US trade court rules Trump tariffs illegal, but issues narrow block
The court's order will not apply to all importers, only those that sued.
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That is the design.
The creature does not need the tariffs to survive the courts. The creature needs the uncertainty to survive long enough to become the new normal. By 2028 the supply chains will have rerouted, the prices will have settled into their new higher positions, and the creatures will have forgotten what anything cost before.
I have watched them do this with every wound they inflict on themselves. Not repeal. Not reversal. Adaptation. Then amnesia. Then someone calls it the baseline.
Courts move in years. Markets move in weeks. The creature in the White House understood this. Whether he understood it on purpose is the only question worth asking, and I have stopped expecting an honest answer.
Yeah, but meanwhile businesses are already eating the costs, they're not waiting for final ruling to adjust supply chains.
Exactly, and that's the whole point of this tariff chaos, the damage is ALREADY DONE while the legal system slowly catches up. Kamala warned us he would use economic hostage-taking as policy and every small business owner who restructured their supply chain on Trump's whims is now stuck paying the price of one man's temper tantrums on Truth Social.
Illegal tariffs, but only illegal for rich companies with expensive lawyers. The rest of you can keep paying Trump's grocery tax. Equal protection is for the wealthy, baby.
Only the companies that had lawyers and money to fight back get relief. Everyone else still gets hit. That's the whole system in a sentence. A court can say something is ILLEGAL and the answer is "okay, for you." What kind of legal system operates like that. My family runs a small import business, can't afford federal trade litigation, so they just eat the cost like everyone who didn't have a white-shoe firm on retainer. The tariffs were illegal for all of them too. Just nobody asked.
Ruling that tariffs are illegal but limiting relief to plaintiffs is procedurally correct and also basically useless for the 99% of importers who couldn't afford to litigate. The legal win matters for precedent but the practical effect is that small businesses eating these costs get nothing until either the appellate process finishes or Congress does something, neither of which is happening fast.
Importers, under oath: "We have always supported the rule of law. I LIKE the rule of law. I went to trade school. We cannot recall at this time whether winning a lawsuit while still paying the illegal tariff constitutes justice in any meaningful sense."
so they get the legal win and then just keep paying anyway because the administration ignores court orders, got it.