Donald Trump's Canada Charm Offensive Sure Gets The Last Bit Right
Mad King Donald's Borderline Personality Disorder looks to the North.
Donald Trump yesterday announced he would hike tariffs on imports of Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent, in retaliation for a 25 percent surcharge that Ontario imposed on the electricity it sells to utilities in Michigan, Minnesota, and New York. Trump had earlier announced that Canadian steel and aluminum would be taxed at 25 percent, but hey, why not double it and make life hell for American manufacturers for no good reason?
Trump also threatened to keep increasing other tariffs if Canada doesn’t also roll back import duties on American products that existed before this stupid trade war, and maybe to just keep throwing higher tariffs at our northern neighbor until it agrees to his insane demand of becoming the USA’s 51st state.
By late afternoon, however, Ontario agreed to suspend its electricity surcharge, so Trump backed away from doubling the steel and aluminum tariffs, at least for the moment.
When a reporter asked him at a White House event if that 50% tariff would still go into effect, Trump sidestepped: “I’ll let you know,” he said. Shortly after those remarks, White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro confirmed in a CNBC interview that Trump’s threat of higher tariffs won’t be going into effect.
Instead, 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum the US imports, including from Canada, are set to take effect at midnight on Wednesday, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told CNN in an emailed statement.
In other words, the 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum from all our trading partners went into effect at midnight last night and Trump could still decide to hike them further. That will immediately drive up costs for American manufacturers, and the continuing chaos was reflected in the stock market again yesterday, which once again closed lower.
As for the other crazy shit, well, you’ll just have to see what Trump decides, and then see what he decides a few hours later, then check back the next morning. As everyone knows, big businesses thrive on constant uncertainty and making long-term plans that could become useless the next time the American president changes his mind.
Trump initially threatened the higher tariffs in a Tuesday morning social media hissy, in which he made a whole bunch of threats, demonstrated he knows nothing about how auto manufacturing works, and yet again revealed his serious case of Putin Envy. No, we couldn’t begin to tell you what he means with the scare quotes around “electricity.”
Beyond the canceled call for 50 percent steel and aluminum tariffs, Trump had other demands, like an immediate end to Canadian tariffs on US dairy products and a very nonspecific demand that Canada immediately end “other egregious, long time Tariffs,” or Trump would
substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada. Those cars can easily be made in the USA!
As we’ve mentioned previously, Trump appears not to have the slightest idea how his own 2020 trade agreement, the “US-Mexico-Canada Agreement” (USMCA), actually works when it comes to Canada and Mexico. (That shouldn’t surprise us at all, but does all the same.) Because the agreement encourages tariff-free movement of car components between the three countries, with final assembly of “US-made” cars occurring in any of them, there’s really no such thing as an entirely “US-made car” anymore. As Peter Frise, an automotive engineer at University of Windsor, explained in Canada-talk, there really is no “Canadian” auto industry that isn’t part of the US auto industry, even if Trump is unaware of this simple fact.
Every car I can think of is made all over the place. For example, Corvettes are made in Kentucky, but their gearboxes are made in St. Catharines, Ontario, and the aluminum for the engines comes from Quebec. North America and Europe have the same system, where parts move freely across borders, and the sourcing of parts changes all the time. This is of course what Trump wants to stop, but moving all of that to the U.S. will take many, many years.
When Trump last week announced that he’d suspend tariffs on all automakers for a whole month, he apparently believed that would be plenty of time for American companies to completely remake the supply chain they developed over decades under NAFTA, and then under USMCA, moving every part of their manufacturing processes to the US only.
Somebody should probably tell him that’s not likely to happen, not in thirty days, and not during the four years Trump is officially supposed to be in office.
Trump also insisted again yesterday that he expects his tariffs to force US car manufacturers to completely shift their present North American supply chain to the US, insisting before a Business Roundtable meeting of about 100 CEOs in DC that wild fluctuations in the US economy were simply the necessary cost of making America Great, don’t you see, because American manufacturers, and all other businesses in the world, will hate the tariffs so much, which is why he’ll just raise them to infinity and beyond: “They don’t want to pay 25 percent or whatever it may be,” Trump explained. “It may go up higher. Look, the higher it goes, the more likely it is they’re going to build” manufacturing plants in America.
Trump didn’t explain how that would happen in the space of a month; nor did he explain why he thought American automakers would simply shrug and write off the loss of their Mexican and Canadian facilities, then undergo the huge expense of duplicating them here in America, OR how they’d make enough profits to cover those costs while somehow remaining competitive with the rest of the world.
Also unanswered: Why on earth would US manufacturers commit to new factories here, knowing that they might break ground on a huge auto components plant in America days or weeks before Trump changes his mind again?
But again, we may be focused too much on stupid dollars and cents business stuff here, and not enough on the imperial ambitions to which Trump devoted so much of his social media message. In Trump’s imagination, a place he now inhabits, it simply makes sense for the US to annex Canada, just like Trump’s pal Vladimir Putin knows in his heart that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, never mind reality or actual history.
All Canada has to do is realize that Donald Trump’s fantasy is true, and everything will be easy, you sillies!
The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever — And Canada will be a big part of that.
This reads so much like a child’s letter to their parents, laying out the logical argument for why getting a pet unicorn makes so much more sense than a cat or dog. (Bullet point five: “Thanks to unicorns’ powerful magic, we will be no longer live in fear of dragon attacks.”)
But here’s the real magical thinking tell: If Putin gets to believe that invading Ukraine will simply bring a longed-for reunion with those silly people who don’t understand they’ve been a Russian province all along, then why shouldn’t Donald Trump believe that the entire history of North America was simply a historical misunderstanding, and fix it? And when we erase a couple hundred years of history, we’ll all be so much happier, especially the subject peoples of Canada who have been oppressed by having good healthcare for so long:
The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World — And your brilliant anthem, “0 Canada,” will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!
We have no idea where Trump got the idea that at one point during the early history of European occupation of North America, there were no distinctions between the colonies that became the US and those that became Canada, especially considering that France only gave up its claim to what’s now Quebec in 1763, a little more than a decade before those tea-sipping hotheads in New England, Virginia, and points south decided to break with the British Crown. It’s not like some mean cartographers arbitrarily separated the US from Canada.
Hell, maybe somebody once told him about “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” and he thought it was about all of North America, not a disputed chunk of the Pacific Northwest.
Could we please have more people in mainstream media pointing out, as did CNBC’s senior economics reporter Steve Liesman yesterday, that this is all completely insane, especially since Trump appears to be deadly serious?
In any case, we are sure there will be more exciting tariff news to come, including perhaps Trump precipitating a hostage incident at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Is it strong enough to hold a few hundred Abrams tanks? Just asking.
[Aaron Rupar on Bluesky / CNN / Macleans / WaPo (archive link) / Poynter Institute / US History dot org]
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