Connexion
The U.S. and China agreed to a $60 billion trade deal, according to a Sunday announcement from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
“As a direct result of the strong relationship between President Trump and President Xi, the United States and China, under the auspices of the new Board of Trade, have recommended $30 billion of trade in non-sensitive goods on each side that could benefit from more favorable tariff treatment in the future,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
Items imported from China with reduced duties will include textile goods, some consumer electronics like shavers, and car seats. Items imported from the U.S. include medical components and coal-based products.
The “30-for-30” deal follows President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington last week, when the U.S. also announced an extension to January 10 of the trade-deal truce agreed to last October. A new U.S.–China “Board of Trade,” composed of officials from each side, will oversee the deal’s implementation.
The post U.S., China Strike New Trade Deal appeared first on The American Conservative.
If Trump wants the credit, he must also take the blame.
President Donald Trump’s popularity is suffering badly from another seemingly endless Mideast war. Amid rising prices, even some MAGA voters are turning against him, after supporting him due to the “affordability” crisis under the Biden administration. Since returning to the White House, Trump has dismissed the issue, claiming that prices are falling, and offered a $5,000 “dividend”—but only if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterm elections.
Of course, politicians commonly fault their predecessors. But Trump’s excuses appear increasingly threadbare as he nears the halfway mark of his second term. He has dominated American politics for the last decade and remains firmly in charge of the GOP, which controls the House and Senate and can claim a majority of Supreme Court justices as ideological allies. He emphasizes his own influence in other ways, too, claiming to be the greatest American president and most powerful person who ever lived, while “running” the world.
Power he has in abundance, and he has used it in ways that harm Americans. To start, he, no less than Joe Biden, is responsible for Washington’s ongoing proxy war against Russia. During his first term he reversed Obama administration policy and provided lethal military aid to Kiev. Although last year he dropped Biden’s direct financial and military assistance to Ukraine, he approved the sale of U.S. weapons to European governments for transfer to Kiev. He also continued U.S. intelligence support for the Zelensky government, aiding its drone and missile attacks. He was unconcerned about the destructive impact of those attacks on Russian oil and diesel production until energy prices reached record levels.
Those prices spiked because of the Iran War, yet here too the president has sought to avoid blame, arguing that record diesel prices are somehow a result of Biden’s actions against Russia but not Trump’s surprise attack on Iran. Since March, he has routinely promised they will drop dramatically as soon as Tehran yields, which he has also repeatedly, indeed, almost constantly, predicted. Yet the war continues.
Trump has presented the conflict as one of necessity, citing Tehran’s possession of enriched uranium. There was no evidence that Tehran was pursuing a nuclear weapon when last year Trump ended negotiations and claimed to “obliterate” its nuclear program. And the only reason Tehran possessed the stockpile cited by Trump was because in 2018 he killed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e., the Iran nuclear deal, which had restricted Tehran’s nuclear activities. After withdrawing from the agreement, Trump imposed what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign and essentially demanded Tehran’s surrender. Instead, the Islamic Republic ultimately accelerated its nuclear activities, causing Trump to complain about its failure to accept his terms before the 2020 election.
Despite having claimed to solve the Iranian nuclear problem last year, in February he joined Israel in another military assault on Iran, contending that it was essentially nanoseconds away from developing nuclear weapons and blowing up the world. Which indicates that the 2025 operation was a failure. Or that, if it really was a success, he had no justification for making Israel’s war on Iran into America’s war.
In either case, the ill consequences were his responsibility, not Biden’s. The Pentagon had long war-gamed Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump seems to have dismissed the possibility of such an action. The Pentagon also feared Iranian attacks on its bases throughout the Persian Gulf, which he likewise dismissed. Moreover, the Iranian blockade affected the global supply of other critical products, most notably fertilizer and helium. The recent revival of conflict between the Saudi government and the Ansar Allah or Houthi movement in Yemen has further impeded oil supplies.
Trump repeatedly sought to influence energy markets by predicting a diplomatic settlement and claiming the strait was under U.S. control, while ignoring the predictable consequences of the dramatic drop in energy shipments. Indeed, it was widely recognized by most everyone other than the president that attacking Iran was almost certain to spike oil—and consequently gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel—prices. Although the impact of the war has been cushioned by unexpected mitigating factors, such as China’s reduction in oil imports, the market appears to be coming under increasing pressure.
The president’s undisciplined and arbitrary trade war against most nations on earth has also had a negative economic impact. While tariffs never would make Americans rich, as he claimed, he could have used carefully targeted levies to raise revenue—the federal government is running a $2 trillion annual deficit—and achieve foreign policy objectives. For instance, a more limited effort, conducted in cooperation with allied states, would offer a possible strategy for constraining Chinese economic influence.
But his blunderbuss campaign created malign consequences that he has consistently denied. Most importantly, American consumers, sellers, and producers pay most of the resulting cost increases. These are substantial, especially for the most basic building blocks of an industrial society. For instance, hiking the price of aluminum and steel increases costs throughout the economy. Indeed, the president has implicitly acknowledged that fact by repeatedly lifting duties on sensitive consumer goods, most recently beef, in response to complaints over rising prices. In practice, when even he could no longer maintain the fiction that taxing imports did not raise their price, Trump reduced the tariff.
