President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements no longer cause the market gyrations that they did in 2025. But their sticker shock for American consumers is becoming increasingly clear – just as economic sentiment is souring ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections.

Many business groups had hoped that the tariff wars would end in February, when the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s emergency tariffs. They got a rude awakening five months later, however, when Trump announced a raft of new import taxes to replace the levies that were struck down.

Covering nearly all U.S. imports, the advantage of these tariffs in the Trump administration’s view is that they’re more firmly based on existing U.S. trade law, beyond the reach of the Supreme Court’s review. And Trump has said he envisions enacting many more of these so-called trade law tariffs.

As a trade economist who has been following the tariff wars, I believe that the longer these import taxes are in place, the more the consumers will bear their burden. The 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down, as well as other levies Trump announced after the February ruling, turned out to be temporary. But the bulk of the new levies are designed to be permanent.

That means that for consumers, the total cost burden is likely to increase even if the tariff rates don’t change – because the new tariffs will be stacked on older ones.

On one level, Trump’s tariff fixation is a mystery. Tariffs continue to be unpopular, and it’s unclear why Trump would double down on them before midterm elections when his approval ratings, including on the........

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