MAGA Tariffs, Higher Receipts — Who Wins?

President Trump’s tariff agenda survived a Supreme Court defeat and is now expanding again, even as new government data show American businesses and shoppers are footing most of the bill.

Quick Take

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency-powers tariffs, ruling the law never gave him that authority.
The administration quickly replaced them using a different law, hitting Canada, the European Union, and nearly 60 other countries.
Congress is now debating a bill that would hand Trump even bigger tariff powers against Russia.
Federal Reserve and independent research say American consumers and companies are paying the bulk of the tariff costs.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Emergency Tariffs, Administration Pivots

Trump built his 2025 tariff push on a bold claim: the United States needed to “rebalance global trade flows” by taxing nearly all imports, starting with a 10 percent across-the-board duty. He used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, to justify it. The Supreme Court disagreed. Justices ruled tariff power is “very clearly a branch of the taxing power,” one Congress never handed over through that law.

The White House did not back down. Officials rolled out replacement tariffs under a different statute, Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, applying the new duties to goods from Canada, the European Union, and nearly 60 other trading partners. Canadian exports that follow the rules under the North American trade deal stay exempt, but the rest of the rate and scope barely changed from what the court just tossed out.

Congress Debates Giving Trump Even More Power

That Section 122 authority comes with limits Congress can enforce. It caps tariffs at 15 percent and requires lawmakers to approve any extension past 150 days, a rule that could force Republicans into tough votes during election season. Yet at the same time, a separate sanctions bill moving through Congress would give Trump sweeping new tariff powers on Russia and its trading partners, including duties as high as 500 percent on Russian goods.

Taxpayer watchdogs are split on that trade-off. The National Taxpayers Union urged senators to reject the bill, warning it would “cede additional Article I, Section 8 taxing authority to the executive branch”. It’s a real conservative tension: distrust of unchecked executive power on one side, support for squeezing Russia and rebalancing trade on the other. Lawmakers on the right are not united on which principle wins.

Who’s Actually Paying the Tariff Bill

Trump has repeatedly said foreign exporters absorb tariff costs. The data tells a different story. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York study found that roughly 90 percent of the cost from tariffs on goods from Mexico, China, Canada, and the European Union landed on American companies and shoppers, not foreign sellers. Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy found an even higher number, putting the American share at 96 percent of the total tariff burden.

Retailers have already responded. Companies including Walmart, Best Buy, and Macy’s raised prices on certain items to cover higher import costs rather than absorb them quietly. That’s the honest trade-off behind “America First” tariffs: they can pressure foreign governments and rebuild leverage, but the near-term price often shows up on a receipt in Peoria, not in Beijing or Berlin.

Summary

Today, @realDonaldTrump signed a Proclamation imposing tariffs on drones and drone components on national security grounds. The structure is tiered as follows:

a 100% tariff on larger or more sensitive drones (over 25kg or with thermal imaging) and their docking… pic.twitter.com/2RtcKOYY9c

— Bill Hughes (@BillHughesDC) August 14, 2026

What This Means Going Forward

None of this means the tariff strategy is failing on its own terms. Trump’s team argues these are long-term structural fixes for decades of one-sided trade deals, not a quick fix for grocery bills. Congress has quietly handed presidents growing tariff authority since the 1930s, and lawmakers from both parties, including sponsors of the bipartisan Trade Review Act, are now trying to claw some of that power back. That fight over who controls trade policy, not just this one tariff order, is the real story still playing out in Washington.

For conservative voters, the bottom line is mixed but clear. Trump is using every legal tool available to press foreign trade partners, and the courts have already forced one correction. Whether tariffs deliver lasting wins for American workers, or just higher prices in the short run, will depend on how Congress and the White House settle this power struggle in the months ahead.