The Real Squeeze Inside Trump’s Brazil Tariffs
As I described in this post, just hours before a Circuit Court hearing in which Trump will try to defend his use of IEEPA to arbitrarily impose tariffs, he declared the possibility that Jair Bolsonaro will be held accountable for his coup a threat to American democracy.
I should have looked closer at the products that Trump is excluding from the tariffs. They include orange juice.
That’s interesting because less than two weeks ago, Johanna Beverage Company sued Trump for his tariff threat against Brazil.
4. Operating since 1995 and 2007, respectively, Johanna Foods and Johanna Beverage are the leading private label and co-pack juice supplier and producer, supplying juice products for numerous retailers and brands, including Aldi, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Wegman’s, Safeway and Albertsons.
5. Plaintiffs supply nearly 75% of all private label not from concentrate orange juice customers in the United States, as well as two of the largest branded orange juice producers, making our operations a cornerstone of the national orange juice supply chain. Ex. 1, at ¶12.
[snip]
31. The President’s imposition of a 50% (or more) tariff on Brazilian orange juice will cause significant and direct financial harm to Plaintiffs and to American consumers.
32. Brazil is the world’s leading producer of orange juice and is the second largest supplier of orange juice to the United States.
33. Currently, more than half of the orange juice sold in the United States comes from Brazil, with eighty percent of NFCOJ imported from Brazil.
The entire complaint is an interesting lesson in the orange juice market, including how extreme weather has devastated much of the American orange crop in Florida.
As a result, America has become dependent on imports for the orange juice they drink.
Trump excluded orange juice from yesterday’s tariffs, but not coffee, a bigger export and probably an even more crucial breakfast ingredient.
Which is a bit of a tell.
The orange juice exclusion wasn’t about preventing immediate pain among American consumers.
It was about mooting this lawsuit.
I’ve already complained that the press simply refuses to explain that these tariffs have already been ruled illegal, and significant swaths of the right wing legal establishment are pushing to sustain that decision through the appeals process. (Then again, journalists refuse to describe tariffs as unlawful taxes on American consumers, either.)
But tracking the legal challenges to Trump’s unlawful power grab is actually a critical step in understanding how Trump hopes to sustain them even though they are illegal.
The journalism that happens here, and that unfortunately is not happening elsewhere and everywhere, is deeply appreciated.
Thank you. That graph of the incredibly low levels of orange yields for the last 3 years
should have been front page news, but this is the first time I’ve heard about it.
Brazil should deny overflight rights to Kristi and Corey’s USG executive jet when they return
from their special time down in Argentina.
I’ve seen stories reporting them, but not front-page in major media.
So Big OJ mounts a lawsuit and gets a carveout. Where is Big Coffee in all this? As someone who practically lives on the stuff (and would do so were the protein content higher), I have been watching this Brazil tariff nonsense with increasing, and, yes, caffeine-fueled, anxiety.
Trump has made no secret of the fact that his tariffs on Brazil (with whom we have a trade surplus) have a purely political purpose: to influence a sovereign nation’s judicial system. Trump’s demand that the “injustice” of Bolsonaro’s prosecution be righted is not merely an exercise in narcissism, it is an exercise in how far his reshaping of reality might extend. Holocaust deniers, meet your match.
The world has watched America grapple with our Trump problem. But Trump is a problem not limited to us, or to tariffs. I will of course pay whatever I have to for the coffee I need to survive. He knows that; the stores where I buy it know that. It’s an addiction, or at least a dependency. But how addicted are all of us to Trump’s bullying? To his insistence on reshaping the entire world in his image?
Citrus greening disease has been blamed for most of the decline in Florida’s citrus crop.
The whole issue of agriculture in trump’s mental disease is fascinating. There certainly isn’t enough US grown cane sugar to turn all the Cokes Mexican. The cane growers have been complaining for years that beet sugar get all the best gummint welfare.
We’re talking about orange juice? Where are Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd when you need someone to take down buffoonish folks screwing around with the market in OJ?
To quote Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
Trump and Bolsonaro as Randolph and Mortimer Duke.
I will march upon Washington DC if anyone takes my coffee away. I can’t write music without it. It’s my drug of choice.
We have a freaking trade surplus with Brazil. The insanity of our president is out of control. Businesses are going to freeze investment. We are headed for the destruction of our world marketplace. And why? Because Americans could not vote for a black woman.
This company has 75% of the market in frozen OJ concentrate? Where are the anti-trust enforcers?
My spouse is a Brazilian national, living in Rio at the moment. We applied for residency on February 14, 2025 and have not heard one peep from the Trump Admin. In fact, my tax return for 2024 listing me as married, filing a joint return has yet to be processed. I had to file manually this year because a Tax ID for my spouse is required. The IRS received my paperwork on March 19, 2025. Here it is 134 days later, and my paperwork still says “return received” on the IRS website. It has not been processed.
Prices have increased a lot in Rio for fruits/vegetables/eggs. Evertything is going up.
Apparently, the goal of Trump is to cause a rift between the Lula faction and the Bolsonaro faction (think normies and MAGAts) and have the government toppled. Bolsonaro tried that after Trump’s J6 was unsuccessful, which is why Bolsonario is heading to jail. Too bad our court system is not as bold as Brazil’s.
Bolsonaro also made the mistake of trying it after Lula took office.
Yes. Thanks PJ. That is what I tried to state, but did so clumsily.
After Bolsanaro lost re-election in October 2022 to Lula, Bolsanro’s “MAGAts” did the exact same thing that Trump’s J6 MAGAts did to our Capitol, to their Brazilian federal buildings in Brasilia on January 8, 2023 (J8).
Don’t hold your breath as far as your tax return, the IRS has been backlogged for quite a while.
And now, like other government departments and agencies has dumped lots of employees and contractors, many of the most seasoned ones.
Who knows what skill set the Service has so forget about hearing from them for a long time, if ever.