Trump's Laughable Tariff Policy Has Earned Him a Viral New Nickname on Wall Street

I will admit it. I didn’t know we had a U.S. Court of International Trade. But now I want to collect its trading cards and buy all its merch. From The New York Times:

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

The administration sent out yet another team of crash test dummies to defend the president’s bogus rationale for his unilateral tariffs. It did not go well.

“The president identified the emergency, and he decided the means to address that emergency,” Brett Shumate, a Justice Department lawyer, told the court. He added that the goal had been to “bring our trading partners to the table” and create political leverage for possible deal-making. “It may be a very dandy plan, but it has to meet the statute,” replied Senior Judge Jane A. Restani, who was nominated to the trade court by President Ronald Reagan.

The counteroffensive continued on Thursday.

“I’m sure, when we appeal, this decision will be overturned,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said in an appearance Thursday on Fox Business. Still, the administration’s request reflected its palpable sense of worry, after some of Mr. Trump’s top advisers had previously told the panel of judges that an adverse decision could hamstring their negotiations. Top White House aides said in April that it planned to reach 90 deals in 90 days, with a deadline of mid-July.“If this court limits that authority, foreign counterparts will have reduced incentives to reach meaningful agreements — resulting in the status quo that led to the national emergency,” Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, said in a declaration filed with the court last week. Mr. Hassett downplayed the ruling, casting it as one of a few “little hiccups here and there.” He said that the president has other legal tools at his disposal to impose tariffs outside the economic emergency law, though he signaled Thursday that the administration is “not planning to pursue those right now.”

“It’s certainly not going to affect the negotiations. Because, in the end, people know President Trump is 100 percent serious, and they also have seen President Trump always wins,” he said.

Actually, as we learned from an ill-starred press availability, what he mostly does in this area is chicken out. Apparently, Wall Streeters have started to call them “TACO tariffs,” which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” A reporter from the Wall Street Journal asked him about it and touched off a severe seismic anomaly. Trump said:

You mean because I reduced China from 145 percent that I set down to 100 percent and then down to another number? And I said, you have to open up your whole country. And because I gave the European Union a 50 percent tax tariff? And they called up and they said, please, let’s meet right now, please, let’s meet right now. And I said, okay, I’ll give you till June 9th. I actually asked them, I said, what’s the date? Because they weren’t willing to meet. And after I did what I did, they said, we’ll meet any time you want. And we have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening out? Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing when Biden didn’t have practically anything.

Six months ago, this county was stone-cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country—people didn’t think it was going to survive, and you ask a nasty question like that. It’s called negotiation ... Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question … To me, that’s the nastiest question.

I wish somebody had told me back in October that the country was dead. I would have sent flowers.