In a Cynical Move, Trump Invokes Forced Labor Concerns as a Pretext to Revive His Tariff Regime After Courts Have Repeatedly Struck It Down

Courts have struck down Donald Trump’s tariff regime on a number of occasions, including the Supreme Court itself, which ruled earlier this year that his primary tariffing authority, IEEPA, does not grant the president the power to impose tariffs. Every legal theory he has tried has been rejected. Undeterred, the president has found a new pretext: forced labor. The administration is now imposing across-the-board tariffs of 10–12.5% on countries it claims are failing to enforce anti-forced-labor provisions. Forced labor is a legitimate issue, of course, but unilateral tariffs imposed, without any global cooperation, by an imperialist authoritarian that cares not a whit about human rights doesn’t pass the laugh test. So trade experts are rightly calling out the administration’s bogus framing.

The New York Times reports:

The new tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that allows the president to issue tariffs to respond to other countries’ trade practices. Legal experts said they are likely to be more durable than the initial law Mr. Trump used to enact tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Mr. Trump used Section 301 in his first term to wage a trade war with China, and the tariffs he put in place have survived multiple court challenges. No administration, however, has ever used the provision in such a sweeping way.

Trade experts have welcomed efforts to end or reduce forced labor, but some have complained that the new tariffs are primarily aimed at finding a way to block foreign products and raise revenue, not ending human rights abuses.

As the Times notes, Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations called the announcement a “transparently cynical effort” and “merely a pretext to maintain tariffs that the administration believes have been effective.” The forced labor framing may be new, but the underlying impulse to use tariffs baselessly and illicitly is not.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.