Such levies also raise prices indirectly, by reducing or eliminating alternative products. A market economy is based on freedom of entry and rigorous competition. One objective of tariffs is to promote domestic production by blocking cheaper imports. Whatever the wisdom of attempting to promote “infant” American industries or revive enfeebled “sunset” enterprises, doing so depends on pushing up prices. With the federal government banning low-cost alternatives, domestic producers charge more. The president’s endlessly repeated denials do not change what Americans pay for essential goods.
Trump’s core policies—promiscuous warmaking in the Middle East and expansive mercantilist economic practices worldwide—reflect a return to an earlier age. They are mistaken, in my view, but reflect traditional if widely disputed policy paths. Facing rising popular dissatisfaction, however, the president has chosen to run away from the inevitable consequences of his actions rather than defend them. Someone styling himself as history’s most consequential person should do better.
The post The President’s Irresponsible Power appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president’s combative style is poorly suited to calming the nation amid an unpopular war.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone informs Tom Hagen he is being reassigned ahead of a particularly violent stretch for the family.
“You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom,” he said. “Things may get rough with the move we’re trying.”
The scene comes to mind as the Iran war hits the six-month mark and President Donald Trump continues to drive the national conversation but to no obvious benefit for himself or his party ahead of the midterm elections.
It would seem self-evident, even tautological, that Trump would be better off in a period of peace and prosperity rather than unpopular war. Wouldn’t any president or political leader?
But Trump’s political skills are especially unsuited to calming the nation in a period of crisis or urging Americans to stay the course during difficult times. This was his undoing in his first term and it could waste his second. He’s much better hyping good things happening under his watch and tearing down bad things being done by his opponents, often in an over-the-top fashion.
Presidents cannot always pick what will matter most during their time in office. But Trump’s crises—the Iran war and an unstable, erratic tariffs regime, both worsening the affordability crisis—are largely of his own choosing.
It is easy to imagine some of his most recent moves playing much differently if the public were happier with the state of the economy and satisfied with Trump’s handling of this top issue.
If this were the first-term Trump economy before the pandemic, with both low unemployment and low inflation, perhaps the Democrats would look like humorless scolds in response to his executive order renaming Lake Ontario. Lake America, hell yeah!
Instead, that order has become a symbol of a trade war with Canada that Trump has never fully explained and which looks like a grudge match with a Liberal prime minister he dislikes, within the broader context of public dissatisfaction with the cost of living.
During an economic boom, Trump’s recently published presidential rankings—seemingly cribbed from Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and his liberal historian buddies in 1948, with Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter thrown in for good measure—would seem like a fun afternoon internet distraction rather than a delusional exercise.
Of course, neither of these examples will be a major vote-mover, and the rankings remain closer to the ragebait they would be in the best of times. But trolling looks a lot better from a position of electoral strength.
Similarly, all of Trump’s legacy and DC beautification projects, including the White House ballroom, would be more politically defensible if voters weren’t worried about high gas prices.
On the economy, he is failing to do two things that Clinton—an average president, according to Trump’s own rankings—mastered long before the 1990s internet boom really took off: focus like a laser beam and feel the voters’ pain.
The latter is not really how Trump is wired while in charge, but he was at his best politically when selling his first-term economy and then diagnosing the ills of Biden’s.
Trump cannot help that much of the recent inflation occurred between his two terms and that prices were never going back down to 2019 levels barring an even worse economic catastrophe.
But Trump chose the Iran war and the tariffs. And while the tariffs in some form were always inevitable, the war was not. Whatever desire Trump had to get tougher with Iran than Obama, he did not have to create a global energy supply shock as inflation was coming down.
Even the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s own sister, a political amateur, ran a campaign focused on affordability, not Iran or international affairs. But that is not the national political climate Trump has created for Republicans as Labor Day and, critically, Election Day near.
It’s true that some of Trump’s biggest accomplishments have been achieved through brute force: securing the border, routing the terrorist group ISIS, cleaning up parts of DC. But not everything can be done this way, and all of them were more focused than Trump’s haphazard approach to Iran and trade.
Trump has chosen to be a wartime president, without a vote of Congress. But in the Tom Hagen sense, he is not one. Both he and the country would be much better off if he realized that fact.
The post MAGA Can Thank Trump for the Tough Election Year appeared first on The American Conservative.
Republican lawmakers and cattle industry groups criticized a decision by President Donald Trump on Friday to temporarily ease tariffs on beef imports.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said it was “disappointed” by the move, warning it would undercut America’s beef industry. Meriwether Farms, an American beef company, offered a one-word reaction on X: “Betrayal.” (Catharine O’Neill Gillihan, the firm’s CEO, is a member of the board of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes The American Conservative.)
