After four years of abuse from the socialists to our north and south under the feckless Biden administration, President Trump has indicated to the leaders of Canada and Mexico that the United States will no longer be played for a chump.
In a series of phone calls since taking office, Trump has informed both Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the U.S. government will no longer tolerate uncontrolled borders and unfair trade practices. While the Biden Administration spent four years actively encouraging the former and refusing to address the latter, Trump made it unambiguously clear that those days are at an end.
It’s about time. Despite the risible fears of the Wall Street Journal free-trade-uber-alles crowd about the potentially devastating effects of a “trade war” on U.S. consumers, in reality, the United States holds all the cards, as the president likes to say. The U.S. takes 80 percent of Mexican exports and 76 percent of Canada’s. With economies less than a tenth the size of the United States, they depend on access to the lucrative U.S. consumer market almost completely. But because our political leadership class has stubbornly refused to utilize the unparalleled leverage of access to the American market of consumers because of their discredited commitment to “free trade” ideology, the rest of the world has felt free to erect all sorts of trade barriers to U.S. products with zero fear of retaliation.
From tariffs and regulatory barriers to export subsidies for their domestic industries, other nations constantly protect their own industries and keep our products out of their markets. Few Americans are aware, for instance, that Canada has an average tariff on U.S. dairy products of over 200 percent, that India really charges us auto tariffs of over 100 percent, that China has a tariff burden on our products that is twice ours, and that South Korea’s tariff on American products is four times higher. The result is a record U.S. trade deficit of almost $1 trillion a year.
The U.S. media has almost uniformly ignored these massive inequities, while regularly sounding the alarm about the threat of “runaway inflation” for American consumers should Trump enact even reciprocal tariffs that treat other nations’ products equivalently to their treatment of ours. This despite the fact that tariffs imposed by Trump in his first term (including 10 percent tariffs on Chinese products and higher tariffs on selected products like steel, aluminum, and washing machines) had no discernible effect on consumer prices or inflation, which was at record lows in spite of robust growth of GDP and wages. One would think that the usual suspects would be embarrassed to repeat the same doom-and-gloom predictions of inflation after their sorry record of failure as prognosticators, but, as usual, getting things exactly wrong seems to carry no price for our chattering class.
It’s not only recent history that our opinion-makers studiously ignore; it’s the fact that for most of our history as a nation, tariffs have been an astounding success. Until the U.S. embraced globalist “free trade” policies in the 1970s, we maintained extremely high tariffs, practically prohibiting the import of many foreign products. Both GDP and consumption grew far in excess of the global average, and the U.S. became the unrivaled industrial power in the world. Since our departure from “protectionist” trade policies, our economic and wage growth has been slower than ever before in our history, and inflation has been higher.
Predictably, Trump’s get-tough trade posture with our leftist bully neighbors has already yielded fruit. Despite a bit of face-saving saber-rattling from the leaders of both countries, Trump has already achieved two of his major goals: the movement of 10,000 Mexican troops to their northern border to contain drug trafficking and get the cartels in check and a public discussion of how both countries have gone around agreements to impose trade barriers on U.S. products while turning a blind eye to the steady flow of illegal fentanyl that is costing hundreds of thousands of American lives. Both Mexico’s Sheinbaum and Canada’s Trudeau are attempting to boost their falling poll numbers by playing tough with Trump but will inevitably back down when their domestic producers begin to balk in a few short months. The truly desperate Trudeau has suspended elections in the hopes that using the conflict with Trump will allow him to cling to power by motivating his leftist, anti-Trump base, but that gambit is likely to fail as Trump’s popularity even north of the border continues to increase.
As Vice President Vance has reiterated, the administration’s longer-term policy is to use the tariff lever to restore American industry and to bring investment and jobs back to our shores. Despite the conventional wisdom, we are likely to see clear signs of both of these hoped-for trends before the midterms in 2026. In the meantime, one can only take some pleasure in the slapdown of our nettlesome socialist neighbors, who have spent most of the last decade disparaging Trump and lecturing us about threats to democracy in the U.S., which is rich coming from a Mexican government that has ceded effective control of their country to the drug cartels and a Canadian government that has effectively crushed freedom of speech. Trump has signaled that the days of taking advantage of naive leaders in the U.S. who refuse to defend the interests of our nation and its citizens are now over.
Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration.