Democrats criticize Trump’s new tariffs as ‘end-run around the supreme court and Congress’ – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:

• Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, announced that the Trump administration “is imposing tariffs on more than 80 countries for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

• The government of Brazil has rejected the Trump administration’s claim that it, and 84 other nations, failed to enforce a ban on forced labor, and called the new 12.5% US tariff on imports from Brazil “completely arbitrary and unjustified”.

• Congresswoman Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat, denounced the pretext for the new tariffs as a sham. “President Trump isn’t serious about combating forced labor. He’s trying to make an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress to reimpose his illegal tariffs,” Sánchez wrote on social media.

• The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.

• The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said “it’s very hard to deal with President Trump when he changes his mind every single day. One day the prime minister is with him side by side, and next thing you know, President Trump turns on him like a rabid dog.”

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, made no mention at all of the new US tariffs to be imposed on Mexican imports in a social media post about her meeting, on Thursday, with the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, in Mexico City.

Instead, Sheinbaum posted photos of the meeting and described it as talks about “bilateral agreements for the benefit of both peoples” and a review of the free trade agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada, called the USMCA in the US, but known known in Mexico as T-MEC, shot for Tratado entre México, Estados Unidos y Canadá.

In his own statement, Greer also avoided the subject of the new tariffs he announced earlier in the day, describing the meeting as “the third bilateral negotiating round related to the Joint Review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.”

Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, suggested on Thursday that the reason the Pentagon death toll for the Iran war excludes the four soldiers killed in the past week is that the Trump administration claims that the war ended in June, when Donald Trump signed a temporary ceasefire with Iran over dinner at the palace of Versailles.

“Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire,” Massie wrote on social media. “The reality: By going more than 90 days without congressional authorization,” the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable.”

Earlier this month, Trump sent Congress a formal notification that hostilities against Iran had resumed on 7 July, a letter his administration framed as opening a new 60-day ​window for the use the military in Iran without congressional approval.

We’ve just got a statement from Australia’s trade minister, Don Farrell, in response to the 12.5% tariffs to be levelled by the United States.

These tariffs are unjustified, inconsistent with our free trade agreement, and should be removed.

Australia’s measures to combat forced labour and modern slavery are among the strongest in the world, and we are recognised globally, including in the US, for our leadership.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, told reporters that “everything’s on the table” in response to new tariffs imposed on his country this week by Donald Trump.

Canada will do “whatever it takes to defend and support our families, our workers and our businesses,” he added.

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, was less diplomatic when asked if Canada has been “bringing a knife to a gun fight” so far” in responding to Trump’s trade war. “I wouldn’t say that,” Ford replied, “but it’s very hard to deal with President Trump when he changes his mind every single day. One day the prime minister is with him side by side, and next thing you know, President Trump turns on him like a rabid dog.”

Matthew Holmes, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s chief of public policy, said in a statement that it was suspicious that the US suddenly imposed tariffs on Canada for supposedly not doing enough on forced labor one day before a previous round of short-term tariffs is due to expire.

“Canada is a leader on this with a formal prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour, more legislation coming to strengthen this regime, and businesses investing significantly in compliance, due diligence and supply chain transparency,” Holmes said. “Canada should not be targeted here.”

“If the intent is truly to address forced labour, the focus should be a coordinated approach through a multilateral mechanism. The timing of this is somewhat suspect as previous rounds of tariffs sunset,” he added.

“Trump is hell-bent on raising your prices,” congressman Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat said in a statement on Donald Trump’s lastest tariffs on 85 countries. “His new tariffs are a nationwide sales tax that will only serve to make life harder for Americans just trying to make ends meet.”

The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.

A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran Donald Trump launched on 28 February, remains at 14.

A separate “Names of the Fallen” list on the same Pentagon casualties site currently includes just 13 service members.

According to a New York Times report, the Pentagon website listed 18 American service members had been killed during the war on Iran on Wednesday, but was changed on Thursday to exclude three service members killed last Friday, Saturday and Sunday as Iran retaliated for new US strikes with an attack on a base used by US forces in Jordan. The list also excluded was a fourth soldier who was killed during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil air base in Iraq.

By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war.

Three military officials told the Times “that one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list … because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

A Pentagon spokesman disputed that contention, telling the Times that the decreased total of war dead was die to “temporary data disruptions” that would be quickly fixed.

The reported removal of the recent war dead from the Pentagon list comes one day after Trump traveled to Dover air force base in Delaware to salute the remains of the four soldiers killed in the past week and as he continues to demand credit for the number of dead being so much lower than in years-long conflicts like the US wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Trump posted a chart on his social media platform comparing the death toll of 18 in his Iran war with those previous wars, which misstated the number killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the caption: “These are the real facts. REPORT THEM!”