Trump announced the policy change on Truth Social, arguing it would lower food prices amid a shortage in America’s beef herd. “As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers, for the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff,” Trump wrote.
Beef imports above quota levels are generally subject to a 26.4 percent tariff. Americans are paying about 25 percent more for beef since Trump returned to the White House, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump’s move provoked a backlash from GOP lawmakers, including Nebraska’s federal delegation. “Flooding the market with foreign beef hurts our livestock industry and undermines the long-term solution: growing the U.S. cattle herd to meet demand,” wrote Senator Deb Fischer on X. Nebraska is known as “the beef state” because of the industry’s importance to the state economy.
The post Ranchers, Lawmakers Slam Trump’s Beef Tariff ‘Betrayal’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Trump administration imposed new tariffs of between 10 and 12.5 percent on goods from a slew of countries Friday in an attempt to preserve the president’s tariff regime after the Supreme Court struck down his Liberation Day tariffs.
The new tariffs went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday, the same time the stopgap tariffs Trump enacted after the Supreme Court struck down his previous tariffs expired. The duties, imposed under the aegis of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, target 80 countries for allegedly failing to prohibit imports made with forced labor.
Imports from countries the administration judged to have made some progress, including India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, will face a 10 percent tariff. Goods from China, Australia, Japan, and dozens of other economies will be taxed at 12.5 percent.
Oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and some food products will be exempted from the import duties.
The post Trump Launches New Tariff Regime appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Trump administration said Monday that it will impose an additional 50 percent tariff on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, escalating a trade dispute that has simmered between the neighboring countries since the beginning of the president’s term.
The new rate, scheduled to take effect next month, will mainly affect the Canadian auto, alcohol, and dairy industries. The White House framed the tariffs as a response to Canadian discrimination against American producers through provincial restrictions targeting those same industries.
The duties will apply even to goods that qualify for tariff-free treatment under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which President Donald Trump has separately said the U.S. will not renew. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused the United States of violating the terms of the USMCA and said he was considering “all options.”
The legal authority cited for the move is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which allows the president to implement tariffs of up to 50 percent on countries imposing an “unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation” upon U.S. goods in a discriminatory fashion.
Trump has also threatened tariffs on Canada in response to smoke from the country’s wildfires drifting into the U.S. An official told Axios that those remain under consideration, and if imposed would be in addition to the tariffs announced Monday.
The post Trump Imposes New 50 Percent Tariff on Canada appeared first on The American Conservative.
What a failed Biden-era effort to save American glove makers teaches us about tariffs.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg published a brutal autopsy of industrial policy gone wrong. The article documented how, beginning in 2020, the U.S. government provided $850 million to six American companies to bolster domestic manufacturing of nitrile gloves, a critical component of the medical supply chain.
Six years later, not one of those companies is making gloves.
The company that received the most funding, Blue Star NBR out of Wytheville, Virginia, was supposed to use that money to build the first American plant in a generation capable of making nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR)—the raw material every nitrile glove is made of. It never produced a single batch. Its CEO said he is a month from selling the plant for parts, most of which will go to manufacturers based in China. To put it bluntly: American taxpayers built a synthetic rubber plant, and China may now cart it off in crates.
The lesson that many are drawing is that this episode “shows the difficulty of reviving US manufacturing,” as the Bloomberg piece has it. Not exactly. What the glove program demonstrates is that one cannot successfully protect American industry purely by subsidizing supply; the home market must also be secured. The only trade measure Washington ever deployed for these factories was a tariff aimed at a single country—and a tariff on one country, for a product a dozen countries will happily ship at two cents a glove, is not enough.
And in fact, the Biden administration officials who pushed the policy seem to have recognized that. In September 2024, when the USTR raised the duty on Chinese medical gloves from 7.5 percent to 50 percent for 2025 and 100 percent for 2026, it wrote that the tariff increases would “help protect those investments” the government had made in glove manufacturers.
So far, so good. But in the very next clause, it was observed that the tariff “will encourage diversification to sources other than China,” with “third-country sources” providing the alternative supply. The government hedged, in other words. And stakeholders noticed. The American Medical Manufacturers Association, even while asking for 100 percent immediately, warned that “tariffs on Chinese goods, without other strategic actions, are likely to result in supply shifting to other low-cost countries.” Blue Star’s own president, Scott Maier, wrote in early 2025 that a China-only glove tariff “will simply shift U.S. dependence back to where it was four years ago, Malaysia and Thailand.”
The importers followed the instructions. Census data for the main Chinese medical glove line shows the direct China trade collapsing in the first year of the 100 percent rate.
If a China tariff were sufficient, that collapse should have shown up as orders from American suppliers. Instead, those orders went to Kuala Lumpur. Since the tariffs were put in place, total U.S. medical glove imports actually increased by 19 percent.
Considered by country, the make-up of imports changed even more dramatically. China shipped 107 million dozen pairs a month in 2024, 40 percent of the U.S. market. Within a single month of the 50 percent rate taking effect, that share had dropped to 3 percent. Meanwhile, Malaysia’s share jumped from 44 percent to 68 percent. And Vietnam nearly tripled its shipments within weeks at declared values of roughly a cent and a half a glove: the same as the pre-tariff Chinese price.
