“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” President Trump declared last week when he proclaimed a national emergency and imposed the highest tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. US stock markets lost more than $6 trillion in value and fierce controversies are raging over whether Trump is rescuing or ruining the economy.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump’s penalty tariffs are “the reordering of fair trade.” Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent declared, “For the first time in decades — probably since I was a college student — we’re going to see fair trade.”

Last week, the US Trade Representative (USTR) released its 377-page annual report on Foreign Trade Barriers, exhaustively recapping abuses by each nation cheating America. Luckily for the Trump administration, media fact checkers almost completely ignored the wildly-slanted report.

But one of the most high-profile cases illustrates the absurdity of Trump’s latest fair trade definitions.

USTR stated that most “US exports to Vietnam face tariffs of 15 percent or less.” But in the Rose Garden ceremony, Trump touted a chart stating that Vietnam’s “Tariffs Charged to U.S.A.” was 90 percent. Trump set penalty tariffs at only half the assessed tariff on the US because he wanted to be “kind”; Vietnam’s exports were kindly walloped with a 46 percent tariff. Trump declared that each nation’s tariff was based on “the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers and other forms of cheating.”…….

Basing penalty tariffs on trade flow data is like a federal judge sentencing a criminal based on the weight of the defendant, not on the actual offense he committed. But it doesn’t matter if Trump’s proclamations have zero intellectual or moral credibility. His declaration of an emergency sufficed to vastly increase his arbitrary power over the American economy.

Trump’s decrees vivify how “fair trade” means a moral canonization of pure political arbitrariness. The ultimate basis is that fair trade is whatever politicians say it is—at least until they revise the definition of fairness. Will Trump explain why making foreign trade totally dependent on presidential decrees is a triumph of fairness?