Trump visits Beijing after Supreme Court curbs tariff regime

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping walk as they leave a bilateral meeting at Gimhae International Airport, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30. japantimes.co.jp

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Trump to make three-day visit to China next month, White House says aljazeera.com

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US President Donald Trump will travel to Beijing from March 31 to April 2 for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to a White House official cited by Reuters via the Japan Times and by Al Jazeera. The timing is the point: the trip was confirmed just as the US Supreme Court struck down large parts of Trump’s sweeping tariff regime—tariffs that have doubled as foreign policy, domestic industrial policy, and campaign prop.

For months, Trump’s trade posture has been executive improvisation—tariffs announced, “paused,” expanded, narrowed, and repackaged as leverage. Now the judiciary has reminded the White House that Congress wrote the tariff laws, and presidents don’t get unlimited authority to rewire the price system by press release. That legal constraint is not merely a domestic constitutional footnote; it becomes a bargaining chip for Beijing.

The Beijing meeting is expected to focus on extending a trade truce that prevented further tariff escalation between the world’s two largest economies, Reuters reports. But the Supreme Court decision changes the negotiating geometry. If Trump can no longer credibly threaten broad new duties without running into legal barriers, China can treat US tariff threats as contingent—subject to litigation, injunctions, and reversal. America’s internal rule-of-law machinery becomes part of China’s negotiating toolkit.

This is the paradox of “tough” trade policy in a constitutional system: the more tariffs are used as a personal instrument of executive power, the more vulnerable they become to courts and statutory limits. China, an authoritarian state that can align bureaucracy, courts, and propaganda around a single line, gets to watch Washington argue with itself in public. US firms get to price supply chains against a moving target; Chinese officials get to wait for the next ruling.

The visit also underscores how trade policy has migrated from technocratic rulemaking into leader-to-leader theater. Instead of predictable schedules, published regulations, and transparent criteria, the market receives optics: a summit, a handshake, and a “deal” that may or may not survive judicial review. For businesses, “certainty” is replaced with a photo opportunity.

There is a lesson here, and it is not that courts should run trade. It is that tariffs—taxes by another name—invite political opportunism, and opportunism invites institutional conflict. When a state tries to micromanage cross-border exchange, it doesn’t abolish uncertainty; it nationalizes it.

Trump will land in Beijing to negotiate a truce he can no longer fully enforce on his own authority. Xi will host a counterpart whose strongest weapon has been partially confiscated by his own system. The market will be asked, once again, to applaud “stability” delivered by the same machinery that created the instability in the first place.