“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.
One wonders if this is a gambit for maximum chaos to distract from other stuff being done. Musk is not alone here, Peter Thiel is also a key part of this coup d’etatwith his lackeys working as Musk commissars and he’s no friend of democracy either. Thiel also has VP Vance in his pocket so he;s covered both king and heir (like the Duke of Buckingham in the 1600s). Digby has a good summary posted yesterday:
https://digbysblog.net/2025/02/02/musk-juden/
As a side note, given the ridiculous amounts of unaccounted for cash under control of Musk, Thiel and the other broligarchs one wonders if they’re fronting the Putin bot farms to sow more confusion. It will be hard to track through the crypto back channels, but I am curious why Putin is still able to buy stuff when the ruble is in free fall.
Timothy Snyder has also written about how the chaos is a plan and what to do about it: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-destruction
Thanks for mentioning Peter Thiel’s influence. He, to me, may be even more dangerous than Musk or Trmp since he is much less flighty than either.
It should probably be ‘jugend’ not ‘juden’ so someone should alert Digby.
As noted below by Mike Stone at 09:17 it is rare that dictators of this ilk (completely self serving) retire to happy golden years. They either flee in exile or get waxed by angry mobs (Mussolini and Ceaucescu). So far the Kims in the DPRK have avoided that fate but they’re the exception that proves the rule.
Perhaps Ed Walker can do a post on when the tipping point toward revolt is reached in a society when the opportunities for redress are blocked off. Even the American Revolution had as its genesis the ability to redress grievances (including taxation, trials of British officers, etc.).
That could serve as the backstory for a Bourne franchise script…partly because it isn’t the least bit fanciful (the Bourne stories only get fanciful in their action sequences, not in their backstories).
This brings to mind the question that underlies everything going down right now: Will Coney-Barrett and Rogers make amends for directly, predictably enabling the incipient collapse of American society, polity, and jurisprudence — and band together with the liberal ladies to rescind their Trump v US Constitutional desecration? They should be praying for a good cert petition to clear their names.
But maybe they are just two more hollow humans in the story of the shambling demise of the American experiment.
…the point being that maybe the best suits to lean into right now should be those that challenge that ruling, head on. IOW, a ruling this fresh and rife with immediate, catastrophic blowback should *not* be considered settled law.
Color me not surprised that the IEEPA is apparently is not any sort of International based agreement for which – feckless or not – a challenge could be launched.
No, it’s a USA law: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title50/chapter35&edition=prelim
It appears it’s genesis was 1977: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Economic_Powers_Act
Perhaps in another top post it can be discussed what, if any, legal challenges can be made to block Musk and his tech underlings from access/stealing sensitive data from various government agencies. I have to think the standing pool – like maybe all of us – is rather large. But IANAL and am probably wrong on that.
Yes, experts say that so many illegal and unconstitutional actions are being taken now by the Trump administration and Musk. What legal challenges are currently addressing those? Is there some source I can go to that would describe all the current efforts to challenge these actions in court?
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-legal-challenges-trump-administration-actions/
Thank you.
I’m sorry to go O/T, but Elon Musk has to be stopped. Fight back against any and all of this. Here is a link to the Senators not up for re-election until 2029. Call them all. This has to be stopped. What is happening is unconstitutional. https://www.senate.gov/senators/Class_III.htm
I agree with this OT comment. He is very dangerous. And unstable.
From Wired:
“WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.”
Read the whole thing : https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/
I went to the JustSecurity litigation tracker. Very useful. But the only legal action against Musk listed there is to the establishment of DOGE. I would think that giving unlimited access to govt info to unvetted, non-governmental people would be so unconstitutional and so terrifyingly dangerous that there would be immediate legal challenges and very quick judicial holds on these actions. Why hasn’t this happened yet?
“I would think that giving unlimited access to govt info to unvetted, non-governmental people would be so unconstitutional and so terrifyingly dangerous that there would be immediate legal challenges and very quick judicial holds on these actions. Why hasn’t this happened yet?”
Who has standing to file a suit? The people that have been removed have apparently been put on administrative leave, which seems to neatly avoid any immediate recourse to an employment suit.
Don’t apologize. Don’t do it. Comment on the painstaking work Marcy has done, not what you want her to do.
Anyone whose data was breached by the US Government and/or DOGE should have standing. They have close to all Government information for almost all people. The penalties might only be fines, but surely ACLU or their brethren could demand an immediate shutdown based on magnitude of the breaches.
Musk is the real power behind all this, trump simply signs what’s put in front of him. He’s got what he wants, the appearance of being a strongman. He got control of the presidency for a paltry 290 million
Their is clearly a coup taking place by Elmo and Thiel. They have advocated for this in public for some time. The part that I do not get with these people is that based on history no fascist leader ever escape the most horrible of outcomes. While they do cause immense harm to the people in society, their endings are always very bad. Do they not have any understanding of history?
Are you kidding? Trump knows more about history than anybody.
https://patch.com/district-columbia/washingtondc/president-trumps-golf-course-memorializes-fake-civil-war-battle
When Trump was told that local historians found the memorial to be complete fiction, he countered: “How would they know that? Were they there?”
Silk Road founder and convicted online drug kingpin, Ross Ulbricht, was pardoned by trump.
curious action for one fighting the “flood of illegal drugs into the US”
When I read Project 2025 last summer, I could only do it with a couple of specific questions in mind. These were how it presented and suggested responses to the death penalty controversy and the addiction crisis. Addiction had once been a surefire talking point, so I expected to find at least some policy proposals addressing it.
