President Trump is preparing to impose fresh tariffs on as many as sixty countries within days, even as some of his own advisers privately push him to hold off and honor trade deals struck last year.
The White House has drawn up options for the next round of duties just as the existing blanket 10 percent global tariff is set to lapse on Friday, the Daily Mail reported, citing Financial Times reporting. The new levies are expected to land between 10 and 12.5 percent and would be justified by a U.S. investigation into forced labor practices that trade officials first floated in June.
The move comes after Trump hammered Canada with a 50 percent levy on a sweep of goods on Monday and slapped 25 percent duties on Brazilian imports just days earlier. Both actions signaled that the administration has no intention of easing up on trade enforcement, and that the expiration of the global baseline rate will not mean a reprieve for foreign exporters.
The legal architecture behind the new tariffs matters. After the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping "Liberation Day" levies Trump announced in the Rose Garden on April 2, 2025, the administration replaced those reciprocal tariffs in February with the 10 percent global regime now about to expire. The court rejected the emergency powers Trump had invoked, forcing the White House to find another path.
That path runs through a patchwork of procedural trade laws. Rather than relying on a single broad authority, officials are building the next round of tariffs on narrower statutory grounds, in this case, the forced labor investigation, to survive judicial scrutiny. A separate probe into excess manufacturing capacity has swept up an even wider net of trading partners: the European Union, China, Japan, India, Mexico, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Bangladesh.
Whether those two tracks, forced labor and manufacturing overcapacity, overlap with the roughly sixty countries targeted for the new duties remains unclear. But the combined scope suggests an administration determined to maintain leverage across virtually every major trade relationship the United States holds.
Not everyone inside the building is on board. Senior officials have privately urged the president to keep the peace with trading partners and honor the deals Washington cut in 2025 to bring tariff rates down, the Financial Times reported. After recent inquiries into critical minerals and airplane parts, officials advised negotiating with partners rather than reaching for new duties.
U.S. trade envoys had already carved out exemptions for staples such as beef and coffee and softened levies on steel and aluminum goods, concessions that suggest at least some appetite inside the administration for targeted relief. But those carve-outs now sit alongside a president who appears ready to escalate, not consolidate.
The tension is real, and it reflects a recurring dynamic in Trump's trade policy: advisers counsel caution, the president pushes forward, and the final product lands somewhere between the two. The question is whether the latest round will tilt closer to restraint or to confrontation.
The political backdrop is not friendly. Brent crude climbed above $90 a barrel this week, and gasoline pushed back above $4 a gallon, prices that hit working families hardest. Annual inflation is running near 3.3 percent, according to the Cleveland Federal Reserve's latest nowcast, well above the Fed's 2 percent target.
Tensions with Iran are boiling over and convulsing global energy markets, adding another variable the administration cannot control. Higher energy costs feed into the price of nearly everything else, food, shipping, manufacturing, and voters notice.
A Daily Mail/JL Partners poll conducted this month found Democrats holding a nine-point lead on the midterm ballot, 50 percent to 41 percent. More than half of voters rated Trump's handling of the economy as bad. More than half said economic conditions are worsening.
Those numbers should concern every Republican strategist heading into the midterms. Tariffs are a legitimate tool of trade policy, and the forced labor investigation addresses a genuine moral and competitive problem. But voters do not grade on policy intent. They grade on what they pay at the register.
The administration's shift to procedural trade statutes is worth watching. The Supreme Court's rejection of the emergency-powers approach forced a rethink, and the White House appears to have learned the lesson, at least procedurally. Building tariff authority on specific investigations into forced labor and manufacturing overcapacity gives each action a narrower, more defensible legal footing than the broad reciprocal model the court rejected.
That does not make the tariffs immune to challenge. Courts will scrutinize whether the investigations meet statutory requirements, and trading partners will test every seam. But the approach is more methodical than the original Liberation Day rollout, and it reflects an administration adapting to the constraints the judiciary imposed.
The White House has been contacted for comment on the new tariff plans but had not responded at the time of publication.
Trade enforcement is a fight worth having. Forced labor is an abomination, and countries that flood global markets with subsidized overcapacity deserve pushback. But the strongest trade policy is one that American families can afford to live with, and right now, the margin for error is razor-thin.