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, on his way to what the Pentagon calls the “dignified transfer” of the killed service members’ remains, Trump claimed that the dead soldiers had supported his claim that the war on Iran is necessary to prevent that nation from developing a nuclear weapons – an effort US intelligence assessed Iran abandoned in 2003.

“We’re going to Dover,” Trump said, “to honor our heroes and they’re indeed great heroes. All of them said, very strongly, that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon”.

At an event on Thursday, Trump again argued that the death toll from his war on Iran was low compared to that of Vietnam, the war he did not serve in as a young man.

“You know, we were in Vietnam for 20 years, lost thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives,” Trump said, inflating the actual death toll of US troops, 58,220.

“We were in Afghanistan for years. We were in all these wars that you heard about for years and years,” Trump added. “Well, we’re in for four months and we- I had a very sad day yesterday; I went to Dover, four great American patriots killed. That’s 18 … and one is too many, but it’s 18. Whereas in Vietnam, we lost 200,000.”

Donald Trump has suggested in a social-media post that damage caused to shipping by Iranian attacks could be paid for using Tehran’s assets frozen overseas.

Please let this statement serve to represent, until further notice, that from this point forth, any and all damages done to Ships, Cargo, or anything related thereto, will be paid for by Iranian Money that the United States has in its possession, and controls.

It’s unclear whether the US would be able to use frozen assets in such a way; any move would probably be challenged.

Europe has faced an array of issues in its attempts to use Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine.

As soon as the Trump administration announced its new tariffs on 85 countries, for supposedly failing to crack down on forced labor, the office of the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, turned its official, government social media account into a political battering ram: posting past statements against forced labor from 15 senators and members of Congress of both parties, in a transparent attempt to head off their criticism of the new tariffs.

One of those lawmakers, congresswoman Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat, denounced the pretext for the new tariffs as a sham anyway.

“President Trump isn’t serious about combating forced labor. He’s trying to make an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress to reimpose his illegal tariffs,” Sánchez wrote on social media.

She continued:

If he was serious, he would not be applying the same tariff rate to China, one of the worst forced labor abusers in the world, as he does to countries like Australia. Then again, unlike China, Australia, doesn’t manufacture any Trump corporation products.

This is the same administration that gutted funding to combat forced labor through cuts to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs and rolled back worker protections here at home, while encouraging companies to profit off some of the world’s worst forced labor abusers through his proposed US-China Board of Trade.

We need to take forced labor seriously. But that includes addressing our problems here at home, including by taking on the export of goods made with American prison labor. Slapping more tariffs on every country that upsets the president isn’t the way to do it.

The government of Brazil has rejected the Trump administration’s claim that it, and 84 other nations, failed to enforce a ban on forced labor, and called the new 12.5% US tariff on imports from Brazil “completely arbitrary and unjustified”.

In a statement provided to Brazilian news outlets, including O Globo, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government said that it would immediately trigger a process of imposing retaliatory tariffs on US goods.

“Lacking a domestic legal basis to support its protectionist trade policy,” the Brazilian government said, the Trump administration “chose to manipulate an issue central to human rights and the struggle of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices”.

Brazil also noted that it had cooperated with the investigation by the US trade representative’s office, and provided “extensive” documentation of Brazilian legislation and actions taken by customs authorities to curb imports of goods produced using forced labor.

“The United States bans certain imports from China produced by forced labor. In effect, the Trump administration wants to globalize this ban,” Monica de Bolle, a Brazilian economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, wrote on Friday. “Brazil is one of the US targets, posing a problem since China is one of its biggest trading partners. But one thing is clear. This dispute is not about forced labor. None of the remedies being sought would do anything to address any forced labor conditions anywhere. No, this action is about the Trump team’s effort to use any legal stratagem to wage its trade war and to single out Brazil for punishment.”

“Virtually every US ally – including the European Union, Canada, and Mexico – received materially identical USTR findings on the same day. Using slave labor as a bogus justification for a trade war becomes obvious when you realize that the tariff is being threatened against some 60 economies simultaneously,” she added.

As nations are scrambling to find out if they are subject to the new tariffs imposed on Thursday by the Trump administration, for supposedly failing to crack down on forced labor, the US trade representative’s office has provided a list of nations or economic blocs supposedly guilty of a “Failure to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor”.

According to a draft version of the Federal Register Notice:

On June 2, 2026, the Trade Representative determined that, in each of the 60 investigations, certain of the acts, polices, and practices of the economy at issue are actionable under sections 301(b) and 304(a) of the Trade Act. The Trade Representative also issued a comprehensive report, Acts, Policies, and Practices of Various Economies Related to the Failure to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor (Report).

