President Donald Trump, the man who believes his life was spared by God so that he could inflate his net worth by billions of dollars by hawking self-branded meme coins, has a plan to slap tariffs on Canada and Mexico—it’s just not ready yet. According to the White House, 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on goods imported from our neighbors to the south and north on Feb. 1. Why not today, you might be wondering? Perhaps they need the extra 10 days to build excitement about unprovoked trade warring with our immediate neighbors to a crescendo, or even to explain coherently to at least one person what this is all about.
After all, it was just over five years ago that Congress approved Trump’s treaty revision with both countries, which he insisted on renaming the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). The North American Free Trade Agreement was, I’m sure you understand, insufficiently America-centric in its nomenclature. It left people bereft and wondering, “which country in North America is the most important?”
The terms of the new agreement, which is working perfectly fine, run through 2036, but like a ballplayer who wants to tear up his long-term contract and negotiate a new one after a big season, Trump is no longer satisfied with his own handiwork. He wants an opt-out that isn’t included in the original deal. He gazes upon the USMCA and smells only the fetid stench of 2019, when his mandate did not include a popular vote victory, he was reeling from his first impeachment in the House of Representatives and making fun of him on late night television was still big business.
Now, after narrowly defeating his hapless opposition and ushering his thoroughly humiliated predecessor out of the White House, Trump regards himself as a colossus astride the Potomac, having reached the towering heights of 49.8 percent of the national popular vote (so close to a majority yet forever so not one), the world’s richest men genuflecting pitifully before him, offering him advice, tribute and expensive, unwanted documentaries about his wife. He’ll never be riding higher than today, so it’s time for Mexico and Canada to pay up.
The trouble is that while officials in both countries, where national governance is still taken at least somewhat seriously, race to put contingency plans into place should Trump wake up on Feb. 1. in the mood to impose across-the-board tariffs on our friendly and cooperative neighbors, it is not even clear that trade is the issue. “It has nothing to do with that,” Trump snapped at a reporter on Tuesday who asked whether the tariff threats were meant to influence new negotiations over renewing the USMCA, which were already scheduled to happen next year. Instead, according to Trump, it is because the two countries are responsible for allowing “millions and millions of people to come into our country that shouldn’t be here.”
That makes it sound like Trump wants something less tangible from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbuam—not concessions on specific trade issues like tomato or dairy imports but an elaborate performance of border-hardening or some other form of ritualized public capitulation. He wants them to play Boar on the Floor for their political lives while he sits back and sneers. He wants them to take him seriously but not literally.
Making them scramble in anticipation of economic doom is the whole point. As he does with Democrats, Trump seems to get an enormous amount of pleasure out of behaving contemptuously, tossing out nonsensical sentence fragments and febrile conspiracy theories and then watching as his fellow world leaders try their best to react normally and pretend that the president of the United States isn’t an erratic geezer with the comportment of a lesser Sopranos lieutenant.
As for the actual policy threat, it should go without saying that deliberately torching relations with Canada and Mexico would be both bad politics and even worse economics. The Peterson Institute For International Economics predicts that while the tariffs would disproportionately harm Mexico and Canada (and increase the number of Mexican laborers seeking to cross into the United States) they would also suck $200 billion a year out of U.S. GDP and single-handedly add close to half a point to the inflation rate. Trump might even inadvertently save the Canadian liberals, who are on the precipice of getting blown out of the water in the upcoming federal election, by rallying Canadians around the flag in defiance of their unruly downstairs neighbors.
There would also be non-material consequences, namely that the close-to-insurmountable obstacles to getting global leaders to believe that the United States will have even minimal policy continuity between administrations will get even higher. Instead of negotiating with an untrustworthy, unpredictable and poorly governed U.S., other countries are going to start looking for ways to minimize contact with and dependence on us. We will have given our allies The Ick.
What Trump will actually do when it is time to make good on his amorphous tariff ultimatum is impossible to predict. This specific threat still feels like it belongs in the “too stupid and politically damaging to possibly be true” category, but that has rarely stopped him in the past. While you wait to see which industry’s prices Trump may or may not capriciously send soaring into the exosphere, you can buy some certainty in these turbulent times by banking your hard-earned money in a $MELANIA token, a grift so nakedly preposterous that even the crypto potentates that Trump successfully courted believe it “could harm their industry’s reputation.”
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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