Trump declares flawless victory in pointless trade war
Keep pulling the fire alarm, eventually no one will pay attention to the noise.
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President Trump ended the trade war before it started by preemptively declaring victory and going home.
On Monday evening, just hours after his 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada were scheduled to go into effect, Trump praised himself for having art-of-the-deal-ed a compromise to ensure greater cooperation with drug and migrant interdiction efforts at our northern and southern borders.
“I am very pleased with this initial outcome,” he wrote, announcing that the levies would be “paused” for 30 days to assess the impact.
After dropping earlier in the day, the financial markets tacitly agreed to return to the lucrative fiction that Republicans are “good” for the economy and the key to Trump is to take him seriously but not literally. But the broad consensus is that Trump got rolled. Mexico and Canada agreed to token improvements in their already robust border security measures, and the president congratulated himself for having successfully bullied the neighbors.
All’s well that ends well … if you disregard the reckless destruction of alliances and soft power that took generations to build and made America the richest nation the world has ever known.
Tariff Man
On the campaign trail, Trump promised that tariffs would be the universal cure for all woes.
“I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time,” he babbled the Economic Club of New York in response to a question about the astronomical cost of childcare. “We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
Trump’s plan to extort a vig from smaller countries is pure fantasy, premised on the lie that the cost of tariffs are borne by exporters and not passed on to American consumers. He blithely assured his supporters that those countries would “get used to it very quickly,” absorbing the tariffs as the price of access to US markets and never daring to think of retaliating.
And because the bullshit is baked in to everything he says, no one bothered to point out that this problem was supposed to have been solved in 2020 when Trump chucked out NAFTA and replaced it with the (virtually identical) US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. His corporate backers assured us he’d never be so monstrously stupid as to follow through on his threats and would instead cut taxes and blow up regulations like a normal Republican.
LOL.
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The Scut Trumpus Affair
Last week Trump announced that he was imposing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, our closest allies, along with a 10 percent tariff on China, our putative enemy.
Here, as always, Trump reaped the benefit of being treated if his words need only be true-ish, but not actually true. The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy tariffs, but Trump simply waved in the direction of several dubious statutory delegations and emergency powers and asserted the power by fiat. He claimed to be imposing the tariffs as punishment for Canada and Mexico’s failure to interdict drugs and migrants at the border, despite the fact that the majority of fentanyl coming into the US is smuggled in by Americans, and the traffic in immigrants and drugs across the northern border is negligible.
He barely bothered to hide that the real purpose of this exercise was to punish our neighbors for not buying more American stuff or, in the case of Canada, agreeing to become the a state.
"What I'd like to see — Canada become our 51st state,” Trump told reporters on Monday in response to a question about what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could do to avoid tariffs. (Watch below.)
The White House comms team fired off a hilariously mendacious email to reporters explaining that “President Trump’s Tariffs Are a Necessary Solution” which will “strengthen the American economy, raise wages, and create jobs.”
Almost wholly absent was any tie to fentanyl or immigration, although the email did cite the 43 whole pounds of fentanyl seized at the entire Canadian border in (fiscal year) 2024, “enough to kill 9.8 million Americans” and “a massive 2050% increase from FY 2023.”
Literally no one believed that these tariffs were about drugs. They were universally understood as an attempt to extract economic concessions and implicitly renegotiate USMCA.
Dog that caught the car
The backlash was immediate. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum called the suggestion that her government was somehow in an alliance with the drug cartels “a great slander.” But, perhaps because Canadian media is largely in English, that country’s response dominated American coverage.
Trudeau delivered a passionate speech in defense of the Canadian-American Alliance and announced his intent to impose dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs. British Columbian Premier David Enby directed the removal of American alcohol from state-run liquor stores. And Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that he was “ripping up” the province’s contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink Company.
Americans suddenly remembered (again) that Canada and Mexico are our biggest trading partners and that massive tariffs would make a whole lot of stuff we buy a lot more expensive. US automakers deluged the White House with protests and demands for a carveout that would protect their bottom line.
In the end, Trump blinked. After phone calls with Sheinbaum and Trudeau, he announced that he was suspending the tariffs for 30 days, using the pretext of his “drug war” as an offramp from his disastrous trade policies.
But even so, he couldn’t resist telegraphing his real aims.
In case the mention of his commerce secretary wasn’t clear enough, Trump made sure to flag that this is most definitely about trade and not immigration or drugs.
"We have deficits with almost every country, not every country, but almost. And we're going to change it. It's been unfair,” he groused to reporters. “That's why we owe $36 trillion. We have deficits with everybody." (Apparently the president is confused about the distinction between the deficit and the debt.)
In reality, the supposed “concessions” were functionally nothing: Mexico already had 15,000 troops on the US border, and Canada’s $1.3 billion border surge was announced in December of last year. Canada did agree to appoint a fentanyl czar, though, whatever that means.
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
Compared to the damage being wrought by Elon Musk and his acolytes, it’s tempting to write this episode off as a crisis averted — the dog that didn’t bark. But Trump’s constant antics are anything but cost-free.
When Trump suggests that the United States government will renege on its treaties in hopes of bludgeoning other countries into submission, he erodes America’s credibility on the global stage. His stunts burn alliances and waste the country’s soft power. And while he unifies our allies in alliance against us, he risks driving them into closer proximity with our adversary China.
Meanwhile Trump’s 10 percent tariffs on China are still in effect, and that country is ramping up retaliatory levies of its own, setting the stage for a repeat of the disastrous trade war of Trump’s first term that cost American farmers billions in lost revenue.
And still Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro, best known for being catastrophically wrong about everything from hydroxychloroquine to congressional subpoenas, insists that Trump will indeed be launching a massive tariff regime to replace income taxes as a primary source of government funding.
“If President Trump succeeds like he wants to succeed, we are going to structurally shift the American economy from one over-reliant on income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service, to one which is also reliant on tariff revenue and the External Revenue Service,” he said at a recent Politico event.
But for today, that will have to wait. Trump is basking in the glow of his bigly victory, and won’t be transforming the country into a massive shakedown operation … yet.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
In his deranged mind, he never loses. He seems to be regressing into a toddler who screams and cries to get what he wants. And the world of grown ups has to pacify him by pretending to to give it to him. All the world knows he got played except for him and his maga cult. If we make it through, historians will spend centuries trying to explain how a sick, sadistic, insane toddler in chief came to rule our nation.
Felon 47 wouldn't know "flawless" if it walked up and smacked him in the face.