The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump Gets Introduced to Section 301 || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

The Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs were illegal, forcing the administration to do things...the right way. Welcome to Section 301 investigations. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4lCaOCU

Okay, Peter Zine here coming to you from Tulsa. It's way too windy outside to record there, so we're going to do it right here by the coffee machine, which is keeping me alive today. All right, today we're going to talk about the next step of Donald Trump's trade policy, as I'm sure you guys all knew. The Supreme Court recently ruled six, three that Trump's tariffs, which he labeled as an emergency situation, putting tariffs on literally every country in the world, were a gross abuse of the law that he cited, that it was illegal and unconstitutional for him to do so that tariffs are the province of the Congress unless the Congress has expressly granted authority to the executive. Now, there are laws where that has happened, and that is what brings us to

today. There's something called 301 terrorists where the president can say, hey, this country is not being fair. It's violating American trade laws and any agreements that we have. Therefore, we will investigate this violation. We will open up the situation to public comment, so any consumers or American businesses can testify, we'll put it all on record, we will pull all the information together, we will make a finding, and then we will use that as amote in negotiations with the country on the other side, and if those negotiations do not go the way that we like, we will then impose some sort of punitive system that might include tariffs. That's just one of many options. It's very adult, it's very constitutional. It follows the letter of the law

now that he has been unable to convince the courts that what he was doing before was legal. It also takes time. There are two problems that Donald Trump is going to face with the 301 approach. The first one is that it can't be arbitrary. So something that Trump did over and over and over again last year is whatever happened in the international system that annoyed him, he threw a tariff on it. You're trading with a country I don't like. Tariff.

I don't like you personally. Tariff. You say something about the military. I don't like. Tariff. You seem to really like steal. Tariff. It didn't matter what it was.

He would throw a tariff on anything, and that has now been proven, shockingly so, to be unconstitutional, not what Congress intended. The problem, however, with this new approach, is that there is a process, and you have to start it, and there's negotiations, and there's a comment period, and you actually have to build your case. Now, I have no doubt that at the end of the day the Trump administration will just say, oh, yeah, of course, we've now proven our case, and we take it. But that takes months.

Second problem, all of this, all of it, every little bit of it, is handled out by the U.S. Trade Representative Office. Now, the U.S.T.R. run by a guy by the name of Jameson Greer, who knows what he's doing. He was trained by one of the best in the industry, Bob Lighthizer. The problem with U.S.T.R. is it can only do so many things at a time. And under Joe Biden, who did not push a single free trade deal, it was kind of hollowed out of its staff. And then when Trump came in and Doge and Elon Musk and all that, it lost some more of its staff.

And that has never been rebuilt. So Greer and the USTR's office in general simply doesn't have the capacity to really do more than one of these 301 investigations at a time. And Trump has already initiated 301 investigations on Canada, Japan, Korea, the European Union, Mexico and of course China. And I'm sure there's going to be many, many, many, many more. And because this is a process and you have to document and get common. comments and make findings, you can't just wave a pen and make it happen. The USTR simply doesn't have the staffing that's necessary to do that. And then third, on top of all of that, USTR is responsible for negotiating or renegotiating every other trade deal. Remember that when this all

started in April of last year, Tariff Day, Liberation Day, based on your politics, we put tariffs on every country on the planet. And Trump feels that that is necessary for every country on the planet. And now we're doing 301s for all the big ones and probably many of the small ones in the weeks and months to come. But that ignores what else is going on because the U.S. does have trade deals separate from all this 301 stuff. So for example, over the weekend, the United States, Canada, and Mexico formally started the process of negotiating for what NAFTA is supposed to look like a year to five years from now. That until this moment was the U.S.T.R. primary job because Mexico and Canada are the United States's top and second largest trading

partners. And whatever the future of American manufacturing happens to look like, or American agriculture, American energy, or American population workforce, it's going to be bound up and with whatever happens with NAFTA. But now the USTR has to do at least a dozen 301s, probably several 301 negotiations and investigations at the same time. Bottom line, this is like the hard frustrating way to do it, yes, but it should have started this way a year ago. The only alternative would have been to go to Congress and say that I need some sort of trade negotiation authority. Now, it is something that presidents in the past used to do. You'd have to go back to George W. Bush for the last time this was done. It was called Trade Acceleration or Trade Promotion Authority,

where Congress grants the president the ability to do negotiations outside of the normal back and fourth of the legalities. If you want to do that, you have to get congressional approval. The thing is, Trump really hates going to Congress because then he actually has to say out loud what he wants to do and put it up for a vote yay or nay. That was hard enough last year when he had a meaningful majority in the House and the Senate. But since then, Donald Trump has had a hard time staffing his government with people from the private sector because there aren't a lot of them that believe what he believes. And so he's had to reach into his ideological allies, people who owe their political careers to him in Congress. And in doing so, has whittled down the majority that he has in the House and the

Senate to work with. And there are enough remaining trade-based, business-based Republicans in the party that is unclear that he would get the sort of support that he would need in order to make the changes he wants to make. So that kind of leaves us in this stall where Trump is kind of forced to let the system be the system, but he's unwilling to challenge the system legally. And so far in this administration, where that has ended, has been with a Supreme Court case that tells him the thing that he never wants to hear. No.