When President Donald Trump ordered a whopping 39 percent tariff on all imports from Switzerland earlier this year, he did so, of course, by claiming there was a national emergency.
Officially, Trump's executive order pointed to "large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits" that, the president claims, "constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States." Because this was part of Trump's push for what he called "reciprocal" tariffs, the executive order also pointed toward "foreign trading partners' disparate tariff rates" that were supposedly to blame for the trade imbalance.