Meanwhile, the share of this market claimed by American manufacturers stayed pitifully consistent: roughly 1 percent of the more than 100 billion gloves the country uses every year. The tariff moved tens of billions of gloves from one foreign supplier to another–but failed to bring a single production line home. The factories the tariff was supposed to revive failed as though nothing had changed. SafeSource Direct suspended operations and laid off some 700 workers in September 2025, nine months into the 50 percent rate.
To add insult to injury, the replacement supplies have not even reduced our dependence on Beijing. The Malaysian gloves that now dominate our market are mostly made using raw materials from China, as Bloomberg notes. And in some cases, Chinese companies are simply moving some operations into third countries: the Chinese-owned Intco Medical, the world’s largest glove maker, is building an Indonesian complex designed for up to 40 billion gloves a year (“largely targeted at US demand,” per one analyst) and just brought a new Vietnamese plant online at the end of last year.
My organization, the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), identified these issues in our comments on the Trump administration’s Section 232 investigation into medical imports. We showed how Chinese and Vietnamese gloves were entering at near-identical prices, and warned that China’s falling direct share was misleading, since it was simply shifting production to operations in third countries. The months since have proven the point. Together, Vietnam and Indonesia represented 23 percent of U.S. medical glove imports in May 2026, against 4 percent in 2024: their gains tracking China’s losses almost perfectly in reverse.
This is the “China outpost” problem, and we should assume this will be the default strategy of big Chinese industrial concerns. A China-only tariff doesn’t remove Chinese supply from your market. It launders it.
The reason is that protective tariffs exist to close that gap against every foreign supplier—to reserve the home market for the producers you are asking investors to finance. A tariff that exempts other producers who can operate at vastly lower costs than are possible in the home country will inevitably fail. Washington spent nearly a billion dollars erecting plants whose output was guaranteed to be undersold from the day the ribbon was cut, waited until most of them had already failed to impose any tariff at all, and then aimed the tariff at one country out of the dozen willing to sell at two cents. The administration’s current fallback, Buy American procurement, covers the roughly 2 billion gloves a year the federal government buys: about 2 percent of national consumption. No one finances a factory for 2 percent of a market.
Happily, the solution is simple. The Department of Commerce opened a Section 232 national security investigation into medical supplies last September, and gloves are expressly in scope. The statutory report was due to the President at the end of May, with his decision window running through late summer. The pharmaceutical 232 investigation has already produced tariffs taking effect this month. When the medical supplies investigation concludes, Washington should take a specific duty—we suggest a five cents a glove, ten cents a pair—and apply it to every single country of origin.
Every country, because that is the only geometry that constitutes protection. A universal tariff leaves no outpost to flee to: the Chinese-owned line in Indonesia pays the same nickel as the line in Guangdong. The nickel makes domestic production viable on contact—a glove landing at two to two-and-a-half cents pays its nickel and sells at seven-plus, above the six cents American Armor Gloves told Commerce it needs to compete, and comfortably above the viability floor other domestic producers have documented.
And a specific duty, because ad valorem rates invite foreign exporters to set their own tariffs. We ran this experiment with the Biden policy, which had the effect of depressing declared prices on the surviving China trade and on the companion surgical glove line. But quantities jumped six- and seven-fold while declared unit values collapsed by as much as 85 percent, keeping declared value almost perfectly flat. In other words, costs didn’t fall. Invoices did. At a 100 percent rate, every penny shaved off a declared value saves a penny of duty, and a glove declared at two cents leaves endless room for shaving.
None of this would have surprised Henry Clay. Arguing in 1842 against relying on foreign invoice valuations for ad valorem duties, Henry Clay observed that the system permitted “frauds in which the foreigner, with his double and triple and quadruple invoices, ready to be produced as circumstances may require, fixes the value of the merchandise taxed.” This is as true today as it was 184 years ago. And the cure is the same: write the schedule in cents per unit, not percentages.
“A clear per-unit tariff is simple to enforce, prevents under-valuation, and signals that the United States intends to rebuild this strategic industry,” as we pointed out in our October comments.
And the users? Here is the part hospital lobbyists will not tell you. A box of 100 nitrile exam gloves imported at $2–3 retails for $8–15—the markup between the dock and the exam room is several times the import price, and it dwarfs the duty. Even at full pass-through, a nickel a glove puts hospital prices around eight cents—still well below the 14 cents hospitals were paying per glove in 2021, when the industry’s answer to scarcity was price, not supply. Gloves are a rounding error in the cost of a medical encounter. A nickel at the wharf disappears into the distribution chain’s margins; it does not show up in anyone’s hospital bill.
