The Trump tariffs are on; then they’re postponed for a month. They’re 10%. Or they’re 25%. Or even 40%, maybe. They could be restricted to certain goods, or they could be on everything. Legal challenges abound. An announcement is coming, later this week. Perhaps. One day, the USPS is ceasing delivery of all packages from China; the next, they’re delivering them again. 

Some argue, or hope, that U.S. President Trump is simply using threats of injurious trade penalties in order to win smaller, different concessions from target countries or regions. 

Others see a far more dramatic agenda at play — a degree of economic isolationism, achieved solely via presidential fiat, that’s not been pursued by the U.S. for centuries. 

Trump has said he wants to usher in an American manufacturing renaissance through the introduction of wide-ranging tariffs and tax breaks. His proposed tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, Canada, quite possibly the European Union, the U.K. and others, could have an enormous effect. America imported $3.3 trillion worth of goods in 2024. At a low-ball 10% rate across the board, that’s a potential $330 billion tax on businesses and consumers. The tariff charges could exceed profits for some companies, according to an analyst at PwC. 

Read More: Threatened U.S. Tariffs Could Wipe Out Company Profits: PwC

But while we wait to see which tariffs, if any, actually come into effect, the uncertainty of it all is putting businesses in a bind.

“As a business, you make big investments in factories based on trade agreements,” says Randy Carr, CEO of Florida-based World Emblem, which has 1 million square feet of manufacturing space in Mexico and the U.S., and employs 800+ employees in its Mexico facility in Aguascalientes. “At the end of the day, it’s frustrating because there’s no clarity. Markets don’t like instability. The majority of our clients have cut back CapEx, and that’s difficult.”

Carr says the threatened tariff scenario is causing his company to scramble to figure out how to handle the new rules, should they come into place. “It’s causing me to shift my entire leadership team. Instead of doing what they were tasked to do in terms of annual planning, now it’s all crisis planning. We’re modeling all these different scenarios about how we navigate this.” Carr says he now has to cut back on all growth planning, including capital expenditure and staff expansion. “We’re even contemplating layoffs to pay for this multi-million-dollar tax, which is what this is,” he says.

“What Trump has done is (propose) tariff as a revenue, not to right some wrong,” says Dan Cannistra, an international trade attorney with Crowell & Moring Attorneys. “It’s a shift in how the government collects revenue.” 

Cannistra explains that, up to this point, the vast majority of tariffs implemented by any country have been for the purposes of fairly run-of-the-mill trade remedies — for example, to counter low-priced imports that benefit from illegal subsidies in their origin country, or to punish a country for theft of intellectual property (as Trump did during his first term, against China.) Cannistra says tariffs can also be used for protecting national security, and they have often been deployed that way, in countries where, say, agriculture or steel and aluminum production are considered essential to national security. “That was 90% of the tariffs, if not more, until now,” he says. “And then there’s tariffs as simply a revenue generator. That’s where people start to say: ‘We shouldn’t be doing that.’ That’s where most of the conflict comes in.”

Trump argues that his tariffs are designed to right wrongs, but Cannistra pushes back. “That’s running trade deficits with China, and lost jobs, but those are general economic considerations,” he says.

Certainly, Trump wouldn’t be the first U.S. president to cite national security as empowering him to impose punitive tariffs on trading partners without the approval of Congress. Cannistra says the most notable recent example came from Richard Nixon in August, 1971, during the plunge in the U.S. dollar brought on by the OPEC-led oil crisis. Then, he “closed the gold window,” so that foreign governments could no longer exchange their dollars for gold, and enacted a 10% percent import surcharge on all dutiable imports. The idea was to force other countries to revalue their currencies against the dollar, but the action was reversed four months later, after the international Smithsonian Agreement was reached. 

Before that, in 1917, was the Trading With the Enemy Act, which morphed into the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, which authorizes the president to “regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.”

Those tariffs “weren’t used to the scale or duration of what Trump is doing, but that’s not what necessarily makes the difference,” says Cannistra. “This is just the beginning.” 

Read More: The Trouble With Trump's Tariffs

That might not sit well with U.S.-based businesses operating internationally, such as World Emblem.

CEO Carr says he was surprised when Trump announced sweeping tariffs on trade with Mexico and Canada. “The USMCA was touted as the greatest trade agreement ever made, and it was done by his administration,” he says, referring to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that in 2018 replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement implemented by President Bill Clinton in 1994. “I agree with what’s he’s trying to do with [restricting the flow of] fentanyl, and with leveraging tariffs for national security improvements. I just wish our business and customers and employees weren’t the target of it. And even if we were, it would be more reasonable if it was [introduced at the rate of] 2% per year for 10 years, say, instead of 25% right off the bat.”

The need to react quickly, if and when tariffs on U.S. imports from Mexico actually come into effect, also troubles Carr. “I’ve heard it takes Customs 15 days to ramp up, so I have two weeks to prepare, and we’re two of the largest trading partners in the world. So it’s a pretty big deal,” he says.

Cannistra says he believes Trump is deadly serious when he argues a massive trade deficit  — $1.21 trillion in 2024 — means “America is the world’s sucker,” as his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, said in a February 4 interview with The New York Times.

Watch: A Look at the Trump Trade Agenda

Rather than the IEEPA, or even Nixon’s import surcharge, Cannistra sees closer parallels between what Trump has in mind and one of the first acts George Washington signed into law after America became independent from British rule — the Tariff Act of 1789. That created a uniform tariff on imported goods carried by foreign ships, while also establishing a much smaller tax on goods carried by American-owned ships.

“That is where he is going back to. That’s the historical scale of what he’s trying to do,” says Cannistra. “The magnitude of the unwinding and detachment from the global economy can’t be understated.”

Carr says, whatever happens, he will view it as an opportunity to rise above the competition. “Anybody that’s competing with me that has the same issue, we’ll fare better,” he says. “So the silver lining could be that. We run a significantly better business. Once we’re certain, I’ll throttle forward.”