued for clawing back the funds because he has a pending rehearing petition at the Supreme Court, where he’s again trying to convince the justices to take up his appeal in the case that resulted in that jury award.
After the justices declined to review his initial petition in June, the federal judge in New York who presided over the case ordered the funds released to Carroll earlier this month. Trump’s attempt to halt the judge’s order is pending in a federal appeals court.
But the Supreme Court just signaled that it could soon issue an order that brings a truly final resolution to the matter.
The Supreme Court docket shows that, on Thursday, the court “distributed” Trump’s rehearing petition to the justices, which is a routine step before they decide whether to grant or deny review. Though the court is on a summer recess before the next term starts in October, the justices publish order lists over the summer that mainly contain petition denials. They issued such a list earlier this week.
According to the court calendarthe next list is scheduled for release on Aug. 17, so we could see action on Trump’s rehearing petition then.
That action would most likely be a denial.
As the trial judge noted in his July 8 ruling rejecting further delay, successful Supreme Court rehearing petitions are “rare birds.” On that note, Carroll’s lawyers said thatas far as they knew, only once in the last 75 years has the court agreed to straight up reconsider its denial of a petition, and that was in the landmark case of Boumediene v. Bush about the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. They said more recent reconsiderations — the latest one being in 2018 — involved the justices sending cases back to lower courts for further review, rather than the justices taking up full review themselves.
“If successful petitions for rehearing are ‘rare birds,’” then Trump’s pending rehearing petition “cannot possibly get off the ground,” Carroll’s lawyers said in their opposition to Trump’s claw-back motion in the circuit court.
We may learn Aug. 17 whether the justices agree. They haven’t requested a response from Carroll and, under court rulesthey won’t grant a rehearing petition without first doing so, unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” It’s unclear what those circumstances would be here.
In the meantime, we could hear before that from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on Trump’s motion to force Carroll to return the funds. The long-shot nature of his Supreme Court rehearing petition is only one of her arguments against that temporary relief in the circuit court, another one being that a prior stipulation between the parties said that she gets the money upon the denial of Trump’s petition, which already happened in June, not his rehearing petition.
Whatever happens with his circuit motion and high court rehearing petition, there will still be the separate matter of his appeal in the other case Carroll won against him that resulted in an $83.3 million defamation award. Unlike the $5 million case, that one stems from Trump’s defamation of Carroll while he was president (during his first term), and he is pressing claims of presidential immunity in that appeal. One of his lawyers said he will be filing that new petition by July 28.
In the pending rehearing petition, Trump said his forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case gives the justices a good reason to reconsider the $5 million case denial, because he said his presidential acts were wrongly used as evidence against him in the $5 million case, too. Therefore, he argued in the rehearing petition, resolution of his forthcoming $83.3 million petition will “bear on the proper disposition” of the $5 million case because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity rulingin Trump’s favor, which curbed the use of official presidential acts as evidence to impose liability for other conduct.
Of course, the justices knew about the forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case when they rejected his $5 million petition in June. So it’s unclear what new information has come to light that would warrant reconsideration. But we should learn soon enough, possibly Aug. 17, whether the court will finally put an end to the litigation in the $5 million case, though that would still leave open the question of how the litigation over the much larger award will conclude. We might not know whether the justices are interested in reviewing that second case until the fall, at least. Even if they deny Trump’s rehearing petition in the first case, they would still be free to review the second one.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Amid new allegations that China and Russia are helping Iran in its ongoing war with the United States, Donald Trump apparently decided to set the record straight — or at least try to.
In a Friday morning statement published to his social media platformthe American president said that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin separately assured him that their respective countries would not provide Iran with support.
“Therefore, two major Countries that people speak of often in terms of Iran are, in my opinion, not participating,” the Republican added.
The trouble is, Trump’s “opinion” isn’t altogether relevant. What matters is the truth, not what he considers to be the truth. And there’s a whole lot of evidence to suggest the American president’s “opinion” is wrong.
It was just five weeks ago when, as the Group of Seven summit in France was wrapping up, Trump offered some curious praise to his friend in Moscow. “I want to thank Vladimir Putin, he was very neutral,” the Republican saidreferring to the Russian president’s role in the war with Iran. “They could have made it much more difficult for us.”
About a month later, Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a straightforward question during a televised congressional hearing: “Are Russia and China helping Iran? And if so, how?”
The Pentagon chief hemmed and hawed a bit, explaining that there are details that “ought to remain classified,” before stating that China and Russia are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing” — a far cry from remaining “very neutral,” as Trump claimed.