The way to redeem the glove program’s billion dollars is not another appropriation, another waiver, or another procurement memo—and it is certainly not another tariff on China alone, which we should now assume merely will merely redirect Chinese supply through third countries. It is a nickel, collected at the wharf, on every glove from everywhere. Protection is the policy that costs the taxpayer nothing and pays for itself twice over: in the immediate revenues for the Treasury, and in the bailouts of American factories that never have to happen.
The post How Not to Do Industrial Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Trump administration on Wednesday announced that it would impose a new Section 301 tariff of 25 percent on Brazil for alleged unfair trade practices.
The tariff would impose new import charges on a wide range of goods from the South American nation but exempt some major categories including oranges, coffee, oil and gas, as well as beef.
These new tariffs come as the Trump administration reimposes tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. President Donald Trump has increased pressures on the Brazilian government in part for its treatment of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president and Trump’s political ally, who in 2025 was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading a coup plot following his loss in the 2022 presidential election.
Some of the exemptions had precedents in the earlier round of tariffs. The Trump administration reportedly considered exempting beef imports following a White House visit from Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The proposal met significant backlash from the U.S. cattle industry, delaying an order that would have suspended the tariff-rate quota to lower beef prices.
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The president has declined to renew the United States’ largest free-trade agreement.
President Donald Trump has decided not to renew the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was up for review this year. The agreement will remain in force until 2036, at which point it will expire unless all three signatory countries have agreed to renew it for another 16 years.
The country’s largest trade agreement, the USMCA was originally negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. It replaced the much-reviled North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump called “the worst trade deal in history” and a “job-killing failure” responsible for the loss of American industrial capacity.
Although the USMCA was negotiated under the first Trump administration and touted as a major achievement (the president called it “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved”), Trump has since been relatively ambivalent on the value of the deal, noting, for example, that the U.S. still runs a major trade deficit with Canada and Mexico.
“It was sort of a good deal, but it was a great deal for one reason,” Trump told reporters in June. “It gave the right to terminate.”
That right to terminate (or rather, to not renew) is what the president is exercising now, as he feels the agreement has not done all he had hoped it would. The economic trends that the USMCA was supposed to arrest—growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada and American deindustrialization—have continued. Indeed, since the USMCA came into force in 2020, the U.S. trade deficit with its North American partners has exploded. In the past six years the U.S.–Mexico trade deficit for goods has almost doubled, going from $111 billion in 2020 to $197 billion in 2025. The U.S.–Canada trade deficit for goods grew from $14 billion to $48 billion over the same time period, an increase of nearly 250 percent.
American manufacturing is not much healthier for the change, either. While the U.S. manufacturing industry has grown in dollar terms since 2020, the sector has declined in proportion to the rest of the economy. When USMCA entered into force, manufacturing contributed just over 10 percent of the total U.S. GDP. Today, it represents only 9.4 percent. That decline is particularly painful as the U.S. attempts to keep pace with China’s massive manufacturing sector, an effort that looks more doomed with each passing year. The USMCA also failed to bring any revival in manufacturing employment: There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in January 2020.
The lackluster results delivered by the USMCA are hardly surprising. The agreement, though touted as a repudiation of NAFTA, was essentially the same framework with a few modifications and a new coat of paint. It maintained essentially intact the North American free-trade zone, NAFTA’s signal accomplishment, but tightened rules of origin for automotives and automotive parts, strengthened labor standards, and beefed up the enforcement mechanisms for violations of the agreement. It also, of course, added the sunset clause that ends the agreement unless it is renewed by 2036.
The U.S. will continue to negotiate with Mexico and Canada over the terms of the USMCA during its remaining decade, however. The Trump administration is pushing to strengthen the automotive rules of origin even further, among other changes. But drawing up a replacement framework does not seem to be on the president’s agenda, at least for now.
Materially altering the USMCA framework will be difficult. North American trade is deeply integrated, and is becoming more so as the U.S. seeks to decouple supply chains from China. Much of that manufacturing has moved to Mexico, which under President Claudia Sheinbaum has placed steep tariffs on Chinese goods in an attempt to tighten its economic alignment with the U.S. Ending the North American free-trade zone would be a major disruption to the American economy and highly unpopular with U.S. businesses and consumers.
It’s also uncertain how effective doing so would be for American reindustrialization. American manufacturing has trouble competing with China’s cheap labor costs; sourcing parts from lower-cost countries like Mexico allows American companies to reduce the price of their products at the cost of shifting some of the supply chain abroad. Cutting off the possibility of cheaper inputs may stem the flow of offshoring but make American goods too expensive for the market, harming manufacturers.
Still, the Trump administration already began to move beyond the free-trade framework established by NAFTA and only partially preserved by the USMCA. During Trump’s 2025 “Liberation Day” tariff campaign, Canada and Mexico were not treated like free-trade partners: The administration imposed duties on some Canadian and Mexican goods under border-emergency authorities, though USMCA-qualifying products retained their preferential treatment.
These measures marked an important departure from NAFTA’s animating premise: that tariff-free trade among the three countries should be the default. The Trump administration’s position is that access to the U.S. market must be subordinate to American industrial and economic policy priorities. It will continue to push that line in the ongoing USMCA talks this summer.
