U.S. Rep. Don Beyer of Northern Virginia yesterday addressed Trump’s upcoming tariffs during a hearing of the Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee before engaging witnesses with questions. Since Beyer’s remarks, Trump has reportedly planned the imposition of additional auto tariffs.

We are having this hearing a week before what President Trump has taken to calling “liberation day” and frankly that adds a bit of absurdity to this exercise.
We’re discussing new notional trade agreements while the President is busy tearing up the last one he negotiated. I’m very interested in the possibilities of an agreement with the United Kingdom or with Switzerland. But it’s hard to imagine an FTA in the present context.   
On April 2nd, the President has promised to levy tariffs in some form and some amount, based upon some invented but yet-to-be-revealed metrics, on an unknown list of countries, relying on dubious authority.
We are told that these tariffs will remedy all manner of slights real or imagined.
Countries around the world and businesses around the country are scrambling to understand the MAGA astrology that these supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs will be based.
Investment is on pause; your 401k is down, and uncertainty is up.
This opacity might be less dangerous if the President wasn’t simultaneously promoting his crypto token– a historic platform for industrialized bribery.
And depending on what you want to buy, your paycheck won’t stretch as far because Howard Lutnick has felt disrespected by some Prime Minister somewhere. Your life will become more expensive to protect the President’s feelings.
Does that feel like liberation to you?
The past two months of on and off trade war against Canada have given us the perfect distillation of the emptiness and absurdity of the Administration’s trade policy. The Wall Street Journal called it the dumbest trade war in history. When they’re right they’re right.
We’ve heard 17 different pretexts for the necessity of aggressive tariffs that will raise costs, destroy integrated supply chains and turn friends into enemies.
The only one the President will stick to is his desire to turn a proud and friendly nation of 40 million people who can’t stand him into the 51st state. You won’t hear a lot of that from my Republican friends because they know how utterly stupid that sounds.
You won’t sound any smarter explaining to your constituents that the price of their medicines just went up because Denmark refused to sell us Greenland for Trumpcoins.

  Are there irritants in the US-Canada trade relationship? Sure. But this is blowing off your toe to cure a hangnail. It’s burning our manufacturing base in order to save it.
And this has been so successful the President now wants to do a world tour, with American consumers footing the bill.
This committee should be leading the charge to reassert congressional trade authority. We should be working together to protect the economy from an ideological and emotional tariff program that will make us poorer and kill more jobs than it saves.