Liberation Day

Donald Trump’s second presidency began with a blaze of executive orders which horrified and impressed in equal measure. It also begged the question: if it really were so easy for a president to circumvent the legal obstacles and assert his will, how come none had behaved in this way before? A year on, we are learning the truth: no, a president can’t just do what he likes, and there is a horrible price to pay if he tries. In the case of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs the notional bill is $166 billion. That is the sum that US Customs believes it will have to refund to importers who paid tariffs which were

At a rally in Georgia on Thursday night, President Trump declared that he couldn’t wait “forever” for the Supreme Court to rule on the legitimacy of his sweeping tariff policy. Whether or not the court was listening to his complaint, forever arrived today as it handed Trump a thumping defeat. It struck a blow not only for fiscal but also political sanity. Government intrusion upon the free enterprise system is bound to prove inimical to prosperity and liberty The language of the ruling was as lapidary as it was persuasive. “President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the

With Trump’s international agenda, scratch beneath the hilariously crazy surface and you find a more serious campaign to isolate China, China, China

Trump will be able to claim a negotiating success. But that doesn’t mean Americans will be better off for it

The President is risking something more – the diminishment of his political superpower: unpredictability

The world’s two biggest powers are now engaged in a full-blown trade war

He is right to complain about tariff disparities and to do something about them

‘Liberation Day’ is when America stops pretending the global trading system resembles a textbook model