Nope. These folks’ sole response to a nationwide problem came down to a single sentence contained within yet another paragraph–one of many–about the southern border. Stopping immigration, apparently, will magically disappear all America’s addiction problems. No matter the (unacknowledged) fact that most fentanyl is brought across that border by US citizens. And absolutely NO mention of the myriad complexities involved in actually treating addiction.
“Drugs” are just another rightwing rallying cry designed to induce “the base” to vote against their own interests, and support the long game of a party whose only true fealty is to the very rich. The blaring hypocrisy of the Ross Ulbricht pardon? That base will easily be convinced that we are purveying “fake news” again.
Is “Mexica” (with an “a”) in the first line a typo, or is there a reason for spelling it that way?
I love Chrystia Freeland. She has a great bio too. Wish she lived in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXbVmfAKsY
“Utter madness’: Canadian PM candidate slams Trump’s tariffs”
Unfortunately she destabilized the liberal party and paved the way for the maple MAGA to grab power ahead of the scheduled election. If she hadn’t done that she would be in position to act on the advice she’s giving now.
Citations please. So, does this mean you won’t be voting for her?
Wiki:
“A political crisis emerged in Canada after Chrystia Freeland, the minister of finance and deputy prime minister, resigned from Cabinet on 16 December 2024.[1] The events “sent shockwaves” through Canadian politics, leading to calls for Trudeau to resign.[2] On 6 January 2025, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his pending resignation as leader of the Liberal Party and as the prime minister of Canada.[3] He also asked Governor General Mary Simon to prorogue Parliament until March.[4][5]”
If she wins the leadership contest she will get the liberal vote, but very grudgingly so in some cases.
Trudeau was headed for a third, possibly fourth place finish in a forced election this month, or March at the latest.
Freeland’s resignation triggered a domino effect that forced Trudeau’s resignation and prorogation of Parliament, which forestalled a no confidence vote and snap election.
Now the liberals have a chance to regroup, elect Carney as their new leader, which will hopefully delay an election for a little while, so Carney can “axe the tax” himself and remove the Conservatives’ slogan and solitary campaign issue (other than hating Trudeau).
The Conservatives were running 20+ points ahead of the Liberals in polls before Trudeau resigned; last week, it was a dead heat.
Would it be an instance of Godwin’s Law to point out that this is exactly the National Socialist playbook? Declare a spurious emergency; invoke “emergency powers” to deal with it; and never go back to non-emergency status. As others up-thread have pointed out, Musk and Co are already using this as cover for their own purposes.
The Canadian government has already put lists online of US products which Canadians should avoid buying (though it’s too bureaucratic to be immediately useful), and there are a lot of products US manufacturers need the delivery of which will begin to slow down. So yeah, recession is probable. I don’t get why US media outlets are so blasé about all this.
This also touches on the UK since while Canada is independent she is still in the Commonwealth with a Governor-General representing Charles III.
Canadian here. Wouldn’t depend on Charlie for anything. This type of “fight” just isn’t part of his skill set. He also won’t want to be involved because if he looses or is ignored, he will look less than majestic. G.B. won’t do much because they don’t want Trump’s attention to wander towards them.
As to the Commonwealth, it gets together for their Games every few years, but if assistance was seriously needed I wouldn’t hold my breath. The only two you could count on would be N.Z. and Australia. India, their government is not to be trusted. There is the no small matter of the murder of a Sikh activist at one of the Surrey Gurudwara. Most are of the opinion the murder was at the request of the Indian government. They aren’t keen on Sikh activists and Canada has a number of them. B.C. is/was the home for some of those who allegedly participated in the bombing of the Air India flight.
Scott_in_MI said “Who has standing to file a suit? The people that have been removed have apparently been put on administrative leave, which seems to neatly avoid any immediate recourse to an employment suit.” Good point.
I am not a legal expert so let me ask some dumb follow-up questions. Apparently these unauthorized (?) individuals now have access to lots of private information including social security numbers that they could potentially abuse in some way. Do people who have SSNs in those files have standing? Does Lutheran Social Services, which Musk is apparently shutting down payments to, have standing? Do the people who are served by Lutheran Social Services have standing? Aren’t there lots of potential individuals and groups who would have standing?
The legal and news impact low hanging fruit for the ELCA and Lutheran Family Services would be veterans receiving services. Especially, those in nursing homes.
It would be good if politicians and pundits pointed out the recent history of tariffs in Trmp’s first term. His trade war with China resulted in a bailout for farmers that cost more than the tariffs brought in. Those retaliatory tariffs from China are still in effect but held in abeyance.
Odd how recent history seems to have been forgotten, so actively.
From Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-mexico-is-serious-canada-appears-have-misunderstood-trumps-executive-2025-02-03/
Oooorrr… perhaps Hassett and other bootlickers have misunderstood that they have alienated and enraged an entire country that has been a close trading partner and ally of the U.S. for decades?
Trump threatened tariffs on Canada for weeks, but gave changing, vague excuses for why they would be imposed. His excuse makes sense for Mexico but is preposterous for Canada. In the two weeks since his inauguration, Trump did not speak once with Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau, despite Trudeau’s attempts to reach him. Canada made efforts to secure its border, as Trump had demanded. But the U.S. gov’t seemed uninterested in those efforts.
Trump was warned repeatedly that the imposition of tariffs would damage both economies, and the long and deep cooperation between the U.S. and Canada.
On Friday, Trump was asked what more Canada could do to avoid the imposition of tariffs, and he said Nothing. On Saturday, he signed and announced the tariffs—still without having spoken once to Trudeau—and also spent several hours at his golf course.
Does Trump imagine he can flick a switch and undo the damage he has done? I suspect it is permanent, because Canadians are not going to ever forgive this huge betrayal.