Donald Trump, noted human rights crusader, is doing his part to combat forced labor around the world, how about you?

That’s sarcasm, in case you didn’t pick up on the snark.

On Friday, the US began collecting taxes of between 10% and 12.5% on dozens of America’s trading partners as punishment for those countries’ supposed negligence vis-à-vis the importation of goods made by forced labor.

The new duties took effect precisely the moment an ad hoc, 10% global levy imposed in February expired, which is to say they replaced the stop-gap measures Trump employed after the Supreme Court struck down his “reciprocal” tariffs.

Administration officials variously insisted these levies aren’t an end-around and weren’t imposed merely as replacement duties for the taxes disallowed by the court. That contention’s about as plausible as the idea that Trump cares about the immorality of forced labor.

Some imports were spared. Energy, food and fertilizer, for example, will get an exemption from the new tariffs, which sounds like an effort to avoid exacerbating war-related inflation. (The administration would deny that, I imagine.)

You wouldn’t know it from the barrage of headlines Friday, but neither the levies nor the timing were a surprise. The taxes are the result of a(nother) 301 investigation, the results of which were released on June 2, when Jamieson Greer accused America’s “most important trading partners” of “failing” to keep goods produced by forced labor out of their supply chains. “We will no longer tolerate this,” Greer said at the time.

It didn’t take a leap of logic to surmise that the likely implementation date of the new forced-labor duties would line up with the expiration of the stop-gap global tax mentioned above.

The figure above, from BofA’s Michael Hartnett, shows you cumulative customs duties collected by the US since Trump took office for the first time a decade ago.

Officials from around the world reacted with a mix of regret and resignation to the new duties. A remark from New Zealand’s trade chief was emblematic. Friday’s developments are “very disappointing but not unexpected,” he said.

The levies may be challenged in another round of lawsuits. Section 301 does, of course, grant of the president authority to tax imports in the event America’s trade partners are in fact engaged in flagrantly unjust practices. But as one legal scholar told The New York Times Friday, “Trump is reinterpreting the statute to try to impose perpetual tariffs on almost all imports.”

America, Greer reminded the world late this week, banned forced-labor imports almost 100 years ago. “It’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” he added.

He’s right. As the Times remarked in the same linked article, the US “has prohibited the importation of goods made with slave labor for nearly a century.” Now if only that ban were in effect for three centuries, a lot of black folks would’ve been spared a lot of suffering.