ADVERTISEMENTUS President Donald Trump’s tariff regime has already faced one lawsuit, and further legal challenges are reportedly being prepared by business leaders and conservative lawyers amid growing opposition from influential right-wing figures.
New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a conservative non-profit legal group based in the US, filed a lawsuit last week on behalf of a stationary company based in Florida after Trump announced a 20% import levy from China as part of his sweeping tariffs.
The NCLA said the tariff imposed on China is “harmful” as the stationary company, Simplified, depends on materials imported from China that are not available in the US.
“President Trump imposed the tariff by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA),” the NCLA said in a statement. “However, this statute authorises specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats. It does not authorise the President to impose tariffs.”
The lawsuit argues that there is no link between the fentanyl epidemic, which Trump has used to justify invoking the IEEPA, and the tariffs.
“In its nearly 50-year history, no other president – including President Trump in his first term – has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs,” the NCLA statement added.
Republican rumblings?
NCLA is backed by conservative funding from billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and legal activist Leonard Leo. The pair invested millions of dollars into the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025, which aimed to prepare the foundations for a second Trump presidency, according to a report by NBC News last year.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that the world’s 10 richest people lost billions of dollars after Trump’s tariffs announcements sent the global stock market into freefall.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk lost over $100 billion (€92bn), and both Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost at least $20 billion (€18bn) each.
Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at Trump’s behest, has recently signalled that he disagrees with some of the US president’s policies including limiting trade relations with the EU. Trump recently said Musk’s time at DOGE would be ending soon and that he would return to running his own companies.
Rachel Tausendfreund, a senior researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told Euronews that “there is significant rumbling on the tariff issue among a large and important chunk of Republican voters and especially in the donor class”.
“If Trump loses popularity, Republicans in Congress might finally start standing up to him,” she added.
