The action film and the unconstitutional farce

If trade policy and monetary policy were eligible for the Oscars, the current US administration would already have the statuette for Best Science Fiction Film on its trophy shelf.

Four months ago, in these very pages, I described the tariff manoeuvre devised by Donald Trump and his loyal right-hand man at the Treasury, Scott Bessent, as a mind-boggling script straight out of a film about the multiverse.
A clumsy attempt to resurrect archaeological relics from the 1970s to mask the obvious failure of an economic vision based on unilateral bullying.

You didn’t need a Nobel Prize or a crystal ball to predict how it would all end: all it took was the ability to put two and two together using a broken abacus.
Faced with protectionist demagoguery and sovereignist solutions, after all, it’s all too easy to be a prophet. Today, fiction gives way to the theatre of the absurd: for the US Treasury, the fairy tale has turned into a financial bloodletting of epic proportions.

According to official figures filed by US Customs and Border Protection with the US International Trade Court, US customs has already issued and refunded over $100 billion (equivalent to €87 billion), including duties collected without justification and substantial interest.
This figure already accounts for more than 60 per cent of the total haul — some $166 billion, equivalent to €144 billion — raked in by the White House through its much-trumpeted ‘Liberation Day’ plan.

That incredible house of cards was swept away by the Supreme Court with a 6–3 ruling that branded the misuse ofthe International Emergency Economic Powers Act as unconstitutional.

In practice, Washington had taken a 1977 law designed for states of emergency and the nuclear threat and wielded it like a fiscal club to tax the world, hoping that no one in court would read the first three lines of the legislation.

The history of gullibility and the export scam

To fully appreciate the absurdity of this disaster, it’s worth rewinding the tape to 2 April 2025 and retracing the steps of this ‘masterpiece’.

When Trump announced his barrage of tariffs, anyone with even a smattering of economic knowledge and three functioning brain cells warned of the impending catastrophe.
Conversely, the usual crowd of people who get a kick out of the mere sight of a strongman in charge began to hail the event as a stroke of genius.

At the forefront are the MAGA Italici Sovranisti a Targhe Alterne — known to their friends as M.I.S.T.A. — who instantly rejoiced, passing off Washington’s madness not only as a strategic victory for the White House, but even as a huge ‘opportunity’ for our own companies.
A logical contortion that betrayed a staggering lack of economic understanding.

A few months later, the first statistics on European and Italian exports to the United States were released, showing strangely positive figures. It was a moment of glory for the tariff enthusiasts, who came out into the open with that classic, triumphant tone of a Year 1 pupil: ‘See, we were right, weren’t we?’.
Even in that case, the celebrations betrayed a total inability to read a balance sheet. The apparent resilience of exports was not the litmus test of sovereignist success, but the simple result of two factors: the panic among American companies, which were stockpiling goods in their warehouses before the ban came into force, and the boost from the pharmaceutical sector, which, as it happens, was subject to zero tariffs.

A negligible detail, of course, for those who think the economy is run by tweets.

Inflation for everyone and a bonanza for the giants

But the masterstroke of sovereignist rhetoric lies in pretending not to understand what a tariff is.
A tariff is not a fine that the Americans slap on an Italian or Chinese manufacturer: it is a tax that the American importer pays to their own customs authorities.

Initially, the major import companies in the US tried to absorb the blow by tightening their belts so as not to lose customers. But when they grew tired of playing the benefactors, they began passing the price rises directly on to supermarket price tags.

The result? Lo and behold: US inflation has started to rise again, and the average citizen has begun paying up to 20 per cent more for their shopping to fund the White House’s autarkic fantasy.

Whilst voters watched their savings dwindle, the Supreme Court called a halt to the festivities and presented the bill.

With the law struck down, the billions collected under the guise of the emergency have turned into an illegitimate debt that the federal government must repay, along with an apology.
But the real kick in the teeth is yet to come.

The 100 billion already refunded by the Treasury will never find its way back into the pockets of the ordinary consumers who bore the brunt of the price rises. Under US law, the money is due solely to registered importers – that is, the huge multinational logistics and trading companies.

The bottom line for the big companies is nothing short of spectacular: first they raised prices for customers by passing on the tariff, then they kept prices high when the tariffs were lifted, and today they are pocketing billions in refunds from the state, complete with interest.
A mind-boggling profit-making machine, paid for entirely from the public purse.

The budget deficit and the usual moralising

At this point, the question naturally arises: why do Donald Trump and Scott Bessent keep pushing ahead and looking for loopholes – such as Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 – to impose new ‘bridge’ tariffs?

The answer is far from spectacular: the United States is drowning in a colossal public debt, Trump’s tax promises wouldn’t hold water even if they were reinforced with concrete, and the White House is in desperate need of quick cash to patch up a federal budget teetering on the brink of collapse.

This affair offers the European Union — and the various armchair economic advisers within our own sovereignist movements — an unforgettable lesson.

‘Vintage’ protectionism, half-baked trade wars and shortcuts via emergency decrees have never created a single job or protected a single industry.
They generate inflation, destroy the market, empty citizens’ pockets and enrich multinationals, leaving the state in a dire financial state.

The MAGA model has proved to be a cosmic failure at every turn. In Trump’s multiverse of tariffs, the players continue to wave their arms about, but history’s calculator has stopped making concessions: and, as always, it is the usual suspects who are footing the bill for demagoguery.