• United States
• China

March 4, 2025, 1:51 PM View Comments ()

Mark Antony, when he gave a funeral oration for Julius Caesar, acknowledged that “the evil that men do will live after them.” And when it comes to U.S. President Donald Trump and trade, boy did he get that right. 

On March 3, Trump followed through on months, if not years, of threats to levy tariffs on the United States’ three biggest trading partners—Canada, Mexico, and China—with a variety of justifications, from immigration to stopping the trafficking of fentanyl across the northern U.S. border. 

But the main impact so far has been to tank the U.S. stock market. What’s difficult to understand, if you’re an economist, small-business owner, farmer, or U.S. ally, is why injecting atherosclerosis into the world’s most important trading relationships would be a good thing. Trump himself clearly doesn’t understand it; he still thinks foreign countries pay U.S. import duties, rather than the importer, and evidently can’t be convinced otherwise. 

The real reason that Trump is slapping Herbert Hoover-like tariffs on the United States’ closest trade partners is not because it will replace the income tax (it won’t), or because the 1890s were the golden years (they weren’t), or because of Canada’s allegedly lax border control. 

The real reason is far more likely. It’s because Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained the facts of the war in Ukraine after Trump’s recent tantrum, and he doesn’t cease repeating that economic coercion will not ever make Canada the 51st U.S. state. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has similarly drawn Trump’s ire, despite efforts to better police the border, by mocking the U.S. president’s attempts at cartography.

It is impossible to distance Trump’s tariffs on partners and allies—and yes, also on China—from his distancing of Washington from partners and allies otherwise. His administration’s abuse of Ukraine has already scared Europe so badly that Brussels found ways to pay for defense. His threats of further economic warfare against a continent struggling with low productivity, dwindling exports, and an actual war not that far away only add to the joy in Brussels. 

One could document all the ways in which Trump’s tariffs will tax U.S. households, make homebuilding pricier, make gasoline more expensive, juice inflation, wreck farmers’ planting season and their main export markets, destroy the integrated U.S.-Mexico-Canada auto market, compel higher interest rates, and ensure slower economic growth. But economists, businesspeople, and everyone else already did that, before the election, to no avail.

Antony defended his dictatorial former boss: “I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.” Would that America had it so easy.