The American people have seen Trump’s tariffs make everything more expensive. Small businesses around the country have closed or are in distress due to the president’s tariff policy.
However, the tariffs have not been applied equally, and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have started an investigation into some groups and individuals who have given Trump money and whose businesses were then exempted from tariffs.
Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote to Donald Trump:
I write you now because, in the midst of all these terrible and lawless policies, you took care to cut lots of sweetheart deals with corporations and industries that won carve-outs from your tariffs when you saw you could get something good in return. Brazilian beef tongues, Chinese smartphones, and Belgian blood diamonds all got sweetheart exemptions from your latest raft of tariffs. While tariffs are supposed to be a toll to combat unfair trade practices, in your hands they have become yet another tool for grift and self-enrichment.
From the outset of your second term, you have made clear that you view tariffs as a bludgeon to wield indiscriminately against America’s friends and foes alike. Declaring tariffs the “most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” you have publicly threatened to impose tariffs on countries for a host of ill-defined and inane reasons, including, “flooding” American markets with “bathroom vanities,” failing to prevent wildfire smoke from blowing across the Canadian border, and refusing to support the nonconsensual sale of Greenland to the United States.
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Consistent with your nakedly self-interested and transactional approach to government sanctions, the USTR’s final rule contains conspicuous—and suspicious—carve-outs for a few industries. Ostensibly, those exemptions were reserved for cases when tariffs would make critical minerals unavailable or fail to contribute to the reduction of forced labor. 14 In practice, many of the exemptions make little to no sense under the USTR’s own criteria. They do, however, make sense when factoring in the now world famous Trump Tariff Discount.