Trump Rebuilds His Tariff Wall, Brick by Brick

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**David Gura** (0:09)
The war with Iran is at an inflection point. That's according to Bloomberg Economics. President Trump is considering his next steps. And over the weekend, there was a pause in strikes by both the US and Iran. But Houthi militants, aligned with Iran, have fired missiles and drones at Saudi oil facilities, impacting crude prices. That has added to concern about inflation, ahead of this week's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
In the middle of all this, President Trump decided to impose a raft of new tariffs. After the US. Supreme Court overturned the tariffs the president had put in place on national security grounds using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, countries all over the world waited to see how Trump would try to rebuild his tariff wall.
First, there was a temporary measure, a short-term 10% global tariff that expired last week. While that was in place, the Trump administration put the finishing touches on another policy it hopes will be more permanent.

**Brendan Murray** (1:08)
So Section 301 allows the US. Trade Representative, after an investigation into certain unfair trade practices, to impose tariffs based on a number of different reasons.

**David Gura** (1:20)
That's Brendan Murray, who's Bloomberg's global trade editor. Section 301 is part of the Trade Act of 1974

**Brendan Murray** (1:28)
Essentially, if American companies, American workers, are being disadvantaged in any way from competition overseas, this allows the government to legally justify tariffs against certain countries' imports, and that's what we've seen here.

**David Gura** (1:45)
Countries from Australia to Switzerland have expressed their disappointment, and they've denied what the US has alleged, that they haven't done enough to keep forced labor out of their supply chains. These new tariffs went into effect on Friday at midnight New York time. And now, companies and countries are trying to make sense of them, and lawyers are considering court challenges that will determine whether the policy sticks.
I'm David Gura, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Bloomberg's Brendan Murray breaks down the latest levies imposed by the Trump administration, how they came about, who they impact, and what they reveal about the administration's approach to trade.
In announcing these tariffs, Jameson Greer, the US trade representative, said in a statement, The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it. It's well past time, he said, for our trading partners to do the same. Brendan, what do we know about the rigor of these investigations, if the administration's claims against these countries are in fact founded?

**Brendan Murray** (2:52)
So what we're going to see over the coming weeks is a lot of legal debate about whether these are justified or not. American importers are going to ask themselves, why am I paying a duty based on forced labor from the products that I'm importing from Switzerland, probably as far from forced labor as you might think a country could be.
That's because the administration has judged that countries, including Switzerland and Canada and many in Asia, have not enforced their forced labor rules and regulations adequately enough or they don't have the rules on the books at all. So what we're seeing is the administration say, look, we're just trying to level the playing field for American workers. Now, there are arguments that this won't hold up in court as well. Some people point to the fact that the apparel industry would raise these issues too. There are Americans in prison who are producing goods that are bought in the marketplace, and doesn't that qualify as forced labor for people who work and get paid 50 cents an hour or nothing at all. So there's going to be a lot of finger pointing, but ultimately, the question is going to come down to, how can you justify these tariffs on so many countries, paint them all with the same brush, and impose a tariff of 10 to 12 and a half percent on them?

**David Gura** (4:19)
How strongly are they making the case here that this is about human rights? I drew the connection between those IEPA tariffs being struck down and they having to kind of scramble to find some other means by which they could put these tariffs in place.
Are they pushing back against the notion that they were looking for another means of doing this? Are they saying this really is about human rights? Are they making that claim in this release?

**Brendan Murray** (4:40)
Yeah, that's one of the main criticisms that the administration has already heard, that this is just a pretext to collect money and to pad the Treasury revenue.