What will replace the USMCA when it expires in 2036 remains an open question, however, and will probably depend heavily on the results of the 2028 presidential election. Trump himself seems inclined to leave it to his successor, and it is not certain how the party will settle on economic policy as he exits the stage.
Vice President J.D. Vance, the heir apparent, has been one of the most prominent champions of the second Trump administration’s protectionist policies, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, likely to be the establishment darling in a primary contest, is a proponent of something closer to the pre-Trump Republican consensus on free trade. Either could move the party in his own direction.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been fiercely critical of the Trump administration’s tariff policy, and are likely to seek a return to the days of NAFTA, a position that meshes well with the party’s increasing suspicion of borders generally.
The post Trump Turns Down USMCA Renewal appeared first on The American Conservative.
The recent Supreme Court setback was expected. Now we turn to Section 301 tariffs.
MAGA can be a very emotional movement. That passion led to a historic win in 2024 when President Trump carried every single swing state. But it can also have downsides. Unfortunately, when we run into even a little adversity, we are prone to crippling self-doubt and panic.
A bad court ruling. A hostile media cycle. One misleading, hyperbolic headline. Some anonymous quote from a faceless, NeverTrump bureaucrat. Within hours, social media timelines fill with blackpilling, accusations of betrayal, and declarations that the entire MAGA agenda is dead.
But the Panicans need to relax. We’ve watched the president work for more than a decade. We’ve seen him adapt, change lanes, find another lever to pull, and keep moving. He’s proven doubters wrong over and over again. At this point, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
And that is certainly true when it comes to the question of the “Trump Tariffs.”
In February, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s “emergency power” tariffs, which he argued he could levy using executive authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Included in these were his “trafficking tariffs,” which he levied against China, Canada, and Mexico for failing to prevent the flow of fentanyl into our country, and his “reciprocal tariffs,” which he levied against nearly every nation for the “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. economy and U.S. national security posed by trade imbalances.
The president obviously preferred a better ruling, just as a power hitter might prefer a fastball down the middle of the plate. But he hasn’t struck out—not even close. Governing is a process. Serious attempts to reorder the global economy were never going to move through the courts uncontested. Judicial review takes time.
Meanwhile, he’s already looking to crush the next pitch.
Soon after the ruling, the administration began exploring alternative tariff authorities under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which allows the United States government to respond to unfair foreign trade practices. This angle puts the tariff argument on much firmer legal and political ground.
A Section 301 framework allows the administration to connect environmental dumping, industrial overcapacity, state subsidies, weak labor standards, and non-market manipulation to a broader argument about systemic trade distortion. This argument targets the trade practices that allow foreign producers to artificially suppress prices through overcapacity and state-backed advantages that American firms cannot realistically match under normal market conditions.
China stands apart because it combines nearly every distortion inside a state-directed command economy built around subsidies, industrial overcapacity, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, forced labor, and heavy industrial pollution.
While China is the clearest example, the problem is very much a global one. Many countries benefit from weaker environmental enforcement and lower industrial standards. For decades, Washington has treated these distortions as normal features of “free trade,” while domestic industry hollowed out and production shifted overseas.
Environmental activists and regulatory bureaucracies played their own role in this shift by focusing heavily on reducing domestic emissions totals without accounting for how industrial production would move abroad. China now produces massive amounts of the steel, chemicals, batteries, solar panels, and industrial materials required for the so-called green transition while relying heavily on coal power and weak environmental enforcement. American policymakers spent years measuring domestic emissions reductions without seriously accounting for the offshoring of both industry and pollution.
That dynamic carries direct economic consequences. Weak environmental enforcement becomes an economic advantage. Governments willing to tolerate severe pollution hand manufacturers pricing advantages over competitors in countries operating under stricter standards, allowing them to flood markets with cheap, dirty products.
That is exactly why the Section 301 approach matters so much. It treats these practices as interconnected forms of trade distortion instead of isolated policy debates.
Trade policy evolves through institutional fights, legal challenges, and shifting authorities. Durable frameworks usually emerge over time. The administration is adapting in real time while parts of the online right continue embarrassing themselves by treating every procedural setback, temporary injunction, or narrow ruling like the collapse of the entire America First movement.
Real patriots trust the plan. Ignore the “Panicans” and let the President cook—he’s about to hit a dinger.
The post Relax, Panicans: Trump’s Tariffs Are Just Getting Started appeared first on The American Conservative.
Tariffs and antitrust are yin and yang. Ranchers need both for a functional market.
On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, and the manufacturing policy director Pete Navarro held a joint press conference to provide an update on their antitrust investigation of the Big Four meatpackers, which combined control more than 85 percent of the U.S. beef processing market. This investigation began with President Donald Trump’s November request, in which he accused the packers of “driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.” Blanche said his department has reviewed more than 3 million documents and contacted hundreds of ranchers, cattlemen, producers and processors in the six months since.
