When the Supreme Court killed his favorite tariffs in February, President Donald Trump rolled out temporary import taxes to replace them. But those stopgap levies expire in less than three months. Now the administration is scrambling to put more durable tariffs in place to keep revenue flowing into the U.S. Treasury and to shore up the president's protectionist wall around the American economy. Starting this week, the government will begin hearings in two investigations — one on countries that lag in enforcing bans on forced labor, another on overproduction — that will likely lead to a new round of U.S. tariffs.
The Iran war has stalled the world's economic momentum this year, likely pushing growth lower compared to 2025, the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday. The IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth to 3.1% in 2026 from the 3.3% it had forecast back in January. The expected growth would mark a deceleration from a 3.4% expansion in 2025. Citing higher energy prices caused by the war, the IMF marked up its expectation for global inflation this year to 4.4% from 4.1% in 2025 and from the 3.8% it had forecast for this year in January.
In President Donald Trump's idealized framing, the United States was at its zenith in the 1890s. The Republican has said repeatedly, "We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country." Trump points to decades after the Civil War, when the federal government ran frequent budget surpluses. Tariffs were then the government's main source of revenue and were high. But economists and historians say most of the era's growth was due to factors like the country's booming population, advances in technology and expansion of territory, which gave it new natural resources to exploit. They also say tariffs didn't play as large a role as Trump suggests.
