The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has ripped into President Donald Trump’s “self-defeating” obsession with tariffs, which the president has clung to despite their economic and political harm.
Trump has spent the past year and a half attempting to impose crushing duties on products from dozens of U.S. trade partners, including his April 2025 emergency “Liberation Day” tariffs, various rounds of universal tariffs, and additional sector-specific duties.
After the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs in February, he announced new tariffs based on various statutory authorities, some of which have also been rejected by the courts.
That hasn’t stopped Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, from announcing yet another tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent on products from about 60 countries, prompting the Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal to argue that enough is enough.
“Mr. Trump’s tariff obsession is a self-defeating act,” the opinion editors wrote. “There’s been no surge in domestic manufacturing, and they are contributing to rising prices. They are also unpopular, especially in the farm belt.”
The duties are a type of import tax paid by American companies, which must either eat the costs or pass them along to their customers.
The latest round of tariffs was announced last week under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to impose tariffs in response to “unfair foreign acts, policies, or practices affecting U.S. commerce,” the Journal reported.
During his first term, Trump used Section 301 to penalize Chinese products for the government’s intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers.
This time, though, the administration has not conducted detailed investigations into each country’s practices, according to the Journal.
Instead, the administration has declared that all 60 countries engage in unfair trade practices by failing to “impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition,” thereby lowering supply chain costs.
U.S. Trade Representative Greer concluded that Canada, Ecuador, the E.U., Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan all ban imports made with forced labor, but fail to enforce the prohibition, so their products will be subject to a 10 percent tariff.
The rest of the countries—including the U.K., Australia, and Switzerland—don’t have a ban in place, so their products will be hit with a 12.5 percent duty.
That means products from Indonesia and Pakistan—two countries that have been accused of tolerating forced and child labor within their borders, not just their supply chains—will have a lower rate than products from the U.K.
“These implausible targets suggest forced labor is a mere pretext to reimpose universal tariffs,” the Journal’s opinion editors wrote.
The Section 301 memo also proposes exemptions for various classifications of imports, including “articles for which additional tariffs may not contribute substantially to the elimination of the investigated acts, policies, and practices described above.”
That could include “basically everything,” according to the Journal.
“Lobbyists, on your marks, get set, and go to Howard Lutnick at Commerce or the White House—and don’t forget your campaign checkbook,” the editors wrote.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
