Trump
Has Donald Trump lost his most powerful tariff weapon?
The US Supreme Court decision on tariffs has upended the central plank of President Donald Trump’s economic and foreign policy.
Will this lead to a change of course, or will Trump double down?
Even by Donald Trump’s standards, 2026 has been unusually frenetic.
From the ousting of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, to his threats to annex Greenland, to his repeated vows to use military action against Iran, a lot has been happening.
Amid all these geopolitical upheavals, there is one key tool that has pretty much defined both of Trump’s presidencies: tariffs.
Trump’s obsession with tariffs goes back a long way. Those who have observed the US president over the decades say it is tied to his view of the booming Japanese economy of the 1980s.
Trump formed the view that Japan’s economic success was based on what he felt were the unfair terms of its economic relationship with the US. He came to see tariffs as a magic bullet for balancing the terms of trade with countries — a view he has firmly held for more than 40 years, regardless of the country or the economic dynamics at play.
He often turns to tariffs when cornered. At the height of the Greenland crisis, when European leaders strongly rebuked his rhetoric, he threatened tariffs against those who opposed his plans. His resolute confidence in their effectiveness, regardless of the issue, seems unshakeable.
“I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at his Inauguration Day parade in January 2025.
“Tariffs are going to make us rich as hell, it’s going to bring our country’s businesses back.”
US Supreme Court decision to rule his emergency tariffs illegal could be such a defining moment of his second term.
Has the US top court’s decision removed the main leverage Trump had for his economic policy? Will it cause him to change course? Or will he simply double down?
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, nonresident senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told DW that while the ruling doesn’t remove tariffs from the Trump playbook, it may blunt their Impact.
“No matter what happens going forward, this removes Donald Trump’s preferred avenue for making tariffs the issue with which he deals with any foreign policy or any policy issue overall by simply saying, you know, at very short notice, this country gets, you know, 20%, 30%, 50% tariffs,” Kirkegaard said. “That degree of unpredictability in US trade policy has now gone away.”
However, Trump’s decision, in the wake of the ruling, to install a 10% global tariff and then ramp it up the next day to 15%, was interpreted by some as a sign that he has no intention of softening his approach.
“So much for people who imagined a loss at the Supreme Court would lead to a more restrained trade policy,” Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, said on LinkedIn.
Not all of Trump’s tariffs have been invalidated either. Tariffs on steel, aluminum and cars — sectors of particular interest to China and the EU — remain in place. The Trump administration is also exploring ways to impose more tariffs under different statutes.
Yet so many of the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump imposed on countries around the world have been taken off the table and replaced with the new global tariff. This new tariff already has an expiry date of 150 days due to legal restrictions and needs the US Congress’s approval to be extended.
About The Author
