How obviously illegal were Donald Trump’s tariffs?
So obviously illegal that even this radically right-wing, Trump-enabling Supreme Court couldn’t find a way to rule in his favor.
And here’s the thing: It was obvious that they were illegal from the minute Trump imposed them. The Constitution very clearly assigns that sort of power exclusively to Congress. The tariffs were an arbitrary exercise of power well outside the rule of law.
But the mainstream news reporters covering Trump just couldn’t bring themselves to say so.
Similarly, the tariffs were crazy. They were a non-solution to a problem that didn’t exist. They were destabilizing. They were capricious. And, for good measure, Trump didn’t actually seem to understand how tariffs worked.
But reporters just couldn’t bring themselves to say that, either. (Well, one of them did, briefly.)
Instead, the elite Washington press corps did what it always does with Trump. It treated his actions as if they were within the realm of the normal. That’s called normalizing. It selectively quoted and paraphrased him to make him sound like he was saying something in the realm of the rational. That’s called sanewashing.
Our elite journalists were effectively covering up for Trump, and spreading his lies rather than telling the public the truth.
Why? Well, it goes back a while. It all started when Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election, and became president in 2017. This was a national emergency. But rather than sound the alarm, the leaders of our top newsrooms chose to remain calm. Anything else, they decided, would seem shrill and partisan. They were above that.
And the rest is history. They’ve never been willing to change course, even in Trump’s second term, as he seized dictator-like powers, perverted the government, sent masked thugs to terrorize Democrat-led cities, and suffered from an obvious mental decline.
Just look at today’s coverage of Trump’s press conference. He used ridiculous hyperbole to malign the justices who ruled against him and made ludicrous claims about what the ruling meant and what he could do next. He often seemed to have no idea what he was even talking about. But the New York Times headline at this hour is “Defiant Trump Says He’ll Work Around Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling.” The Washington Post headline is “Trump imposes new tariffs, denounces Supreme Court justices as a ‘disgrace’ after ruling.”
That’s normalization and sanewashing.
But nothing is normal, and what he’s doing is not sane.
If you are an avid follower of Press Watch, none of this will be news to you. But bluntly put: Any news coverage that doesn’t situate Trump’s actions in their essential context is effectively disinformation. And that essential context is, for starters:
- He’s deranged
- What he says often makes no sense
- He lies almost all the time
- He’s corrupt
- He doesn’t care about the rule of law
- He’s a white supremacist
Trump’s tariffs were the act of a mad dictator, and the elite media didn’t tell you. Hell, they still won’t.