When President Donald Trump issued executive orders in 2018 that called for new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the official justification for the policy was, somehow, national security. Of course, no one really believed that. Jim Mattis, Trump's defense secretary at the time the tariffs were imposed, said the Pentagon didn't need tariffs on imported metal to protect the country. "I scratch my head a little bit about the rationality of a presidential action" based on national security that even the Pentagon disputes, wrote a federal judge who reviewed the tariffs as part of a lawsuit brought by steel importers. Even Trump himself made no secret of the fact that the tariffs were purely good, old-fashioned economic protectionism cosplaying as a national security concern. "If you don't have steel, you don't have a country," he memorably—and nonsensically, since there are many countries that don't make their own supplies of steel—tweeted in 2018.
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