Donald Trump’s much-loved tariffs, or at least most of them, have been deemed illegal by a US appeals court. What happens next?

The first thing that will happen is that the Trump administration will appeal against that judgment to the US Supreme Court where, with six of the nine judges appointed by Republicans and three of the six by Trump himself, the government will hope for a ruling that would allow Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs to remain in place.

The trade war is a mess of Donald Trump’s own making.Credit: Getty Images

For the moment, they remain until at least October 14, with the appeals court giving the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court were to uphold the US Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit’s majority (7-4) decision, there’d be even more chaos and uncertainty than Trump’s trade wars have already generated as businesses, and countries tried to work their way through a maze of questions relating to how they should respond and what Trump might do next.

It’s not a surprise that the appeals court ruled against the reciprocal tariffs, which Trump had imposed on countries that have a significant trade surplus with America, and against the legality of the baseline 10 per cent rate on everyone else. The reciprocal tariffs range from about 15 per cent to the 50 per cent rate imposed on India and Brazil.

Trump, citing a national economic emergency, used the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as his authority to impose the tariffs, along with those he’d applied in February to imports from Canada and Mexico because of their claimed role in fentanyl imports.

The emergency? Trade deficits that the US has experienced for the past half-century that relate to an imbalance in US savings and investment rather than the unfair trade practices that Trump has used to justify the tariffs. There was no trade deficit-related national economic emergency........

© Brisbane Times