Academia
Once again, President Donald Trump is subverting domestic and international law in an effort to seize a larger fraction of global value and supply chains, this time on the hypocritical pretext of forced labor.
United States President Donald Trump gestures on July 22, 2026, as he arrives onstage to speak at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia. (AFP/Saul Loeb)
Here he goes again. United States President Donald Trump is increasing and decreasing tariffs willy-nilly, violating international agreements that he himself signed and almost surely violating federal law. The only difference this time is that he has a new pretext for abusing tariffs: stopping forced labor.Of course, the administration is right that too little is being done about forced labor. But its stated concern is a ruse. With the new tariffs closely tracking the ones that Trump imposed on the basis of trade balances, are we supposed to believe that bilateral trade deficits just so happen to be highly correlated with the use of forced labor?
After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s previous tariffs, the administration imposed 150-day temporary tariffs, already deemed illegal by the courts but still under appeal even as they expired in late July, and now these new ones following an “investigation” into other countries’ supposed failure to police labor abuses.
