What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried really hard to act like he still had a tariff plan.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down most of the tariffs Trump had imposed since returning to office as illegal, because the law he cited as an authority didn't apply to his actions. By the end of the day, he said he would use other legal authorities to impose a flat 10% import tax on goods from the rest of the world. (These measures are legally dubious themselves, but will probably go into effect at least for a while.)

On Saturday, without explanation, he changed that figure to 15%—almost as though to make sure that domestic and world markets understood there would be no relief from the constant chaos and uncertainty of the past year.

Today, he sent out members of his administration to insist that Trump could and would still do whatever he wanted in terms of forcing American consumers to pay higher prices, and that this would somehow work out for the best. But in practice, this meant two things: sprinting away from any hope that consumers would recover the thousands of dollars they'd paid in higher prices as a result of the illegal taxes Trump imposed, and putting pressure on Congressional Republicans—many of whom want nothing to do with Trump's deeply unpopular trade war—to give him the authority he'd claimed to have all along.

(Trump himself hid away from public sight today.) 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been given the job of explaining away Trump's now-revoked promises of tariff rebates, which is the closest Trump has ever come to acknowledging that American consumers are the ones who pay the cost of tariffs. For the most part, he tried to shift the blame to the courts, who will now have to address the question of whether businesses can recoup the taxes that Trump illegally collected at customs. (Bessent called this "corporate welfare," although he didn't say why he thought the federal government should keep illegally collected taxes just this one time.)

Meanwhile, Trump has another problem: what little leverage he gained from declaring a trade war on the rest of the world has evaporated, and the handful of "deals" he's been trumpeting are now moot. The European Union is already rattling its saber at Trump, whose new 15% tariff will expire in 150 days without Congressional approval that absolutely will not be forthcoming. Even worse, as was obvious at the time, most of the "deals" Trump made involved vague and unenforceable promises to "invest" in the United States at some point in the future. Even if those countries had intended to honor those pledges, there's no reason to now, except to take advantage of an opportunity to buy in a depressed American market.

Meanwhile, the countries that Trump hit with the highest tariffs last year are seeing their strategy of not negotiating with him pay off, as taxes on their imported goods drop to the same as nations that played ball. It is not a coincidence that the world's largest economies, and the ones who do the most business with the United States, are the ones now celebrating a shutout victory in their standoff with Trump—while many of those who made concessions are seeing their tariffs unilaterally increased to the flat 15%. What's more, each of those countries will now have the option of maintaining their own retaliatory tariffs against the United States, putting Trump and the United States in exactly the bind he had hoped to put the rest of the world.

 

Faced with questions about all of this today, Trump's chief trade representative, Jamison Greer, simply took a page from Trump's book and insisted, all evidence to the contrary, that "the policy hasn't changed."

Why does this matter?

• A president who wasn't a complete disaster at running businesses would know that markets hate uncertainty. 

• It was always a stupid idea to declare a trade war on the literal rest of the world, and it's even stupider to try to do it with less leverage than you had while you were losing before. 

• The economy of the United States and the well-being of Americans is infinitely more important than Donald Trump's wounded pride.