Several US states have filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s tariffs on 60 trading partners, claiming the duties harm their economies. The official reason? Forced labor violations abroad. The actual reason? States are furious they did not think of this first.
What we are witnessing is diplomatic theater at its finest. States that spent the last decade ignoring supply chain ethics are now suddenly very concerned about labor practices in Vietnam and Malaysia — specifically the labor practices that made their widgets cheaper. It is almost as if they only discovered forced labor exists the moment tariffs started hitting their bottom line.
The real scandal is not the tariffs themselves. It is that states are effectively running their own foreign policy while pretending to care about human rights. They have hired trade lawyers, filed briefs, and are essentially negotiating with countries behind the scenes — all while maintaining the fiction that they are just defending free markets and workers’ dignity.
Trump’s move was crude and probably economically messy. But he did what states have been too cowardly to do: he actually used leverage. Now those same states are suing him for it, not because the tariffs are wrong, but because they wanted to be the ones holding the leverage.
The forced labor angle? That is just the punchline they could use in public.