Tariffs’ True Tragedy

On The Inevitability Of This Crisis

July 21st, 2011 isn’t a date that would mean much to most people, and in isolation it wasn’t a particularly interesting day. It was a summer Thursday, and so for some reason my mother and I were in the car, and we heard Amy Winehouse’s Rehab on CBC Radio 2. We sung along, went into the Dollarama that was the purpose of that section of our trip, and then thought nothing of it again.

Less than 48 hours later Winehouse died.

Winehouse’s death was a tragedy - such a talented young artist who was very clearly fighting her demons but could also make sure incredible music from them - but it was the worst kind of tragedy in that nobody could claim to be surprised. Obviously it was a shock, but nobody who had listened to Rehab, let alone the rest of her catalogue, could credibly say that they hadn’t worried she was going to die young. That, in many ways, makes it so much worse - we all know she needed help, and yet the people around her, and I mostly mean her fucker of a father, enabled her own destruction. It was avoidable, but it wasn’t avoided.

It’s how I feel about America now, because it’s the same situation at a different scale. The crisis Canada and the US (as well as Mexico) face was entirely predictable, even if the specifics weren’t. Americans have now twice elected a failed businessman who decided to salvage his reputation by cosplaying a businessman on TV to the highest office in the land and to the most important position in the world. That they got away with it once - or at least enough of them were willing to pretend that they did, despite his incompetence, corruption, and callous disregard for humanity - lulled Americans into a false sense of security about him. But this was always the consequence of electing a man so singularly unfit for the job, and now we’re here.

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When Trump announced these tariffs in the fall, I was one of the people who wanted the Liberals to engage with the stated premise of Trump’s illogic. It was always bullshit, but if Trump wanted a border security package and some commission into drugs or something then give him what he wants. Is it a dumb premise to buy into? Sure, but the money that we’ve spent so far on border security and we could get away with if this was a rational negotiation would be a pittance compared to the costs of a trade war. If this was a rational negotiation.

The fact that Donald Trump has at no point given us a list of action items, deliverables, or any sort of metric that would be deemed a success gives the game away. There’s been a lot of talk about Canada and the US as friends and neighbours and the relationship between nations, so it’s fitting to use a relationship metaphor.

What those who want to blame Justin Trudeau are doing is ignoring a basic point - Trump isn’t trying to get to yes.

When you care about somebody, when you want to be married to or in business with or just generally in their lives, you find a way to get to yes. You make sacrifices, you accept half a loaf, you let things go because you’re trying to make this work, you’re trying to get to yes. Donald Trump isn’t. Trump’s America, where he’s just refusing to respond to calls from either Trudeau or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, isn’t trying to get to yes. They don’t want a deal on fentanyl, they want to use that fig leaf as an excuse to do a thing they want to do.

Go back and watch the 2016 Debates against Clinton, and you realize that these tariffs are what Donald Trump genuinely thinks will lead to a revitalization of the American Midwest and American strength. It’s a bad set of ideas, in a lot of ways, but his argument is at least internally coherent - and they make these decisions make a lot of sense. This is genuinely what he thinks is good for the US economy.

It’s far more reasonable to walk out of watching those debate clips back again thinking that it’s a miracle we got through the USMCA process essentially unscathed, and that’s my general take. We somehow got Trump to back down once, a feat that’s essentially a miracle given his seemingly sincere belief that NAFTA was a disaster. But the idea that these tariffs were some leverage play gone awry fails for the same reasons almost any conspiracy or big brained idea does - people don’t want to admit people on their side or that they like make insanely stupid decisions or hold stupid beliefs.

The number of Trudeau deadenders who claimed that the Foreign Interference report would somehow lead to the end of Poilievre or was why Trudeau wasn’t resigning couldn’t reckon with the idea Trudeau’s refusal to step down wasn’t just insane stupidity. In the same way, those trying to blame Trudeau don’t actually sincerely think Trudeau is to blame, but they have been negatively polarized into liking Trump. They know tariffs are a bullshit idea, that there’s no border or fentanyl crisis flowing south, and that Trump is batshit for this. But they can’t admit that to themselves, so they make up comforting fictions to explain it. Hell, the Dallas Mavericks made a trade last night so stupid everybody thought Shams Charania had to be hacked to post it, because none of us could bring ourselves to think they’d do something so stupid. The thing about a comforting fiction, however? It’s still fiction.

The answer is that this is what Donald Trump wants to do, and the American people signed up for this. They knew what he would do, who he was, what he wanted power for, and they willingly signed up for this shit. We are collateral damage, and that’s the price we pay for the sins of the past and our American reliance, but short of building a time machine and telling Alberta to build pipelines to tidewater in the late 90s and early 00s that made no sense when they were proposed but just so happened to go online with the price surges of the mid to late 2000s there’s not a lot we can do now to fix that problem imminently. But we can tell the truth about why we’re here.

Donald Trump wants a trade war. He wants one because he thinks that this is how he redeems America’s greatest recent failure. He is why Americans and Canadians are going to suffer. If you want to blame someone else for his decisions, blame the voters who let a dangerously unqualified cult leader who already tried to overthrow an election once back into office. Justin Trudeau can be blamed for a hell of a lot of shit, and this site’s archive is full of articles that haven’t exactly made me friends inside the PMO or Trudeau’s orbit. But I won’t let people use political disagreements to lie about my country’s PM in a moment of crisis.

We are where we are because of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people. This was inevitable the moment they elected him again, and it is the fault of them and them alone. You can be mad about it, you can be sad about it, you can burn inside about it, but don’t pretend you’re shocked by the outcome we’ve all known was coming, whether we wanted to admit it or not.

Let’s just hope the tears are short lived enough that we don’t find out if they dry on their own or not.