A livid Donald Trump took America’s trade war against Canada to the next level in a Tuesday temper tantrum on social media, as he announced new tariffs and threatened to make the country pay a price “so big that it will be read about in History Books.”
Starting Wednesday, America will double its tax on incoming steel and aluminum from the northern ally, up from 25 to 50 percent, Trump said in an early morning Tuesday post.
The president announced his retaliation after Ontario’s premier refused to back down on adding a 25 percent surcharge on electricity to three U.S. states, threatening to cut off electricity to America entirely if the trade war didn’t end.
ADVERTISEMENT
Calling Canada “ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD‚” Trump whined about the new electricity charge as well as Canada’s taxes on American dairy.
“If other egregious, long time Tariffs are not likewise dropped by Canada, I will substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada,” Trump threatened. “Those cars can easily be made in the USA!”
Trump did offer Canada an out: “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” he wrote.
“This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear,” the president added. “Canadians taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever.”
That apparently wasn’t enough for Trump to get the anger out of his system. An hour later, the president raged even harder at the situation in another post.
“Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area?” Trump wrote. “Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?”
He vowed that Canada would “pay a financial price for this so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come!”
In a separate post on Monday night, Trump, who initiated the trade war against Canada, accused the northern country of being a “tariff abuser.”
Since first announcing a 25 percent tariff on all goods from American allies Mexico and Canada (as well as a smaller tax Chinese imports) soon after entering office, Trump has repeatedly backed off and then ratcheted up the trade war.
He delayed the tariffs by a month shortly after announcing them early in February. When the tariffs took effect at the beginning of March, both Canada and Mexico promptly instituted their own retaliatory tariffs. The stock market was sent plummeting, and Trump agreed to end taxes on goods protected by the free trade agreement between the three countries—which removed the majority of the taxes.
Trump’s latest tariffs come after the Dow Jones, which tracks the stock market’s overall performance, dropped more than 1,000 points on Monday, over 2 percent.
The White House has downplayed the precipitous fall, attributing it to the “animal spirits of the stock market.”
While Trump has said that the taxes are meant to stanch the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. (less than 1 percent of which is seized at the northern border), his barb about Canada becoming the 51st state seemed to support departing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s perspective about his true motivation.
After calling the trade war “dumb” at a press conference last week, Trudeau added, “What he wants to see is a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that will make it easier to annex us.”
Trudeau said, though, that he wasn’t worried that Trump’s plan would work: “That’s never going to happen. We will never be the 51st state.”
Trudeau, who announced that he was stepping down as the Liberal Party leader in January, is set to be replaced by 59-year-old economist Mark Carney, who won the party’s election on Sunday.
