Ep. 2131 - Trump and Musk Bring The CHAINSAW
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What is President Trump's leverage play with Canada?
Well, President Trump's leverage play continues to work. Canada has now caved. President Trump tried to push a 25% tariff against Canada. Canada immediately suggested that they were going to tariff American goods. That would have been much worse for them than for us in any trade war between the United States and Canada. Canada is going to lose. Instead, Justin Trudeau has bent the knee to President Trump. He announced that Canada would appoint a fentanyl czar, list cartels as terrorists, and launch a joint strike force with the United States to combat organized crime, fentanyl trafficking, and money laundering. also announced that he would be deploying 10,000 personnel to the northern border as well.
So yesterday, as we talked about, Mexico caved and said that they would send 10,000 National Guard troops to America's southern border to police for fentanyl and to police for illegal immigration. And now Canada is doing the same. Instead, the sweeping tariffs that Trump was proposing have been put on hold for 30 days, presumably to reach a further agreement. Meanwhile, Beijing, is attempting to figure out how to end around the tariffs that President Trump just put on them. He put a 10% tariff on Chinese goods. Beijing is hitting back by announcing a quote-unquote broad package of economic measures targeting the United States. The fresh duties were announced by China's Ministry of Finance. They levy a 15% tax on certain types of coal and liquefied natural gas and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large displacement cars, and pickup trucks. Now, the problem with all of that is that China is not a massive consumer, for example, of American crude oil. We have plenty of markets all over the world that are perfectly willing to take our liquefied natural gas.
The Ministry of Commerce and China's Customs Administration also announced new export controls immediately effective on more than two dozen metal products and related technologies, including, for example, tungsten, a mineral typically used in industrial and defense applications, as well as tellurium, which can be used to make solar cells. This is according to CNN. Now, here is the thing. Again, the United States, if we need those sorts of materials, can go elsewhere for those sorts of materials. There's not a lot of sting in these Chinese retaliatory measures. So the notion that this is going to radically alter the American economy in any way is unlikely. Prices will go up in certain areas of the American economy, but unlike tariffs on, say, Mexico or Canada,
where Mexico and Canada, Canada's an ally, and Mexico's at least titularly an ally. China is an actual geopolitical enemy of the United States. And so actually having a trade war with China, even if it does some economic damage to the United States, will do much worse economic damage to China. Will President Trump get some sort of concessions that allow him to walk back the tariffs? We'll find out, but they're going to have to be some pretty significant concessions. And President Trump is moving faster than any president of my lifetime to do things. It is astonishing. Astonishing. I've never seen an administration move this quickly to do as many different things as the Trump administration is doing right now. Whether you're talking about walking back support for the UNRWA,
whether you're talking about ending support nationwide for the transing of the children, whether you are talking about ending DEI initiatives all over the country, whether you're talking about reconstituting the Defense Department. By the way, recruitment immediately has skyrocketed since the appointment of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense. We're talking about getting wins at the Panama Canal, where the Panamanian government has now announced it is not going to take place in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative anymore. This administration is pushing so hard, so fast on so many fronts. that it's very, very difficult for any opposition to truly form around any one issue.
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