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Doom scrolling Trump’s tariffs [1]

['Thom Hartmann', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Ice Blue']

Date: 2026-09-09  

We’re only halfway through the last four years of a decade-long con.

tariff plan is going well I see — Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T19:36:47.999Z

Just consider all the ways Trump’s tariff obsession has failed.

First, tariffs aren’t being paid by other countries, as the president has asserted repeatedly. Trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day ordering certain agencies to explore the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariff-related money from other countries. As the president stated in his inaugural address, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Of course, American companies and individuals pay his tariffs, not other countries. Indeed, the Reason Foundation claims his tariffs have amounted to the largest tax increase on Americans since 1993.

For example, Ford Motor Company announced in February that it paid about $2 billion in Trump’s tariffs for 2025 and expected to pay another $2 billion in 2026.

General Motors also had to pay about $2 billion in 2025. And yet Trump said during his recent trip to Michigan, “It’s amazing what tariffs are doing for GM.” He should have said “doing to GM.”

Another example: More than a thousand companies — including FedEx, Costco and Revlon — filed suit at the U.S. Court of International Trade to recoup their portion of the $133 billion they paid in Trump tariffs. As USA Today reported in June, “Corporate America stands to receive billions in tariff refunds from the U.S. government.”

Trump is making numbers up out of thin air. The last time there was a trade deficit with Canada was 1985. Trump's tariff policy continues to fail. Canada is laughing at Trump and retaliating, and we pay the price for his tariff fetish.#Trump #Canada #tariffs #tradedeficit — Bill Addis (@paidprotester.bsky.social) 2026-08-31T14:04:28.247Z

Upon returning to office, Trump immediately took a Sharpie to “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country, with the most advanced protections for workers ever developed” — also known as the USMCA, which he himself negotiated in 2018 as a replacement for NAFTA

“We don’t need anything that Canada has, we don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” he blustered in June. “We don’t need their cars, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need anything that they have.”

Canada supplies roughly 80 percent of the potash American farmers use as fertilizer. Midwest refineries are built to run on heavy Canadian sour crude, and the pipeline infrastructure simply doesn’t exist to swap in lighter, American-produced oil from places like Texas. Canadian hydropower fuels a significant share of the electricity supply in New York and New England. And the auto and auto parts trade between the two countries, already strained by Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, is about as integrated as two countries’ economies get.

And yet Trump negotiated as if Canadians could never say no, even as he demanded crippling concessions and lobbed humiliating insults at our stalwart ally. Trade talks were at an impasse after 18 months of threats and taunts about annexing our northern neighbor. But in July the prospect of an additional 50 percent levy on a sprawling list of Canadian goods forced Canadians back to the negotiating table. And last week, with the major principles agreed, Trump congratulated both sides for striking “a very fair deal.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/9/800095791/community/tariff-war/

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