I was aware that Donald Trump’s weaponized tariffs, applied to over 100 countries on an arbitrary and impossible-to-understand basis, had been challenged in the Supreme Court.
Seeing as he has packed courts on all levels with his cronies, I had little hope that the tariffs would be judged unconstitutional (executive overreach).
But, lo and behold, the Court just ruled 6 to 3 that this was indeed the case.
Hallelujah!
What I didn’t know was that the case against Trump had been brought by a wine importer!
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/21/busi … isk-takers
What’s significant here is that no major US corporation, many of whom have lost a lot of money due to the increased tariffs, stepped up to challenge the authoritarian president.
Reflecting the political environment in America and the fear that reigns there at the present time, none of the big guys had the cojones to say “stop this madness”. How pathetic
The wine company, Vos Selections, is in New York
https://vosselections.com/contact-us/
Their website had a section entitled “Fighting the Tariffs”
https://vosselections.com/tariffs-blog/
The US is learning that protection is ultimately counter-productive (this is one of the oldest and most widely agreed-upon ideas in economics, going back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo) as the cost of living rises and the average American is hurting – not to mention the ill-will and anti-Americanism Trump has created around the world.
I mention pyrrhic victory because within 24 hours, smarting from his defeat, Trump blithely announced that he would retaliate by applying an across-the-board 10% tariff on imports from every country on the planet. Will this unbelievably petulant response give rise to yet another court case?
Who knows? With Trump pushing presidential power to new extremes of questionable legality, most anything is possible…
Let us look at what happened in Bordeaux. Trump pulled the figure of a 15% tariff on French wine imports out of a hat. And, compounded by an increasingly low US dollar to euro exchange rate, sales on Bordeaux’s most important export market have unsurprisingly slumped. Of course, that penalizes the local wine industry, but also consumers of Bordeaux in the US.
The whole theory behind protectionism is that by raising the price of imported goods, homegrown industries will get a boost. But does anyone really think that Bordeaux wine lovers will automatically turn to California wines? In my opinion, most such people already have a lot of Bordeaux in their cellars and will simply wait until the prohibitive import duties are a thing of the past.
Meanwhile, the US president plays havoc with the rules of international commerce and law.