A day later, MS NOW reportedas part of its live blog coverage: “Recent Iranian drone strikes targeting CIA facilities in the Persian Gulf have prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to probe whether Russia was involved in providing information to Tehran, Reuters reported. … The U.S. investigation has not led to firm answers on whether the Kremlin was involved in the recent attacks, according to the report, but the precision of the attacks has stoked further speculation over the extent of Russia’s technical support for Tehran.”
But as this week nears its end, Hegseth’s boss nevertheless decided to contradict his own defense secretary via social media, declaring that China and Russia are “not participating” in the conflict.
Under the circumstances, Trump’s version of reality is literally unbelievable. In fact, just days into the war with Iran, multiple news organizations, including MS NOW, reported that Russia had provided Iran with information that could help it strike American targets. One U.S. official told MS NOW point-blank that Russia was “providing intelligence help to Iran.”
It wasn’t long before any doubt about the accuracy of the reporting evaporated. Iranian officials publicly confirmed Russia’s “military cooperation”; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz acknowledged Russia’s wartime “strategic partnership” with Iran; and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said matter-of-factly that Russia was “providing intelligence to Iran to better attack and kill American troops.”
The Wall Street Journal soon after advanced the broader storyreporting that Russia expanded its intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Iran, “providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region.”
This should have been the sort of news to send shock waves through the nation’s capital. In the middle of an ongoing and deadly hot war in the Middle East, the administration had reason to believe one U.S. adversary (Russia) was helping another U.S. adversary (Iran) facilitate attacks against us.
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA and Pentagon official, said during a Senate hearing“If Russia is helping to kill U.S. forces, we have crossed a Rubicon. We are in another moment. We have to take decisive action on that.”
But there were no shock waves. Trump and his team chose not to care.
The initial reaction from the American president and his team to the allegations was total indifference. This was followed by news that the Republican administration agreed effectively to reward Putin’s regime by easing oil sanctions on the country.
All the while, top members of Team Trump publicly vouched for Russia’s trustworthiness and echoed Kremlin talking points.
The American president managed to make the problem worse during a Fox News interview by conceding that he believed Russia “might be” assisting Iran, but he added that Putin’s regime deserves a pass because the U.S. has assisted Ukraine.
“You know, it’s like, hey, they do it and we do it, in all fairness,” Trump said. “They do it and we do it.”
Days later, he went further, telling the Financial Timesin reference to Russia, “It’s hard to say, ‘You’re targeting us, but we’ve been helping Ukraine.’”
In other words, the incumbent American president, during a war, both echoed Putin’s talking points and excused an adversary for helping a different adversary target American troops and assets.
All the while, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared publicly that his country’s government had “irrefutable” evidence that Russia had provided intelligence to the Iranian regime during the war, but he simply couldn’t get the White House to take an interest in the proof.
A simple question appears unavoidable: As Trump launches a new effort to assure the public that Russia and China are “not participating” in the war, is he confused about recent events he ought to understand? Or does he not know what “participate” means?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace slammed President Donald Trump’s eldest son for exploiting his father’s name for “massive profits” after new reporting from The New York Times revealed how Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has gone from managing a few hundred million dollars to overseeing more than $3 billion in assets in just two years.
According to the Times, since Trump Jr. joined the firm after the 2024 election, 1789 Capital’s main investment fund has reportedly generated nearly 200% in returns through the first half of 2026. Many of the companies linked to the firm have directly benefited from Trump administration policies or have been on the receiving end of large government contracts.
On Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” Wallace said the report is just the latest example of a Trump family member using “his presidency for personal profit.” The MS NOW host noted a recent analysis from The Washington Post found that funds linked to the president’s two eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, have generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since he returned to the White House.
While both Trump sons have denied any wrongdoing and say they do not use insider information from the administration to make investments, Wallace questioned the family’s newfound success.
“Were either the Trump sons successful investors before Donald Trump was president a second time?” she asked.
According to the “Deadline: White House” host, there’s one group who she said should feel the more slighted by the president’s family’s reported dealings: his own supporters.
“We can’t be more mad, though, than Trump’s own voters,” she said.
Wallace noted that as Trump and his family appear to be enriching themselves, Americans across the country are suffering under the administration’s policies, including the ongoing war against Iran and the president’s tariffs.
“How do you make people understand that he’s robbing them?” she asked. “This isn’t money that is zero-sum. They’re enriching themselves at the expense of the people who sent Donald Trump to Washington to make their lives better.”
You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
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- Contradicting Hegseth, Trump claims Russia is ‘not participating’ in Iran
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- Comer: 1 NDA produced by Leon Black to House Oversight ‘unacceptable’
- Trump imposes double-digit tariffs on countries before Friday deadline
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