Ramstad: Why Minnesota businesses remain trapped in tariff uncertainty

While President Donald Trump isn’t known to be a patient person, he was tired of waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of his use of an emergency-powers act to impose tariffs on U.S. imports.

“I’ve been waiting forever. Forever,” Trump told an audience in Georgia last Thursday, Feb. 19.

The next day, the court ruled 6-3 it wasn’t legal for Trump to unilaterally invoke a 1977 emergency-powers law in pursuit of tariffs. Trump called the justices who ruled against him “fools and lap dogs” and said they were “swayed by foreign interests.”

Trump’s tariffs lost in the court of public opinion long before they did in the Supreme Court.

A survey by Pew Research this month found 60% of Americans disapprove of the substantial increases in tariffs, including 39% who strongly disapprove. One poll by ABC News, the Washington Post and Ipsos late last week found a 64% disapproval rate.

One of the great contradictions about Trump is that he plainly cares a lot about public opinion, but he won’t bend on his two main economic policies — sharply reducing immigration and raising tariffs — despite their unpopular and harmful effects on the economy.

After the Supreme Court ruling went against him, Trump said he would impose a 10% tariff on all U.S. imports under a different law that gives him 150 days until Congress must decide on whether to extend the tariff. He lifted the rate to 15% on Saturday.

Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers on goods that arrive at U.S. ports. Trump continues to say they are paid by exporting countries. But while tariffs may lead Americans to buy fewer goods from elsewhere, and thus hurt other countries, the fees are paid at the border by the firms that import the goods. They pass some or all of that cost to consumers.

Neither Trump’s immigration crackdown nor his tariffs are helping Minnesota’s economy — or the nation’s. Public support was never high for tariffs, and it has fallen sharply on immigration in recent months, partly because of the excesses of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.

“Tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us,” Trump said shortly after he was inaugurated in January 2025.

Instead, imports rose and the trade deficit for U.S. goods set a record in 2025.

Other countries scaled back purchases of U.S. goods in response to Trump’s tariffs. Strikingly, most held back on imposing tariffs on American goods in recognition they would just be taxing their own companies and people.

For now, we are stuck with the downside of tariffs. State data lags, but Minnesota saw export declines throughout the first nine months of last year. In the third quarter of 2025, the state experienced a 14% decline in goods exports. Shipments to the state’s biggest trading partner, Canada, were down 32%.

Fourth-quarter numbers, due in a couple of months, will show more clearly how Minnesota’s harvest was affected.

The upside to tariffs, in the eyes of the president, is the power it gives him to influence businesses and other countries and the revenue it yields to the federal government as a counterweight to tax cuts and increased spending Trump and Republicans in Congress shaped over the past year.

Trump has mentioned at times that he would use some of the revenue from tariffs to create refunds, or rebates, to taxpayers. Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture crafted an aid program to farmers hurt by last year’s downturn in exports, though farm groups have criticized it as unequal to losses their members experienced.

At Farmfest near Morgan, Minn., in August 2023, an official from the USDA’s trade office noted that aid payments to farmers fell in 2022 by $13 billion because there was no longer a need to compensate them for the trade war that started in Trump’s first term.