The Trump administration would like you to know it has discovered a conscience. Early this month the U.S. Trade Representative proposed slapping fresh tariffs on more than 60 countries — 10% on the ones it calls partial offenders like the EU, Canada, and Mexico, 12.5% on everyone else, China and India included — over their failure to keep goods made with forced labor out of the supply chain. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade envoy, called that failure “unacceptable,” and said it forces “American workers to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.” The report names the usual horrors: rice picked in Myanmar, cotton out of Xinjiang, tobacco from Malawi. It is, genuinely, some of the worst exploitation on earth. And this crew found it exactly when it gave them a reason to do the one thing they were going to do anyway.
Here’s where the sleight of hand happens. A tariff is not a rescue. It is a tax, and the person who pays it is the American standing at the register, not the plantation that used the forced labor. Nobody in Xinjiang gets a day off because Washington added 12.5% to the sticker. The cotton still ships; it just costs more when it lands, and the government keeps the difference. If you actually wanted that cotton kept out, you’d block it at the border, which is a power the U.S. already has and mostly doesn’t use. Taxing slave-made goods 10% and waving them through isn’t ending the practice. It’s putting it on sale and taking a cut. Meanwhile the same White House spent all of 2025 jacking up steel and aluminum costs until plants in Pennsylvania and Iowa started shedding the exact American workers Greer is now pretending to lie awake about.
So spare me the level playing field. This is a man who watched Mack Trucks and Whirlpool lay people off because of his own trade war, and his answer is a new trade war wearing a human-rights lanyard. Look at who’s on the list: Canada and the EU, at 10%, for the crime of running a “partial” forced-labor regime — meaning they have real laws, just not perfect ones, which is more than you can say for the guy taxing them over it. Real solidarity with an exploited worker anywhere would cost the people signing these orders something. This costs them nothing and bills you for it. They didn’t find a conscience. They found a costume, and it’s your paycheck holding it up.