With this action the administration is taking on hardcore government investigation– and litigation-survivors. The largest of the packers, JBS, is a Brazilian conglomerate whose owners pled guilty in 2020 to a bribery scheme that financed their original entry into the American market. In 2023, the Biden Antitrust Division filed a civil suit against Agri Stats, the data intermediary the packers allegedly used to coordinate; that same year, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced legislation to break up meatpacking, and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), in his capacity as then-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, investigated JBS for “turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers”. More recently, not to be outdone by the Trump administration, Senate Democrats led by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer have introduced their own legislation to break up the dominant meatpackers. And McDonald’s, Target, Kroger, Sysco—everybody who is anybody is suing the Big Four.
All Americans should pray for their breakup. But even that won’t be enough. Antitrust needs to be paired with tariff protection if American ranchers can finally enjoy a functioning home market. Ranchers need certainty as to how much of their home market will be traded away to imports if they’re going to set about rebuilding.
The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF USA), an association of independent ranchers that itself launched a class action lawsuit in 2019 against the packers, details the depth of the hole we find ourselves in. The U.S. cattle herd today is 86 million head—smaller than it was in 1951, when only 154 million Americans relied on it instead of today’s 340 million. The herd peaked at 132 million in the mid-1970s and has been shrinking ever since, even as the population it has to supply more than doubled. The calf crop is the smallest since 1941. Almost three-quarters of lamb and close to 20 percent of beef consumed in America are imported. Between 2017 and 2022, more than 106,000 beef-cattle operations disappeared. Of every 10 ranchers in business in 1980, fewer than five remain.
Brazilian beef imports are surging so far in 2026, up 21 percent from a year ago. And 2025 itself was a record for Brazilian beef shipments to the U.S., topping $1.75 billion, up 39 percent from 2024.
A generation ago, the American rancher kept 63 cents of every consumer dollar spent on beef; the packer and retailer split the remaining 37. By 2021, those numbers had inverted. Today the rancher receives 37 cents and the middle of the chain takes 63.
The cash market—the open auction in which independent ranchers price-discover their cattle, the one functioning piece of competitive market machinery left in the industry—has collapsed. In 2005, more than half of fed cattle were sold through the cash market. Today it is below 22 percent. The rest is captive supply: cattle owned outright by the packer, or pre-committed under formula contracts packers dictate.
What R-CALF USA calls the “chickenization” of the beef industry is no metaphor. In poultry, more than 90 percent of birds raised in America are grown by farmers under contract to an integrator that owns the chickens, dictates the inputs, and sets the price. Independent chicken farmers, in any meaningful sense, no longer exist. The cattle industry is on the same trajectory. Without intervention, the American rancher of 2040 will be an indentured contractor for a foreign-owned packer, or out of business.
The good news is that ranchers have been in similar trouble in the past, and the Republican Party was able to deliver the solution.
In 1887, meatpackers were on a tear: The railroads had opened the High Plains, and in between the ranches out west and consumers out east stood the packers, able to dictate terms of the market. The packers were thriving, but the ranchers who actually owned the steers were going broke. Known as the Beef Trust, the packers—Swift, Armour, Morris, and Hammond—had consolidated control of the dressed-beef market and, through Chicago’s railroad chokepoint, dictated prices of every range steer west of the Mississippi.
A special Senate select committee was formed and chaired by George Vest, who would spend 18 months documenting the packers’ abuses. The Vest Committee Report of May 1890 found that the “depression in the prices paid to the cattle raiser” came from “the artificial and abnormal centralization of markets, and the absolute control by a few operators thereby made possible.” Substitute Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef for Swift, Armour, Morris, and Hammond, and the Vest Committee could be reporting from May 2026.
The Republican response was double-barreled. In 1890, the 51st Congress—part of a GOP trifecta during the first two years of Benjamin Harrison’s presidency—passed both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the McKinley Tariff Act, the strongest protection-first tariff to date. (Incidentally, this Congress also created National Forests and Land Grant Colleges—an inspiring record.) The McKinley Tariff included a “specific duty” of $10 per head on imported cattle, replacing the prior ad valorem 20 percent rate. Tariff protection plus antitrust would be the yin and yang needed to build a functioning domestic market for the cattleman and consumer: Sherman to break the cartel, McKinley to keep foreign supply from ruining domestic rebuilding.
Unfortunately, the cattlemen got the tariff and lost the antitrust fight. The 1895 E.C. Knight decision gutted Sherman against vertically integrated combinations. Roosevelt’s 1902 prosecution produced Swift v. United States (1905)—Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s celebrated “stream of commerce” opinion, doctrinally enormous but operationally a failure for ranchers. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) put the Chicago packers on every front page in America the following year; the resulting Federal Meat Inspection Act addressed sanitation rather than market power, and the larger packers quietly welcomed it as a regulatory barrier their smaller competitors could not afford. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair lamented, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The structural fight remained unwon, and concentration kept rising.
