Trump Threatens 100 Percent Tariffs And Fighter Jet Flyovers For Canada
Is it TACO Tuesday yet?
The entire world knows, as it has since at least his first term, that Donald John Trump — president, former gameshow host, and adjudicated con man — is full of shit with his tariff game. Now he is threatening to put one hundred percent tariffs on Canada, our second-biggest trading partner after Mexico and until last year our closest ally, with a side of extorting Canada that he will start sending fighter jets over Canadian airspace for “security” if Canada doesn’t go through with buying 88 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets. Huh, Trump sure does love that number! And he is extra-super pig-biting-mad that Canadian PM Mark Carney would not pay a billion dollars to join his Made Up Peace Club for Men, next to Vlad Putin, Viktor Orban, and the former Tantric sex instructor president of Argentina.
Canada would of course have nul reason to want or ever even trust any American-built fighter jets after Trump has spent a year threatening to take over Canada and make it the 51st state, and has taken lately to referring to Prime Minister Carney as “Governor Carney,” as in, “If Governor Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken.” For Canada, Swedish fighter jets will surely do fine!
Trump is still burning, though, after Carney’s barnburner of a speech at Davos last week, where he said something along the lines of how the world had ruptured and the US is not at the top any more, and Canada was no longer going to go along to get along, quoting Václav Havel:
“You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Carney also encouraged others to stand together against Trump’s many crapulences, pointing out that “middle powers must act together, because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” And Canada’s first step is a plan to import 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles at a tariff rate of 6 percent instead of 100 percent, because how much Canada taxes other countries’ goods at its borders is none of the US’s fucking business.
Canada had initially put a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and a 25 percent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum to show solidarity to Trump, then China responded with 100 percent import taxes on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25 percent on pork and seafood. And obviously now Canada is wondering why its consumers are paying more for Trump’s folly when it hasn’t bought them any kind of a reprieve from his idiotic threats.
Oh, and yesterday Trump threatened to tariff South Korea more too.
Trump is wildly stupid at business, especially given he somehow got an MBA from undergrad BS in economics from Wharton, eesh. But he is not so stupid he is unaware that American consumers and companies pay for tariffs on foreign goods. His tariffs are more about how a proper king needs the power of the purse! Tariffs are also something Peter Navarro’s faction of the Heritage Foundation has long been pushing, ostensibly as a way to make China realize it is “reliant” on the US, to decouple the US economy from China’s, and punish China for selling more things to us than we buy from them. That traitorous nut Navarro has a doctorate in Economics from Harvard, if you can believe it!
Class, can you spot Peter’s logical fallacy there? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
As we have all learned over the past year, China is not reliant on the US. Quite the other way around. Even back in 2023, the US was less than 15 percent of China’s export market. China’s leadership also does not have to give one turd if their economy suffers a mild dip, because they do not have to worry about buttering up the populace ahead of any elections. China can make a 5-year plan, a 50-year plan, a thousand-year-plan. They control the majority of the world’s rare earth minerals needed to make high-tech everything: weapons, AI chips, cars and TVs, and the technology to synthesize them for use.
China’s own AI chip technology is rapidly reaching the level of the US’s newest NVIDIA chips, if it is not already there. Even if they aren’t, China’s chips are adequate enough that they can build a whole lunar base with them, so. China also controls the majority of the world’s supply chain of electric cars, Barbies, handbags, toilet brushes, clothes, just about any and every manufactured thing you can name, except for maybe pantyhose (still largely made in the USA!) and Vin Diesel movies.
China’s most valuable natural resource is its people, though. Riding around the cities you’ll see street sweepers. Not the vehicles, but little old ladies posted up on every other block with handmade brooms, sweeping! China is a job creator, and Chinese manufacturing workers make about 40 percent of what Americans do, and there are no labor unions selfishly demanding higher wages for workers there.
Over the past year, while Trump’s dramatics inconvenienced, annoyed and insulted Chinese leadership and its people, China has still done just fine. More than fine. Look how low China’s 10-year bond yields are compared to the US’s, less than half price! As we bondsplained last week, that extra 2.4 percent of return the US Treasury will be forced to pay at the end, there, is the price of risk, just like with a credit card. It’s the real number of how much more confident investors are that China’s treasury will still be in a position to pay up in a decade, versus the US, and/or that the dollar will sink and inflation will go up and make the bonds worth less, which has also been happening to a greater degree under Art O’ Deal. And higher treasury yields also makes the price of Americans borrowing money go up, like mortgage interest rates, uh oh.
LAST WEEK!
Debt, that is the other big thing we make that China buys! And they have been slowly selling their US treasuries over the past nine months. Somebody should break it to Navarro that the party benefitting from the conscious uncoupling is not the US.
China doesn’t need to get their peaches from down in Georgia, or bourbon from Kentucky. They can buy soybeans from Brazil, pantyhose from Turkey, and rip any movie they want off the dark web using a VPN. They can buy oil from Russia, Iran, Iraq, wherever, they don’t judge, and the US disrupting the Venezuelan part of the trade route has been not much of an inconvenience.
And China has been making newer and closer friends all over the world as the US withdraws into North Korean-style terror and isolation. Another bonus! China’s human rights abuses are getting a lot less attention and international brow-furrowing lately, because compared to executing people in cold blood in the street for looking at a government agent sideways, China’s secret prisons do executions in secret, and their social credit scores seem comparatively humane and methodical!
In short, by ceding US hegemony to internally grab any and every kind power for himself he can, Trump has made China more powerful than it’s been in 5,000 years, and without China even having to try very hard.
And by threatening Canada, Trump is screwing over US consumers. If he actually follows through this time, it will mean real economic collapse here.
Canada is the top export destination of goods for 36 US states, and about $2.7 billion worth of Canadian goods and services also cross the border southbound every day. About 60 percent of US crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85 percent of electricity imports. If voters are mad about The Affordability now, 100 percent tariffs on Canada will mean consumer prices and layoffs the likes of which we have never seen. Canada is also the biggest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum, and uranium to the US, and oh, has 34 of those critical minerals and metals necessary for the US’s AI bubble to keep afloat.
So, in spite of dumbshit Scott Bessent pathetically lying that Mark Carney had privately walked back his words, Carney has not walked back any of those words and only repeated, “I meant what I said.”
Economic sanctions, even military threats, will and do hurt Canada, emotionally and otherwise, but they will hurt the US way worse. And Canada is a member of NATO, and NATO has planes too.
When will Trump chicken out again? Place your bets! Trump doesn’t seem to have put a deadline on it this time, that’s how credible it is, but Polymarket is paying out odds of it going into effect by June at 10 to one.
Another day, another buk buk buk buk, bitch.
[The Independent / NPR / Canadian Press]
"For Canada, Swedish fighter jets will surely do fine!"
They're cheaper because you have to build them yourself.
You know what makes me the angriest? All of it, every fucking dumbass bit of it. The smirking assholes in his cabinet, the joy of the idiots that voted for this, the press pretending they can't figure out the difference, all of it.