WARREN, Mich. — Jamieson Greer is a trade lawyer. He is a well-respected trade lawyer. He was chosen by President Donald Trump to be the country’s top trade lawyer: the U.S. Trade Representative. He is not a member of a union. He is not a welder. He is not a manufacturer. He is definitely not a salesman. But here he is one cloudy morning on a factory floor in Michigan, in front of an American flag that could hide an elephant, selling the administration’s trade agenda in one of the most important political states in the country with a man hoping to become its next governor. And that man just went soft on the core tenet of Trump’s efforts to reshape global trade. “We don’t want the tariffs to go on forever,” said Rep. John James (R-Mich.). “We want reciprocal tariffs. We want fair trade.” Greer stares off at a machine in the distance. He’s heard a similar line from tariff-skittish Republicans before — that the tariffs are a tool, a way to get countries to open markets and expand exports, and then they will come down. But those reassurances contradict his daily reality: His boss does want tariffs to go on forever. And he’s made it Greer’s job to ensure they do. Trump has never hidden his love of tariffs. But his second term has seen the so-called “Tariff Man” unleashed, with a trade policy defined by a fire-from-the hip approach that’s upended global markets. He immediately set about imposing tariffs on three of the country’s top trading partners — China, Canada and Mexico — and quickly followed with “Liberation Day,” when he imposed duties on goods from nearly every country in the world in the hopes that it would end the alleged global exploitation of American commerce and mark the beginning of a grand resurgence in domestic manufacturing. He justified those tariffs with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to regulate trade during a national emergency. The trade deficit between the U.S. and other countries, Trump said, constituted such an emergency. But the law had never been used for that purpose and doesn’t explicitly mention tariffs. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t be used that way at all, striking down the cornerstone of Trump’s economic agenda. Trump was undeterred. He vowed that his administration would find a new legal mechanism with… [TheTopNews] Read More.
3 weeks ago