Republicans learned the hard way in the 1890s and 1900s that a strong tariff without domestic competition is a political albatross. Theodore Roosevelt himself walked out of the 1912 Republican Convention partly over unresolved antitrust politics, splitting the party and handing Woodrow Wilson a Democratic trifecta. Once elected, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, Wilson demanded that American producers be thrown into unlimited price competition with imports the world over.
Antitrust without a tariff leaves the domestic producers exposed to ruinous imports from foreign cartels beyond American jurisdiction. Run only one, and you do not get half a result. You get nothing.
Six months after Wilson’s speech, both live cattle and beef—among a host of other goods—were put on the free list. Imports surged. Chaos from the Mexican Revolution pushed Sonora and Chihuahua herds across the Rio Grande; imports from Canada rose with the wartime collapse of British demand; and Wilson’s “effective competition” arrived on schedule. Gross American farm income fell from $17 billion in 1919 to $10 billion in 1921. Farm foreclosures more than tripled after Wilson urged farmers and ranchers to load up on debt to feed the world. The McKinley generation’s worst fears were vindicated empirically.
It ultimately took 30 years for the cattlemen to win on the antitrust front. The newly created independent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) produced the six-part Report on the Meat-Packing Industry (1918–20), documenting the Big Five’s 82 percent control of interstate cattle slaughter and their stranglehold on stockyards, market wires, refrigerator cars, and 114 unrelated commodity lines. Facing a credible nationalization threat, the packers signed the Consent Decree of February 27, 1920—a real divestiture.
Republicans had regained Congress in 1918, the White House in 1920, and on May 27, 1921 passed the Emergency Tariff Act, naming cattle, sheep, beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork as the protected commodities. (Wilson had vetoed the same tariff relief on his last day in office.) The future was bright for ranchers.
Still, cattlemen knew a decree could be undone by a future administration. So they pushed for statutory reinforcement, and the Republican Party delivered. In 1921, under President Warren G. Harding, a Republican Congress (another glorious trifecta) passed two laws back-to-back: the Packers and Stockyards Act, giving USDA comprehensive authority over packer purchasing with broader prohibitions than the Sherman Act; and the Emergency Tariff Act of May 27, restoring agricultural protection that Wilson’s radical free-trade experiment had stripped away. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 made the protection permanent, in the McKinley specific-duty tradition.
The combination worked. The four-firm concentration ratio fell from 82 percent in 1918 to 41 percent by 1947.
Neither tariff protection nor antitrust would last, however. First to go were the tariffs. With the Democrat trifecta win in 1932, Congress would transfer its tariff authority to FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1934. Hull promptly eliminated tariff protection, and the United States signed on to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947. After a Mexican foot-and-mouth quarantine was lifted in 1955, the dam broke. Cattle imports surged from 86,056 head in 1954 to 1,250,029 in 1962. Ranchers successfully rallied and Congress delivered the Meat Import Act of 1964, although President Johnson ensured it had enough loopholes so he could trade away home market access for foreign favors.
Defeats would arrive on the antitrust front, too. The Reagan Justice Department terminated the 1920 Consent Decree. Tyson acquired IBP. Brazilian JBS bought Swift; Marfrig of Brazil now majority-owns National Beef. Two of the four firms that buy 85 percent of American fed cattle are foreign-controlled, and the four-firm concentration ratio is higher today than when Senator Vest opened his investigation. The Reagan-era promise of efficiency-driven consumer relief has produced wholesale beef prices nearly twenty percent higher than a year ago, with rancher prices flat or falling. The empirical case has collapsed.
Trump now has the chance to do what only Harding’s 1921 Congress managed—deliver both halves of home market protection.
On the antitrust side, the DOJ probe should produce a structural remedy modeled on the 1920 Consent Decree, codified by Congress in a modernized Packers and Stockyards Act. Captive supply, vertical integration into feeding, foreign ownership, and information-sharing intermediaries all need direct statutory treatment.
On the tariff side, the Administration should launch a Section 232 investigation covering grazing livestock—cattle and beef, sheep and lamb. Section 232 authority can be used to phase in tariff protection and give ranchers the certainty they need to rebuild the domestic herd.
The objection that tariffs cause shortages misses the lever the United States already has. The existing beef tariff-rate quota—administered by USTR and USDA—can be tightened gradually, allowing imports to fall in step with herd growth. No shortage, no consumer price shock; a planned, multi-year reconstruction of the American cattle supply.
Finally, Trump should work with Congress to codify both halves into permanent statute. Regulatory arrangements that depend on a single administration’s discretion get unwound by the next administration. Harding’s Republican Congress understood this. The current one should do no less.
The American cattlemen of 1890 lost the first round, won the second, and watched their grandchildren lose the victory. The choice now is not between free trade and protection. It is between an honest American protectionism—tariffs and antitrust together, codified by statute—and the dystopia in which independent American ranching disappears, replaced by foreign-controlled, vertically integrated supply chains feeding American consumers at rising prices over the broken backs of American producers.
The 1921 Republican Congress chose the first. Trump and the 119th Congress should make the same choice.
The post The Republican Playbook for Saving the American Rancher appeared first on The American Conservative.
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