“Tariffs will put your jobs at risk:” The Make-Believe Justification for Trump’s Trade War
Tomorrow, tariffs will either go into place targeting Canada, Mexico, and China — creating a recession for at least our closest trading partners, devastating the auto industry, and likely leading to a stock sell-off — or Trump will back down.
This may or may not be the most destructive thing Trump did in the last week, but because it’ll elicit quicker pushback from businesses and Republican members of Congress, it may create an early opportunity to push back on Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs.
And that’s why it matters that a number of media outlets are both burying the stated excuse for the tariffs and debunking that stated excuse as a lie. As described in the Fact Sheet announcing the sanctions, Trump is purportedly invoking a national emergency under IEEPA to impose the sanctions.
ADDRESSING AN EMERGENCY SITUATION: The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
- Until the crisis is alleviated, President Donald J. Trump is implementing a 25% additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10% additional tariff on imports from China. Energy resources from Canada will have a lower 10% tariff.
- President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.
Yet Trump’s claims about the scope of the problem are false. As NPR notes, both Trump and Karoline Leavitt have lied about the scope of the fentanyl deaths.
On Inauguration Day, Trump said foreign drug cartels are “killing 250,000 [or] 300,000 American people per year.” On Friday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said tariffs are warranted because fentanyl has “killed tens of millions of Americans.”
These claims are false.
Nevertheless, outlets are barely contesting the claims. WaPo included these observations in ¶¶5 and 16 of an article on the tariffs.
Trump has framed the levies as a response to an “invasion” of migrants and fentanyl across the nation’s northern and southern borders.
[snip]
But Trump administration officials doubled down Sunday, citing migrants and drugs to justify the new tariffs.
“Canada has some work to do as far as helping us secure our northern border,” Kristi L. Noem, the secretary of homeland security, told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Canada can help us, or they can get in the way, and they will face the consequences of it. … If prices go up, it’s because of other people’s reactions to America’s laws.”
And NYT put this paragraph in ¶10 of a story on the tariffs.
Mr. Trump has said that the tariffs are intended to reduce the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl over the border, as well as of migrants. (The traffic of both people and illegal drugs from Canada is, however, very small.)
CNN more specifically notes that only 43 of the 21,000 pounds of fentanyl seized last year came through Canada (effectively, Trump’s Fact Sheet blames Canada for drugs that transited Mexico).
According to US Customs and Border Protection statistics, only 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the northern border last year, compared with more than 21,000 pounds captured at the southwest border. And Canada has already pledged to spend $1 billion on an enhanced border patrol operation.
Which is what Justin Trudeau said in a celebrated speech responding to the tariffs: less than 1% of the fentanyl and 1% of the illegal crossing into the US come from Canada (which NPR included in its article debunking the claim).
CNN does not, however, correct a claim offered by supporters (and the Fact Sheet announcing the tariffs): That Colombia caved after refusing a military transport with deportees.
His supporters insist it works — citing Colombia’s retreat last week, in a showdown over migrant deportations, under the threat of economy-destroying US tariffs.
It didn’t work. At least thus far, deportations have been done via Colombian military planes, not US military transports. And Colombia has loudly announced that none of those being deported were criminals.
Two Colombian air force planes landed Tuesday in Bogota with more than 200 of the migrants, many of them women and children. Petro welcomed them with a post on X, saying they are now “free” and “in a country that loves them.”
Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said none of the 200 Colombians who were returned on Tuesday had criminal records in the U.S. or Colombia.
“Migrants are not criminals,” Petro wrote. “They are human beings who want to work and get ahead in life.”
One of the migrants, José Montaña of Medellín, said they were put in chains on the earlier U.S. flights. “We were shackled from our feet, our ankles to our hips, like criminals,” Montaña said. “There were women whose kids had to see their moms shackled like they were drug traffickers.”
And of course, this entire fiasco is built off a bigger lie: Trump’s claims to be reversing Joe Biden’s policies, and not his own. A mere seven years ago, Trump declared that the revision to NAFTA he negotiated was the best trade deal ever.
That is, Trump is violating his own deal, something else Trudeau emphasized in his comments.
They will violate the free trade agreement that the president and I, along with our Mexican partner, negotiated and signed a few years ago.
And fundamentally, there’s no reason to believe Trump wants to address drug trafficking. One of the first things he did, after all, was to grant a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht. At sentencing, the government tied his trafficking to at least six deaths, including several heroin deaths (and of course he was accused, though never prosecuted, for arranging hit men).
The vast majority of items for sale on Silk Road were illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of Sept. 23, 2013, the Silk Road home page displayed nearly 13,000 listings for controlled substances, listed under such categories as “Cannabis,” “Dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Intoxicants,” “Opioids,” “Precursors,” “Prescription,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” From November 2011 to September 2013, law enforcement agents made more than 60 individual undercover purchases of controlled substances from Silk Road vendors. These purchases included heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD, among other illegal drugs, and were filled by vendors believed to be located in more than ten different countries, including the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and France.
The narcotics distributed on Silk Road have been linked to at least six overdose deaths across the world. These overdose deaths include: Jordan M., a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer, which was logged onto Silk Road at the time, and died as a result of heroin and other prescription drugs that he had ordered from Silk Road; and Preston B., from Perth, Australia, and Alejandro N., from Camino, California, both 16-years-old, died as a result of taking 25i-NBOMe, a powerful synthetic drug designed to mimic LSD (commonly referred to as “N-Bomb”), which was purchased from Silk Road. Additional victims include: Bryan B., a 25-year-old from Boston, Massachusetts and Scott W., a 36-year-old from Australia, who both died as a result of heroin purchased from Silk Road; and Jacob B., a 22-year-old from Australia, who died from health complications that were aggravated by the use of drugs purchased from Silk Road.
Trump is declaring an emergency, including against Canada, solely in an attempt to make an illegal power grab, to defy his own law.
And yet few are pointing to the fact that his emergency is based on inflated claims about fentanyl deaths and wildly false claims about Canada’s involvement in all of that.
Update: Claudia Sheinbaum has already gotten Trump to back down, pausing tariffs for a month. She’ll deploy troops to the border (as Sam Stein noted on Xitter, they have done this repeatedly in the past without tariff threats). Trump will claim to crack down on weapons being trafficked from the US to Mexico. And they’ll continue discussions about security and trade.