Specifically, the Trade Representative determined that:

• The following 54 economies have failed to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor: Algeria; Angola; Argentina; Australia; the Bahamas; Bahrain; Bangladesh; Brazil; Cambodia; Chile; China, People’s Republic of; Colombia; Costa Rica; Dominican Republic; Egypt; El Salvador; Guatemala; Guyana; Honduras; Hong Kong, China; India; Iraq; Israel; Japan; Jordan; Kazakhstan; Kuwait; Libya; Malaysia; Morocco; New Zealand; Nicaragua; Nigeria; Norway; Oman; Peru; the Philippines; Qatar; Russia; Saudi Arabia; Singapore; South Africa; South Korea; Sri Lanka; Switzerland; Taiwan; Thailand; Trinidad and Tobago; Türkiye; United Arab Emirates; United Kingdom; Uruguay; Venezuela; and Vietnam.

• The following six economies have failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor: Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan.

The list treats China and Hong Kong, which is part of China, as separate economies, and describes the 27-nation bloc of the European Union as one economy. So a total of 85 nations are subject to the new US tariffs which go into effect on Friday.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, just announced that the Trump administration “is imposing tariffs on more than 80 countries for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

Citing legal authority from Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, Greer said that the new tariffs come after investigations by his office.

The new tariffs, at Donald Trump’s direction, are the president’s latest ⁠effort to restore a regime of near-global import taxes after after the US supreme court struck down his “Liberation Day” tariffs of 10% to 50% imposed last year ⁠under a national emergencies law the court said did not apply.

Trump initially responded to that ruling by imposing a ​temporary 10% tariff for 150 days which expires ‌on Friday.

In a statement, Greer called the new tariffs a response to human rights abuses, one day after the Trump administration struck a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, which has been described by rights groups as one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.

The kingdom, Human Rights Watch reported, has invested in “high-profile sports and entertainment events domestically and internationally” in order to “whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record. “Migrant workers, including on projects and companies linked to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, “face widespread abuses across employment sectors”.

“President Trump recognizes that decades of moral suasion have not eradicated forced labor from global supply chains. The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” Greer said in his statement on the new tariffs. “Today’s action will begin to correct what is both a human rights abuse and distortive trade practice to improve the welfare of workers everywhere.”

In his prepared remarks at the Rose Garden event to honor the Los Angeles Dodgers for winning back-to-back World Series championships , Donald Trump ran through the highlights of the Dodgers’ championship-winning games and then veered off script to praise the real heroes: the team’s owners.

Having done so, Trump then praised the late George Steinbrenner, who bought the New York Yankees in 1973.

“If they manage to repeat this year, they would become the first team to win three in a row since the days of the legendary baseball dynasty, the 1990s New York Yankees. And I was there for a lot of those games with George Steinbrenner. He was a friend of mine, and he was the guy he liked winning. He would do anything to win.”

Trump did not mention that the year after Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, he pled guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in a scheme to make illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and instructing his employees to lie to the FBI and a grand jury in a failed attempt to hide his crime.

In 1989, Ronald Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner for his crimes.

Donald Trump has taken the stage and started speaking at an event to honor the Los Angeles Dodgers. Before mentioning the team, the president boasts about what he calls his improvements to the White House, including paving over the Rose Garden lawn and adding letters to the outside of the building, reading “The Rose Garden,” and creating what he calls the “Presidential Walk of Fame”, which features insults to his predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden apparently penned by Trump himself.

“You see the right up there,” Trump said pointing the words “The Rose Garden” in brass letters on the wall of the West Colonnade of the White House

“I had them put that up, looks very nice,” Trump said. “Do you think Biden would do that? I don’t think so. I don’t think Biden would do it.”

“And we created the Presidential Walk of Fame,” he went on. “That wall for 150 years had absolutely nothing on it. And it always used to amaze me. I said, ‘What are we going to put on that wall now?’”

“We did from Washington to Trump and people love it,” Trump said. “And they read, they study the plaques. And generally speaking, I was very nice to the people up there. A couple of them probably not as nice as I could have been.”

The Los Angeles Dodgers, or most of them, have arrived at the White House to celebrate their World Series victory with Donald Trump. The players are arrayed on stage behind a podium, waiting for Trump.

As the LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano notes, the only two players who announced they’re skipping the visit to the Trump White House are Mookie Betts and Kiké Hernández.

“The latter, a native of Puerto Rico, endeared himself to the Dodger faithful last year during the height of the immigration raids with an Instagram post that read, ‘I cannot tolerate watching our community continue to be violated, attacked, abused and separated. ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and their human rights,’” Arellano writes.

This year, Hernández told the LA Times he’s not going so he can focus on a rehabilitation stint. “I’d rather take a day off than do team activities,” he told the paper.

“Nice way to rhetorically strike out, Kiké,” Arellano commented.

The Rose Garden lawn was paved over by Trump to make a patio more closely resembling that at his Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago.