Trump defends tariffs ahead of looming midterms, says they have made the US ‘a fortune’

The president is selling tariffs the way a salesman sells a car he cannot quite name. On Fox & Friends, he claimed the duties have made the United States "a fortune," rescued General Motors, and lured Toyota out of Mexico with a $12 billion domestic plant announcement. The pitch is calibrated for a midterm electorate that has heard the word "tariff" more often than it has seen the resulting price tag.

The machinery behind the rhetoric is procedural, not magical. The Supreme Court struck down the original "reciprocal" tariffs in February, forcing the administration to pivot. A temporary 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 expires at 12:01 a.m. Friday. At that exact moment, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative activates a new round of duties under Section 301 of the same statute, hitting 60 trading partners at 10% or 12.5%. Canada, Mexico, India, and the United Kingdom sit at the lower rate. Taiwan and the European Union absorb the higher one. The legal scaffolding is more cumbersome, as the president conceded, but the economic effect is the same: a tax on imports, paid initially by importers and eventually by consumers.

The administration is also walking away from the trilateral framework that defined North American trade for the past generation. The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement will not be renewed. Instead, the White House prefers bilateral deals, on the theory that Mexico and Canada need the United States more than the reverse. That is a negotiating posture, not a negotiating outcome. The leverage is real, but so is the dependence of U.S. manufacturers on integrated supply chains that cross those borders daily.

For the labor market, the signal is mixed. The president cites auto plants and chip fabs in Arizona as proof that tariffs are repatriating manufacturing. Capital expenditure announcements are not the same as hiring. A fab breaking ground in 2026 does not translate into a payroll surge until 2028 or 2029, and only if the project survives its permitting and construction phases. The compensation story is even murkier: tariffs raise input costs for the very industries the policy claims to protect, which historically pressures wages at the bottom of the manufacturing ladder even when headline employment holds.

The political timing is the cleanest part of the picture. Midterms are approaching, and the president is framing tariffs as both an economic engine and a peace-through-strength tool, claiming the threat of duties halted conflicts from India-Pakistan to unnamed others. Whether voters accept that narrative depends on what they pay at the pump, the grocery aisle, and the auto lot between now and November. The administration is betting that the "fortune" arrives before the bill does.