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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow is Donald Trump\u2019s deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this time. Why are you laughing? (In fact, since saying that yesterday, he\u2019s already chickened out with Mexico, putting the \u201ctaco\u201d in, well, TACO.)<\/p>\n
But the president has already written off hopes of reaching agreements with some allies. Yesterday, Trump announced that he was raising tariffs on many Brazilian goods to 50 percent across the board, as retribution for Brazil\u2019s prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. This morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s decision to recognize a Palestinian state \u201cwill make it very hard\u201d to strike a deal with Canada.<\/p>\n
The president\u2019s perpetual caving can make him seem craven and opportunistic, but you can detect a different impulse in his handling of trade policy too: a warped kind of idealism. When Trump began his political career, he said he would put \u201cAmerica First,\u201d rather than using American power to enforce values overseas. Wars to fight repressive autocrats were foolish ways to burn cash and squander American lives. The promotion of human rights and democracy were soft-headed, bleeding-heart causes. Trump, a man of business, was going to look out for the bottom line without getting tangled up in high-minded crusades. Now that\u2019s exactly what he\u2019s doing: using trade as a way to make grand statements about values\u2014his own, if not America\u2019s.<\/p>\n
This is troubling on legal, moral, and diplomatic levels. The Constitution specifically delegates the power to levy tariffs to Congress, but legislators have delegated some of that capacity to the president. Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows him to impose tariffs in response to an \u201cunusual and extraordinary threat,\u201d on the basis that Congress cannot act quickly enough. This use of the law is, as Conor Friedersdorf and Ilya Somin wrote in The Atlantic in May, absurd. The White House\u2019s months of vacillation on its tariff threats since make the idea of any emergency even less credible.<\/p>\n
Understanding why Trump would be sensitive about Bolsonaro\u2019s prosecution, which stems from Bolsonaro\u2019s attempt to cling to power after losing the 2022 election, is not difficult\u2014the parallels between the two have been often noted\u2014but that doesn\u2019t make it a threat to the United States, much less an \u201cunusual and extraordinary\u201d one. Likewise, Canadian recognition of a Palestinian state is unwelcome news for Trump\u2019s close alliance with Israel, but it poses no obvious security or economic danger to the U.S. A Congress or Supreme Court interested in limiting presidential power could seize on these statements to arrest Trump\u2019s trade war, but these are not the legislators or justices we have.<\/p>\n
Setting aside the legal problems, Trump\u2019s statements about Brazil and Canada represent an abandonment of the realpolitik approach he once promised. Even if Carney were to back down on Palestinian statehood, or Brazil to call off Bolsonaro\u2019s prosecution, the United States wouldn\u2019t see any economic gain. Trump is purely using American economic might to achieve noneconomic goals.<\/p>\n
Previous presidents have frequently used U.S. economic hegemony to further national goals\u2014or, less charitably, interfered in the domestic affairs of other sovereign nations. But no one needs to accept any nihilistic false equivalences. Trump wrote in a July 9 letter to Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva that the case against Bolsonaro was \u201can international disgrace\u201d and (naturally) a \u201cWitch Hunt.\u201d Although the U.S. has taken steps to isolate repressive governments, Trump\u2019s attempts to bail out Bolsonaro are nothing of the sort. The U.S. can\u2019t with a straight face argue that charging Bolsonaro is improper, and it can\u2019t accuse Brazil of convicting him in a kangaroo court, because no trial has yet been held.<\/p>\n
The U.S. government has also long used its power to bully other countries into taking its side in international disputes, but the swipe at Canada is perplexing. The Trump administration remains the most stalwart ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (notwithstanding some recent tensions), and the U.S. government has long withheld recognition of any Palestinian state as leverage in negotiations. Even so, slapping tariffs on Canada for a symbolic decision such as this seems unlikely to dissuade Carney or do anything beyond further stoking nascent Canadian nationalism.<\/p>\n
This is not the only way in which Trump\u2019s blunt wielding of tariffs is likely to backfire on the United States. Consumers in the U.S. will pay higher prices, and overseas, Jerusalem Demsas warned in April, \u201cthe credibility of the nation\u2019s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.\u201d But it\u2019s not just trust with foreign countries that the president has betrayed. It\u2019s the pact he made with voters. Trump promised voters an \u201cAmerica First\u201d approach. Instead, they\u2019re getting a \u201cBolsonaro and Netanyahu First\u201d government.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n About 154,000 federal workers accepted buyouts offered by the Trump administration this year, according to the government\u2019s human-resources arm.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n Remarkable News in Potatoes<\/p>\n By Katherine J. Wu<\/p>\n For decades, evolutionary biologists pointed to such examples to cast hybridization as hapless\u2014\u201crare, very unsuccessful, and not an important evolutionary force,\u201d Sandra Knapp, a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, told me. But recently, researchers have begun to revise that dour view. With the right blend of genetic material, hybrids can sometimes be fertile and spawn species of their own; they can acquire new abilities that help them succeed in ways their parents never could. Which, as Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world\u2019s third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and \u2026 an ancient tomato.<\/p>\n Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Ng Han Guan \/ AP<\/p>\n Take a look. These photos capture moments from the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, where more than 2,500 athletes from over 200 nations competed in events spanning six aquatic sports.<\/p>\n Read. In 2022, Sophia Stewart recommended six books that all music lovers should read.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Tomorrow is Donald Trump\u2019s deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7053,328,430,71,7052],"class_list":{"0":"post-13370","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-idealism","9":"tag-policy","10":"tag-trade","11":"tag-trumps","12":"tag-warped"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Today\u2019s News<\/h5>\n
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Dispatches<\/h5>\n