The Man Trying To Make Trump’s Tariffs Go On Forever

WARREN, Mich. — Jamieson Greer is a trade lawyer. He is a well-respected trade lawyer. He was chosen by President Donald Trump to be the country’s top trade lawyer: the U.S. Trade Representative.

He is not a member of a union. He is not a welder. He is not a manufacturer. He is definitely not a salesman. But here he is one cloudy morning on a factory floor in Michigan, in front of an American flag that could hide an elephant, selling the administration’s trade agenda in one of the most important political states in the country with a man hoping to become its next governor. And that man just went soft on the core tenet of Trump’s efforts to reshape global trade.

“We don’t want the tariffs to go on forever,” said Rep. John James (R-Mich.). “We want reciprocal tariffs. We want fair trade.”

Greer stares off at a machine in the distance. He’s heard a similar line from tariff-skittish Republicans before — that the tariffs are a tool, a way to get countries to open markets and expand exports, and then they will come down. But those reassurances contradict his daily reality: His boss does want tariffs to go on forever. And he’s made it Greer’s job to ensure they do.

Trump has never hidden his love of tariffs. But his second term has seen the so-called “Tariff Man” unleashed, with a trade policy defined by a fire-from-the hip approach that’s upended global markets. He immediately set about imposing tariffs on three of the country’s top trading partners — China, Canada and Mexico — and quickly followed with “Liberation Day,” when he imposed duties on goods from nearly every country in the world in the hopes that it would end the alleged global exploitation of American commerce and mark the beginning of a grand resurgence in domestic manufacturing.

He justified those tariffs with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to regulate trade during a national emergency. The trade deficit between the U.S. and other countries, Trump said, constituted such an emergency. But the law had never been used for that purpose and doesn’t explicitly mention tariffs. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t be used that way at all, striking down the cornerstone of Trump’s economic agenda.

Trump was undeterred. He vowed that his administration would find a new legal mechanism with which to impose tariffs. Greer is the one responsible for figuring out how.

“This is still the president’s program. It’s still his policy. It’s something that he had been briefed on many times, and so it’s no surprise to him when I was able to come forward and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do now,’” Greer said in an interview.

Here’s what he’s doing now: In March, he launched investigations into 96 countries over alleged unfair trade practices. Greer hopes to conclude those investigations by the summer, potentially providing the White House with a chance to reimpose tariffs and the flexibility to change the rates if countries do not respond to Trump’s demands.

“It certainly would be on sounder legal footing,” said Greta Peisch, who was general counsel at USTR in the Biden administration. “At least the opportunity would be there to put something in place that would be much more durable than the IEEPA tariffs.”

That opportunity falls directly on Greer, giving him a new task piled on an already heaping plate. When he wasn’t helping draft tariff orders last year, Greer jetted around the world in a blitz to strike trade agreements. By his own math, Greer’s mileage was equivalent to a trip halfway to the moon.

Greer’s travel also took him across the country, where he’s ridden through sprawling assembly lines in a golf cart, taken pictures with workers and had quiet conversations with CEOs and union leaders. In other words, this self-described “trade nerd” used to operating behind the scenes is now playing the role of a politician in an election year. And as his appearance in Michigan shows, that’s bringing him up close and personal with another obstacle to Trump’s goals, one that’s perhaps even more existential than the Supreme Court: American anxiety about high prices.

James isn’t the only Republican candidate trying to soften Trump’s tariff agenda. With the 2026 midterms just six months away, Democrats are hammering Trump over affordability, an issue Trump dismisses as a “line of bullshit,” but that nonetheless remains a top concern for voters.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released last week found that the president’s approval rating has hit an all-time low, with 62 percent of Americans disapproving of his performance. In particular, 76 percent had a negative view of how Trump has handled the cost of living, and Republicans are wary of associating themselves with tariffs that have contributed to rising costs, especially as the Iran War — which the majority of Americans oppose — ratchets up the price of gas.

That means Greer’s job of delivering a durable tariff regime is not just a legal question, but a political one. Whether Trump’s next round of tariffs can withstand antsy Republicans on Capitol Hill, a midterm election hinging on high prices or, potentially, a Democratic administration in 2029, will depend on how voters feel about tariffs.

Which is why a trade lawyer like Greer is on this factory line in Michigan. And presumably why, when the Republican gubernatorial candidate standing next to him cuts against the “forever” tariffs, he keeps his mouth shut.

Greer spent the months leading up to the Supreme Court ruling telling the world that, even if the Supreme Court struck down some of the tariffs, the administration would figure out a way to reimpose them. He was in the room when the president learned of the ruling. And he appeared with the president at a subsequent press conference, when Trump said that tariffs could even end up higher. He turned to Greer to explain how.

“We’re going to keep continuity in the program,” Greer said. “We’re going to keep addressing this so that the trade deficit can keep going down.”

