President Donald Trump has framed the U.S. trade deficit as a “national emergency” and a threat to Americans’ “way of life” throughout his second term. It was why he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in April 2025 to announce “Liberation Day” and reciprocal tariffs around most of the world (the Supreme Court didn’t agree that it was quite the emergency that he claimed).
As Trump scrambles to reassemble his signature policy, resuming his decades-long obsession with trade, some observers argue that he has conflated America’s trade problems with a very different kind of crisis.
