Trump spent three days telling everyone he had a deal with Canada. Posted about it on Truth Social. Floated resurrecting a dead oil pipeline as a victory lap. Then late last night, the talks collapsed, and at midnight 50% tariffs landed on $20 billion in Canadian imports — lumber, electronics, clothing, furniture, dairy, booze. The USMCA, the trade agreement he personally signed in 2020, says none of this is supposed to happen. His trade rep blamed Canada for “walk backs.” Carney said the US changed terms at the last minute that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” One of them negotiated for three days. The other one posted.
The exemptions tell you who this is for. Oil, gas, and potash are untouched — the raw materials American industry can’t function without stay cheap. Everything else gets the 50% hammer. The stuff that employs workers in towns nobody in Washington has heard of — the lumber American contractors need, the dairy American families buy at the grocery store. A tariff is a tax collected at the American border from an American importer and passed to an American consumer. Trump knows this. He does not care. Carney said Canada will match it dollar for dollar, and that’s the right call, and it’s also the one where working people on both sides eat every cent of it.
The tell was Tuesday night, when Trump announced that “the great Keystone XL Pipeline, long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden, may be awoken from the grave.” He dropped that mid-negotiation, at 10pm, like he was doing Canada a favour. A pipeline killed for environmental reasons five years ago, offered back as a bargaining chip by a man who thinks climate change is a hoax. That’s not trade policy. That’s a landlord raising your rent and pointing at the hallway light he fixed.