Over the past year, Trump relied on two statutes to impose tariffs. The first is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. It allows the president to impose restrictions on imports in the name of national security. That’s how we got tariffs on products like steel, aluminum, copper, lumber and pharmaceuticals, which the president reasons are necessary for industrial production and public health. The Supreme Court hasn’t been asked to weigh in on the Section 232 power, and those tariffs still stand.

The president used the IEEPA tariffs for everything else, including launching “Liberation Day,” waging a trade war with China and making various economic threats: to get Denmark to hand over Greenland (it did not), to get Brazil to drop a court case against its former president (it did not), to get India to stop buying oil from Russia (it did — for a time).

Greer’s responsibility is to replace that IEEPA power. He plans to do it with a short-term tariff and a long-term tariff. In the short term, he’s applied a 10 percent tariff on nearly every country for 150 days using what’s called Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which is designed to resolve international payments problems. Those tariffs are currently being challenged in court.

In the long term, he’ll rely on Section 301 of the same 1974 law, which, after a process of consulting with businesses and the targeted countries, allows the president to impose tariffs to combat unfair trade practices.

“In many ways, [Section 301] is an instrument that can create a very durable tariff regime, with flexibility,” said Everett Eissenstat, the former deputy director of the National Economic Council in Trump’s first administration. He added that the new approach could define trade relationships with other countries “for many, many years to come.”

Trump used the same law to impose tariffs on China in his first term. Those duties have survived eight years, a court challenge and a Democratic administration.

Trump has exercised enormous economic leverage over other countries. Threats of whopping tariffs stunned key trading partners into submission; only China and Canada retaliated with tariffs of their own. The rest signed onto framework deals accepting tariffs that would have been unfathomable a year before Trump reclaimed the White House in order to avoid something more extreme. Some even threw in gigantic pots of money for good measure.

Many of those deals endured after the Supreme Court’s ruling in part because the decision only affected the IEEPA tariffs, not separate duties the White House imposed on specific industries. Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on automobiles alone were a major factor in driving Japan, Korea and the European Union to the bargaining table.

“Countries have not withdrawn from these agreements,” Greer said. “Some of them are kind of waiting to see how it plays out with Section 301, but I have assurances from everybody we’ve dealt with that they intend to keep the deal if we intend to keep our part of it.”

Did he call those countries after the ruling to keep those deals in place?

“Well, first of all,” Greer said, “most of them called me.”

Greer views himself as a technician, and technicians don’t get the spotlight. During the president’s first term, he worked as the chief of staff for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, whose reputation for winning bipartisan support for trade agreements still shadows Greer on the Hill.

Then there’s the Cabinet. Greer is the soft-spoken wonk among bold-faced billionaires like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who have served as the face of Trump’s economic policy. Greer is the only non-billionaire among them. He doesn’t come from New York City, he didn’t raise millions for Trump’s reelection and he’s the only one of the three whom Trump hasn’t gifted a pair of Florsheim shoes.

“You look at this administration and — this is not criticism at all — but you have some people who are really big business people from New York or other places; you have people who are political superstars who’ve held elected office before,” Greer said. “I’m like a guy who’s a technician. But I understand the politics of trade, I understand the policy of trade, certain legalities of it. I know where all the dead bodies are buried, I know who’s going to yell about what. Most importantly, I know what the president wants.”

Now that the fiery, precedent-shattering approach to tariffs has failed, both at the Supreme Court and, arguably, in the court of public opinion — and as whispers wind through the White House that Lutnick is on the chopping block as a potential fall-man for the state of the economy — Greer’s influence could be growing.

“He’s slowly developing a power-footing for himself,” said a diplomat from a European country, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “He’s not a natural in-the-spotlight kind of guy and probably prefers backroom negotiations on trade policy. But he’s the USTR and needs to be out front.”

Every time he brings back a trade deal, they say, he’s building his reputation with the president. He's secured nine agreements on reciprocal trade so far, deals that trade lawyers say are thorough and gain significant concessions for the U.S.

“The deals that he puts together are durable, comprehensive and, at the end of the day, take over the kind of scheming effort that Commerce does,” said one trade lawyer close to the administration granted anonymity to speak candidly about Greer’s performance. Greer, this person said, is building “momentum” within the White House.

But if trade experts are effusive when it comes to Greer as a professional, many remain skeptical of the task set out before him. Greer needs to satisfy the tariff-hungry instincts of the president, the export market demands of lawmakers and their constituents and, in a world where progress is measured in election cycles, not decades, prove that the drastic measures the administration has taken to reshape the global economy are working.

One senior Republican lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, was taken aback by the fact Greer said he wanted the tariffs to stay put.

“Rarely does somebody say tariffs are doing us a favor,” the lawmaker said. “They might say that the president knows what he’s doing and this is a tactic to get a goal done. But I can’t remember a time in which somebody says, ‘I love these tariffs.’”

Of course, one person who loves tariffs is the president. “Almost every day I’m in the Oval Office,” Greer told a crowd at the Whirlpool factory in Clyde, Ohio. “And almost every day, President Trump says, ‘Do you think the tariffs should be higher, Jamieson?’”

“We’re working on it, sir,” he replies.