Trump Discovers Forced Labor Throughout America's Closest Democracies, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Global Tariffs The Supreme Court Struck Down Were Going To Stay Struck Down
WASHINGTON. Moving decisively to confront the scourge of forced labor wherever the Supreme Court had recently confronted his tariffs, President Donald J. Trump this week unveiled a sweeping plan to combat human exploitation in Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and several dozen other trading partners by charging American importers more money.
Under the proposal, released late Tuesday by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, 16 economies long suspected of being democracies, among them Mexico, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, would face new 10 percent tariffs for insufficiently enforcing bans on forced labor, while another 44 nations, including China, Japan, and Switzerland, would be hit with 12.5 percent. Administration officials hailed the measure as a bold stand against a practice that will be paid for entirely by the Americans buying the goods in question.
"The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable," said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, announcing that the remedy for this failure would be a tax collected at U.S. ports from U.S. companies. Officials noted that the new duties would arrive just in time to replace the tens of billions of dollars in revenue lost in February, when the Supreme Court ruled that the President's previous round of global tariffs had been illegal, money the administration had been counting on to help offset its 2025 tax cuts.
"It's a beautiful thing, because nobody can stand up and say they are in favor of forced labor," said one source within the administration, explaining that the nearly 100-page report documenting the abuse had been completed at roughly twice the normal speed by investigators working under what colleagues described as enormous pressure from the White House to find some. "We looked at Canada, we looked at our closest friends, and we found exactly what we needed to find. The wall goes right back up, and this time it's about the children."
To shield voters from the consequences of being protected, the administration exempted a long list of products from the new duties, including aircraft parts, coffee, beef, and the rare earth minerals used to build smartphones, a carve-out officials presented as proof that the policy targets forced labor everywhere except where confronting it would be inconvenient. Economists observed that the plan, like its predecessors, operates as a national sales tax that Americans pay to a government that then credits the President with standing up to foreigners.
At press time, USTR investigators had opened a second inquiry into whether the same trading partners were also guilty of selling things too cheaply, a separate offense for which the proposed punishment was once again a tax on the Americans who buy them.