Within 24 hours after announcing that illegal border crossings were at their lowest point ever, Donald Trump said that he will put in place tariffs on Mexico and Canada... for not doing enough to secure the border.
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When Donald Trump announced on February 1 that he was going to implement 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, he claimed to do so to keep illegal immigrants and drugs out of the United States.
“We need to protect Americans, and it is my duty as President to ensure the safety of all,” he stated back then. “I made a promise on my Campaign to stop the flood of illegal aliens and drugs from pouring across our Borders, and Americans overwhelmingly voted in favor of it.”
Fair enough.
Trump then almost immediately suspended those tariffs for a month after both neighbors assured him that they would take some actions to help tighten border security.
Fast forward to this week, when Trump not only announced that the tariffs would go into effect on Tuesday, and that there was nothing Mexico and Canada could do to avert them, but also that “illegal border crossings last month were the lowest ever recorded.”
Huh?
In other words, within 24 hours, he said that the border was secure and not secure.
Of course, Trump’s claims that Mexico and Canada were not doing enough was always just a pretext. The truth is that he simply likes tariffs because he believes that trade deficits mean that the US is being taken advantage of.
On Monday, when announcing the 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada (as well as a 10 percent tariff on China), Trump couldn’t stop himself from blurting out the truth.
After first talking about fentanyl that continues to pour into the US (which means the border is not as secure as the president claims), he then pivoted to telling other countries that they should build their cars in the US.
“So, what they have to do is build their car plants, frankly, and other things in the United States, in which case they have no tariffs,” he said.
While Trump is a firm believer in the positive effect of tariffs on the US economy, experts predict that the opposite is true and that they will drive up prices for Americans.
“Virtually all economists think that the impact of the tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world,” said Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University. “They will almost surely be inflationary.”
The market agrees.
As the president was announcing his tariffs, the Dow Jones dropped a couple hundred points and ended the day down 1.5 percent. Since Trump’s inauguration, US stocks have lost nearly 2 percent, which affects the investment and retirement portfolios of millions of Americans.
The damage of the Trump tariffs will be compounded by the retaliatory actions that China, Canada, and Mexico have vowed to take.
“It’s going to be an absolute disaster for both countries. We’re your largest trading partner,” said Doug Ford, the premier of Canada’s most populous province, Ontario. “I don’t want to respond, but we will respond like they’ve never seen before. You need our uranium. You need our potash. You need our high-grade nickel.”
Ford predicted that some US plants “will close down within a week,” and that ordinary Americans will feel the pain.
“If he wants to destroy our economy and our families, I will shut down the electricity going down to the US,” he said. “And I’m telling you, we will do it. It’s unfortunate.”
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
