Last Tuesday’s State of the Union address set records. For one, it was the longest SOTU in history, clocking in at an hour and 47 minutes.
From where I sat and from what I observed, President Donald Trump’s speech and the event, itself, wavered between political theatre and stultifying, and overall, it came across more as one of his campaign rallies instead of a unifying cri de coeur. It was, as many predicted, full of the same old grievances and bull manure we’ve already heard, including insults toward other elected officials, which has become the norm.
My overall assessment of the speech, which you’ve probably read here before, on other topics, and heard/read articulated by others, perhaps more eloquently, is that: clowns in both the major parties have taken over the asylum and are not interested in governing. They’re not interested in representing We the People, and we must, as a nation, start electing serious, dedicated people who actually want to make this country a better place, instead of carrying on with theatrics and projection. All of that does nothing but make our nation the international laughingstock.
Now that is out of the way, I want to focus on one aspect of the speech that Trump spoke about: the subject of tariffs. As I wrote in this space last year, after Trump was inaugurated to begin his second term, he is not only the duly elected President of the United States of America but also serves as the President of the Tariff Fan Club.
Four days prior to the SOTU, Trump was dealt quite a crippling blow by the Supreme Court, which in a 6-3 ruling in the case Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, deemed the tariffs he’d unilaterally put into place last year as illegal. In a predictable fashion, Trump lashed out at the conservative justices who’d sided with the ruling; claiming their take was counter to the Constitution. However, the Constitution specifically grants Congress the authority to “lay and collect taxes…and regulate commerce with foreign nations,” in Article I, Section 8, under the heading of “Taxing & Commerce Power.”
In the spirit of “I don’t need no stinkin’ congressional authorization,” Trump said he’d move forward with tariffs without Congress by invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to implement global 10% tariffs, which, in a manner typical and quite cavalier, said might be as high as 15%.
During the SOTU, Trump called the ruling “very unfortunate,” and as he spoke on the matter, a shot of Chief Justice John Roberts showed the long-serving justice looking, well, nonplussed.
Before we go any further into this subject, say it with me, folks: tariffs are taxes. And they’re a regressive form of taxation, at that, passed on to, you guessed it, We the People.
The non-partisan Tax Foundation found that the average family paid an extra $1,000 last year due to the tariffs. However, to hear the president tell the story, the economy is booming due to those tariffs. The numbers tell a different tale; that economic growth actually slowed in the last quarter, and manufacturing jobs were down in 2025.
Here’s something to chew on: an estimated 50 million Americans suffer from food insecurity, and under Trump’s first year back in office, the price of beef is actually up an average of 16%, while the price of coffee is up about 20%, thanks to tariffs. While Trump claims the country has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from the tariff revenue, an estimated 90% of the costs have been passed on to, you guessed it, We the People.
Trump can claim that the prices of groceries are down and living is more affordable (which, of course, he attributes solely to his presence having returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), but here’s a question: when was the last time Trump had to pump his own gas or stroll into a McDonald’s and pay for his own Big Macs?
The claim Trump made that tariffs can, in time, replace the income tax system, might sound to those lacking skepticism and/or critical thinking skills, like a simple and appealing idea. I mean, why not have foreign countries pay for our government instead of American workers?
Mathematically, this just would not work out. Federal income taxes generate about half of all the government’s revenue, which comes out to trillions of dollars each year. Tariffs, even when wielded in a manner as foolhardily as they’ve been as of late, only generate a small fraction of that. If tariffs were raised to extreme levels to replace income taxes, those rates would reduce imports as prices got out of sight and would shrink the tax base they depend on.
The lie that other nations are paying those tariffs falls on deaf ears for anyone who didn’t sleep through their senior year economics class. Importers pay the tariffs at the border, and then those costs are passed to the consumers through higher prices.
It’s a heavy burden for working class and middle-class households, all of whom spend a larger share of their income on goods. Small businesses have been hit hard, as well. I have a friend who is a master distiller and owned a popular regional distillery. He told me last fall that the tariffs were killing his ability to keep his business going, and now it is on the market.
Trump and the billionaire aristocracy are vastly out-of-touch with the daily realities of We the People, of the lower/working/middle classes. The idiocy of the tariff game appears to be a scam to shift the tax burden onto us peasants, and Congress could stop it, however, as the between-the-lines reading of the SCOTUS ruling made clear: they’ve been asleep at the wheel on this issue, and they don’t have any interest in doing their job.
The State of the Union address was a rousing success for the billionaire ruling class, but I believe Trump should have issued an apology to the American people for the tariff nonsense, and subsequently, a refund.
