The Supreme Court threw out Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, so the administration needed a new doorway to walk the exact same policy back through, and on June 3 it found one: forced labor. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it had investigated 60 trading partners — China, Japan, the U.K., the EU, basically everyone — and discovered that all 60 of them fail to properly ban goods made with forced labor. Every single one, guilty. The proposed punishment is a tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent, which, by pure coincidence, lands almost exactly where the old illegal tariffs were sitting before the court killed them. Public Citizen did the math and pointed out that a serious forced-labor investigation of one country usually takes five to eighteen months. This one did sixty in just over two, and the findings read like a copy/paste with the country name swapped at the top. It’s not an investigation. It’s the same tax wearing a human-rights lanyard so the courts will let it in.
And then you read the exemptions, which is where the costume slips off entirely. The tariffs carve out energy, rare earths and certain metals, beef, coffee, fruit and vegetables, pharmaceuticals, and aircraft parts. So forced labor is a national emergency worth taxing the entire planet over — right up until it’s in your morning coffee, or the steak, or the medicine, or the metals a defense contractor needs cheap. The principle has an exact price, and the price is “does an American company want this thing badly enough.” Slavery in a t-shirt: intolerable, tariff it. Slavery in a coffee bean: please, keep it coming, prices are high enough already. They will tell you with a straight face that this is about the conscience of the nation, and then hand you a list of all the products where the conscience switches off.
The official line is that all of this protects American workers from an “unlevel playing field.” Hold that sentence up to the light. These are the same people firing union organizers and watching federal courts call it a coincidence, the same months a company can void thirty thousand workers’ stock and write a new executive a $26 million check in the very same currency. The worker is not the point. The worker is the costume, same as the forced labor is the costume — a sympathetic noun you staple to the front of a policy so nobody looks at who actually pays, which is you, about $1,500 a household this year, for the privilege of a tariff that a court already ruled illegal once. They don’t care about the kid in the foreign factory and they don’t care about the guy organizing the Starbucks down the street. They care that “forced labor” tests well enough to get the tax past a judge. Make them say it without the lanyard on. They never will, because out loud it’s just a tax you’re paying so they don’t have to lose in court.