Trump’s Tariff Proposals Are Already Working Paul du Quenoy

Posted By on February 7th, 2025

https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-tariff-proposals-are-already-working-opinion-2026576

Newly reinstalled U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked askance at an Oval Office press conference on Monday when a reporter asked him about the presence of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was sitting awkwardly just outside of camera view. The previous Friday, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal had vociferously criticized Trump’s plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on most Mexican and Canadian goods, as well as a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports.

Trump intended the tariffs, which were scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, to equalize the U.S. trade balance with its neighbors and its largest competitor, and to punish Mexico and Canada for weak border enforcement, which has allowed large-scale crossings by illegal aliens and lax interdiction of shipments of fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid largely manufactured in China that claims tens of thousands of American lives every year.

Despite Trump’s well-documented position, the Journal declared the expected trade war “the dumbest” in history and predicted that the new administration’s economic protectionism would backfire. It was wrong. Just before the Monday press conference, where Trump declared his “great respect” for the 93-year old Murdoch while also saying his paper’s editorialists “didn’t have any idea what they were talking about,” the world learned that Trump’s protectionist inclinations were not so dumb after all.

Despite a lot of noisy grandstanding over the weekend, during which Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum and lingering Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs on a “dollar-for-dollar” basis, on Monday morning Sheinbaum signaled in a phone call with Trump that she would back down. She offered 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to patrol Mexico’s side of the border in exchange for a 30-day pause on the tariffs. During that period, Trump announced that he would lead high-level trade negotiations between the two countries, alongside his secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce.

By late Monday afternoon, Trudeau caved in his own call with Trump, also pledging 10,000 “frontline personnel” to ramp up border security while implementing a $1.3 billion border security plan that will include technological upgrades, helicopter deployments, and cooperative measures with American law enforcement specifically directed at preventing fentanyl from crossing the U.S.’ northern border. Canada, too, will have a 30-day pause of tariffs while negotiations take place.

The quick resolution of these Mexican and Canadian standoffs followed Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s near-immediate backing down a week earlier. Petro had refused to receive deported illegal aliens transported on U.S. military flights. Trump met this refusal with the threat of a 25 percent “emergency” tariff scheduled to rise to 50 percent after one week. Snarky liberals and doctrinaire free traders caterwauled about expected price hikes on Colombian flowers and coffee, but Petro promptly gave in, promising even his own presidential plane to help repatriate his citizens who are illegally present in the United States.

China, which Trump menaced with the threat of a 10 percent tariff alongside Mexico and Canada, avoided histrionics over the weekend and quietly declared itself willing to negotiate a new trade deal, which some sources believe will restore the 2020 status quo.

Trump described his conversations with Sheinbaum and Trudeau as “wonderful” and “very friendly,” even as critics opine that it was Trump, and not his interlocutors, who had “blinked” on the tariff issue. For good measure, however, Sheinbaum, despite being a convinced leftist, is surprisingly supportive of the Trump administration’s controversial shutdown of USAID, a sprawling humanitarian aid bureaucracy that she, Trump, and DOGE chief Elon Musk agree is irremediably corrupt.

Why the about-face? The simple truth is that Mexico and Canada need the U.S. far more than the U.S. needs either of them. Mexico sends some 84 percent of its exports to American markets, while only 14.5 percent of U.S. exports go to Mexico. Canada relies on the U.S. to buy 77 percent of its exported goods, but just 17 percent of U.S. exports travel north. The disparity is so severe that, according to a KPMG survey taken over the weekend, 48 percent of Canadian manufacturers plan to invest in production facilities in the U.S. specifically to make their wares without then having to export them across the border to their primary market.

In both cases, moreover, the U.S. has readily available domestic sources of just about every commodity that it imports from its poorer and economically dependent neighbors, while both Mexico and Canada have few alternate suppliers of American goods, whether agricultural or industrial. In a “dollar-for-dollar” trade war with its neighbors, U.S. consumers can easily “buy American,” while Canadians would suffer the deprivation of “forgoing Florida orange juice altogether,” as Trudeau laughably told his countrymen on Saturday, less than 48 hours before he yielded to Trump. Americans might complain about pricier avocadoes or expensive non-Vermont-sourced maple syrup, but both Mexico and Canada would suffer severe national economic crises. Trump knew it, and he triumphed.

Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

Categorized under: NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION.
Tagged with: no tags.

Comments are closed.