Evidence is growing that the decent U.S. economic picture this spring was mostly a mirage. Employment has close to flatlined over the past three months, with large downward revisions for May and June. (This is what happens when you defund government data collection: The initial numbers are inaccurate and the revisions are larger. Errors are likely to increase given that on Friday, President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in retaliation for the bad figures.) Labor force participation is down and the only real job growth is coming from health care and related services, precisely the industries that were savaged with at least $1 trillion in cuts in the Republican mega-bill. The economy is converging toward stagflation, with higher inflation and higher unemployment.

Paul Krugman argues that the data finally reflected the significant tariff uncertainty among businesses. Since April, no company has had any idea what their long-run costs of production would be; this has chilled investment and therefore hiring. There was a discrepancy between soft survey data, which confirmed this investment freeze, and the hard data, which didn’t. But the hard data has caught up.

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So there was a stagnation. But now we have more certainty … maybe. The day before Trump’s August 1 deadline for tariff deals, he released a new tariff schedule set to go into effect this Thursday. The schedule reflects a baseline tariff rate of 15 percent, with some add-ons for countries like India and Canada and Brazil. There’s a possibility that businesses now know what they’re facing, and can adjust.

But the idea that all these deals set the new rules of the road in stone doesn’t tell the whole story. Beneath the surface are more carve-outs, exclusions, and special gifts for the industries with enough well-placed lobbyists to obtain them. “This is all just a con,” said Melinda St. Louis of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “[Trump] successfully used the real anger that people have about the status quo free-trade regime to claim he was upending things, when in fact we are seeing him double down on this corporate-rigged trade model.”

Alongside this, Trump has a pathological need to make more threats to demand more tribute and announce more “wins.” So the negotiations never really end, and the certainty never really sets in. That’s damaging not only to the global economy but to the credibility of the country. Trump perceives the leverage of the U.S. market more highly than the countries he’s trying to shake down. In the long run, they could just bolt, and that’s always been the biggest danger from the tariff mania.

IN APRIL, I WROTE A STORY saying that the better way to look at these tariffs was more like sanctions, imposed worldwide to force concessions out of foreign countries and companies, while having little to do with America’s economic needs or the ability to expand domestic manufacturing. That story holds up. Trump put out big tariff numbers with the intent that countries would come running to him, offering goodies to get those numbers down. As I wrote, it’s “a funhouse-mirror version of the neoliberal era: using trade as a bargaining chip to win other policies.”

But what do those concessions really amount to? Some of them are just fake. The claims of increased “investment” from the EU and Japan are just loans and loan guarantees that were already scheduled to happen. The EU “promise” of $750 billion in energy purchases from the U.S., mostly in the form of liquefied natural gas, is literally impossible given the current gas infrastructure.

Other deals are fake in different ways, because they obscure the exclusions various businesses have won. The sanctions-like trade penalties on Brazil, explicitly because of how their judiciary is handling the foiled coup by Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, sound bad until you realize that nearly half of all Brazilian exports to the U.S. are exempted from the 50 percent tariff rate. That includes airplanes and airplane parts, where aviation giant Embraer won the exemption, and fresh orange juice, a major import where the levy would hurt our supply of sweet treats (90 percent of orange juice in the U.S. comes from Brazil). The fact that Brazil doesn’t really rely on the U.S. for its export economy means that Lula could be defiant and reap rewards politically, while business lobbying would soften the blow.

Trump has a pathological need to make more threats to demand more tribute and announce more “wins.”

About $1 trillion in imports are exempt from the tariffs. Even the tariffs on Canada and Mexico (the Mexican negotiation is on hold for 90 days) aren’t that real, because there are zero tariffs on goods compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. One reason the stock market took these tariff threats in stride over the past few months is that they never look the same in fine print.

Another example: When Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on copper, the world braced for higher prices. But when the actual tariffs came out, the tariffs were only on copper products and not the raw materials. The copper market literally crashed on this news, and domestic manufacturers took the win.

That dynamic hasn’t been true universally. The deals with Japan and the EU lower the tariff for finished autos to 15 percent. But domestic producers must get steel and auto parts to make their cars, and those are tariffed at a higher rate. Ford in particular has already felt the impact. If you wanted to destroy domestic auto manufacturing, this is precisely what you would do.

There are also corporate lobbyists for American companies as well as Brazilian airplane and orange juice companies, and as I wrote recently, Trump has heard their cries for help and used these trade deals to win perks for them. Big Tech in particular has been a big winner, from the slashing of digital services taxes in Canada and elsewhere, to the lifting of technology export controls to China.

IT IS CERTAINLY DANGEROUS that Trump is basing tariffs on policies like recognition of the state of Palestine, or like in the case of Brazil, their internal legal rulings. But what’s more dangerous, and more of a throwback to the past, is that trade is just a cover for corporate-driven demands on the rest of the world.

It’s arguably worse than the old days, St. Louis says. “What’s unprecedented is how secretive these negotiations have been,” she noted. “There’s no oversight, no transparency, it’s not even clear who’s leading within the USG on a lot of these things. That provides enormous opportunity for pushing sweetheart deals for [Trump’s] billionaire buddies, for himself and his family.”

The corruption potential is there, but the larger point is that none of this is being done for any logical economic purpose. Tomorrow, trade data for the first half of 2025 will be released, and according to Lori Wallach of Rethink Trade, it will show a larger U.S. trade deficit compared to the first six months of last year. Manufacturing jobs are way down, manufacturing purchases are down, manufacturing construction spending is down—essentially everything involving manufacturing is down, when the alleged impetus for these tariffs is to revive manufacturing.

“The data show President Trump not only has failed to deliver on his promises to cut the trade deficit and revitalize American manufacturing but that the situation has worsened in his first six months,” Wallach said in a statement. “So far, Trump’s trade deals seem to prioritize the demands of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the other usual beneficiaries of decades of failed U.S. trade policy instead of fixing the root causes of our huge trade deficit.”

The fact that Trump is boasting about how much revenue is coming in from tariffs is a tell, St. Louis said. “If a tariff is working you shouldn’t be raising any money. The point is to redirect market behavior.”

Meanwhile, all of these tariffs might get thrown out. A D.C. appeals court didn’t like what it was hearing last week in a case over whether Trump has the authority to use emergency statutes for blanket tariffs. I’ve been told that the 15 percent baseline is being used because the administration can shift to Section 122 of the Trade Act, which allows 15 percent tariffs to deal with “balance-of-payment” deficits for 150 days. That creates a bridge to use tariff processes that take longer. So the legal case isn’t exactly a burden, but the current situation creates … uncertainty.

So far, corporate America has absorbed most of the tariffs, and outside of some select areas prices haven’t moved up. This reprieve had Americans thinking better about the economy. But businesses are warning that they’re at the breaking point and will soon pass costs on to customers.

When Trump blinked after the initial April tariff announcement, Wall Street stopped its nosedive. Since then, everything Trump has done has been in service to investors, as global bullies for U.S. capital. Higher tariffs will hurt a bit, but they just got corporate tax breaks and a free hand on mergers and acquisitions to soften the blow. Plus, they can negotiate to get more and more products excluded from the tariff menu.

I haven’t wavered from my belief that this is kleptocracy in action. There’s a fake conversation that masks what’s actually taking place. As St. Louis concludes, “The real goal is authoritarian power grab.” The problem for this strategy as time passes is that U.S. influence is waning. When the mafia boss loses the ability to intimidate, he loses his business. That’s the fear for the U.S.; if countries just find other trading partners in Europe and China, the bottom can drop out of this protection-money scheme really quickly.