Dem
47
GOP
53
A day after Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, he changed his mind and delayed the implementation of the tariffs for cars by a month. He did this because the automakers screamed. Since cars and parts go back and forth across the border multiple times during manufacture, the result of levying a tariff on every crossing would have made the cars so expensive that it would be the end of the U.S. auto industry. So, Trump relented, for the moment.
Autos are a big part of the $1.6 trillion in trade with Canada and Mexico. They amount to $345 billion, or 22% of the total. This doesn't mean the tariffs are gone, only that there is a month in which the automakers get a chance to convince Trump that this is a bad idea. They will argue that the tariffs will make European, Japanese, and South Korean cars much cheaper than American cars and will effectively kill off the American car industry. The argument may or may not work, though. Trump is generally not open to listening to facts.
It is not clear what it might take to get Trump to drop the tariffs on cars altogether. He often talks about fentanyl that comes over the border. It would be extremely hard to catch drug smugglers. About 290,000 trucks and 140,000 cars cross from Canada to the U.S. every day. Thoroughly inspecting them all, including under each of them, would be impossible. About 35,000 trucks and 43,000 cars enter from Mexico every day. Even inspecting all of these would be impossible. And even if that fentanyl pathway was shut down, smugglers would start using drones to make cross-border deliveries. And even if all drones were shot down and no fentanyl came across the border, the result would be that underground fentanyl factories would spring up in the U.S. as long as there was demand for the product. Though at least that would create a new domestic industry and provide work for American criminals rather than Canadian criminals or Mexican criminals, we suppose. A job is a job, after all. (V)