Et tu, Donald? Trump takes on the world, one mailbox at a time

Julius Caesar would have understood the Latin term “de minimis”. Donald Trump – not so much.

The US president has, again, sought to bend the world to his viewpoint. This time, he’s doing it via American mailboxes by ditching the way the world deals with low-value goods sent through the post.

Officially, Trump’s executive order “suspending duty-free de minimis treatment for all countries” started operation on August 29.

De minimis means trifling or little things. It usually forms part of the term “de minimis non curat lex”, which, for non-Latin speakers, roughly means the law doesn’t get mixed up with small problems.

For almost a century, in American law, that has been the approach taken to small-value packages sent through the mail. Now, it means not imposing tariffs on packages containing goods worth less than $US800. That ends on Friday.

The argument for doing this is simple. The value of these goods is so small, that the cost of the system needed to capture the tariff is actually greater than the tariff itself.

But Trump, who needs tariff revenue to offset the cost of his Big Beautiful Bill, has thumbed his nose at this long-standing problem while arguing that it will be the overseas sender paying the tariff rather than the American getting their parcel from the UPS.

This has been Trump’s argument all along. American consumers won’t pay for his tariffs. But that’s already clearly wrong.

That’s little help to the network of government-run post offices across the world that only started to get details about the introduction of tariffs on packages under the $US800 mark on August 15.

Almost none of them have the systems in place to ensure they don’t end up paying the tariff on tens of millions of goods that pass through their hands on the way to American consumers.

So that is why every post system, including Australia’s, has suspended business package movements to the US.

This is how German postal giants, Deutsche Post and DHL Parcel Germany, explained the problems they face.

“Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the US Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” it said in a statement.

Put it this way. Australia Post, for instance, is not going to absorb $US80 – the flat fee Australian mail caught by the tariff – on every package it sends to the US. It is in talks with a US company that will set up the system that will extract the tariff from the buyer in America (with a clip on the way to that US company that makes this all happen).

If you wanted to find a way to gum up the global trading system and inconvenience millions of Americans, Donald Trump has found a new one.

Ultimately, this will be borne by the resident in suburban Boise who buy some togs from Billabong or a pair of RM Williams boots.

A more serious threat was delivered by Trump against every country that deigns to even think about rules that may impose a tax or levy on America’s tech companies. The Albanese government’s News Bargaining Code is clearly in the frame as the president seeks to protect his tech bros.

In the past week, Trump’s administration has taken a 10 per cent share of chipmaker Intel, while chip giants Nvidia and ADM have said they’ll pay the US government 15 per cent of the revenues they earn in return for an export licence to China.

Caesar would recognise this as a tributum. Today, we’re more likely to call it crony capitalism.

Just minutes after announcing his tech tariff protection racket, the president said he would be removing Lisa Cook from the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, alleging she had made false statements on mortgage agreements.

Despite no evidence, except the untested claims of Bill Pulte, who is the MAGA-embracing head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Trump moved on Cook, who was appointed by Joe Biden to the Reserve for a term that does not end until 2038.

There are huge constitutional questions over whether Trump can even sack a member of the Fed board.

Cook, the first black woman appointed to the Fed, says she won’t be standing down, paving the way for a stand-off between Cook and Trump on September 16 when the Fed board next meets.

Financial markets immediately reacted to Trump’s move against Cook by pushing down the value of the American dollar as concerns grow that Trump’s endgame is to have a central bank willing to carry out his will, no matter the potential economic damage.

There’s nothing de minimis about that.

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