Trump’s Easy To Win Trade War
Those who follow this blog have likely noticed that I have little desire to merely regurgitate the news of the previous day. However, on occasion it seems worthwhile to simply point out what happened recently and discuss it.
To start the month off, Trump got the country he runs into a short lived trade war with the nations of Mexico and Canada. On 2/1/2025, Donald Trump promised to implement a twenty-five percent tariff on those two countries along with a ten percent tariff on China. However, such protectionism has been put on pause, with the BBC reporting on 2/3/2025 that Trump “has agreed to hold off imposing” them “for 30 days.” The reason being that both Canada and Mexico have agreed to do something Trump wants — with both Canada and Mexico saying they will put more effort into protecting its border and while Canada promises to make a greater attempt to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. Never mind that very little fentanyl comes into the United States from Canada, or that both nations were already planning on doing these actions long before Donald Trump asked them to, the White House has been claiming this as a big win.
Mind you, it is important to remember that fentanyl is only an issue because of domestic drug prohibition, which caused those who make heroin to begin using the powerful substance as a cheap filler. Trump actually advocated for the ending of the War on Drugs in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, but his presidency saw him putting both Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr in the charge of the Justice Department at separate points during his first term, two people that had spent their careers in politics doing nothing but advocating for the expansion of the very thing Trump once called to terminate.
One is also forced to ponder how exactly Trump thinks tariffs are supposed to work. Remember, according to those on the protectionist right, tariffs are good — see Bob Rubin’s 2/3/2025 column “Making America Strong Again: How Tariffs Fuel Economic Growth” which points out various benefits protectionism has on the economy. However, if tariffs are truly such a good idea, why exactly should we change our plan to implement them when other countries do what we want? Again, given all Trump got was essentially what the two nations planned on doing in the first place, it seems like the administration is looking for any excuse possible to not put their agenda in place.
I also want to point out that Rubin’s column is full of utter nonsense, take this statement:
No, protectionist policies are equally as reliant on outside factors as income taxes are — if countries stop trading, for example, tariff revenue begins to decrease. Rubin supplies no evidence for the claim that tariff revenue is more consistent than that gotten from income taxes. The column goes on to praise Trump’s first term economic policies, specifically crediting them with the steel industry in the country making a come back:
The problem is that, although those policies did benefit the steel industry, they ended up suppressing the economy elsewhere through making steel more expensive. Rubin never makes an argument as to why we should prioritize domestic steel over every other industry in the country, nor does it properly attempt to take the negative effects of protectionism into account.
The rest of the article discusses the strategic benefits of tariffs in terms of convincing other nations to negotiate. However, that is not a defense of tariffs as a policy, that is simply arguing the threat of them can be politically useful — one could also imagine a situation where the threat of nuclear war is a negotiation tool, but it is hard to argue that is a justification of nuclear war.
The column goes back and fourth between defending tariffs in practice and defending the threat of them when it comes to negotiation, but those are arguments for very different things. And again, if protectionism really is beneficial to the American economy on its own, why exactly are we only doing so on a conditional basis?
The White House needs to figure out its messaging on protectionism if it wants to convince the American people of its policies, although given the authoritarian nature of this administration, it seems increasingly likely they have no desire to do such.
