Trump’s tariffs threats are all sizzle and no steak — at least, we’d better hope so 

Donald Trump’s announcement on Monday night that he would slap 25 percent tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico was in many ways a classic Trump play.

The president-elect’s Truth Social post offered plenty of bombast and chest-pounding but little guidance on how those tariffs would work — likely because Trump hasn’t thought that far ahead. But the post did succeed in putting Trump back at the top of the headlines as cable news outlets and social media pundits raced to offer breathless coverage of Trump’s latest scheme.  

Our collective experience with Trump’s first term means the media should be asking a question it once again failed to broach: What if Trump is just making it all up?

As with his healthcare plan (promised “in the next week or so” back in September 2020) and infrastructure reform (promised on seven separate occasions), there’s a good chance Trump’s tariff threat is more hot air from a politician who specializes in over-promising and under-delivering.

Naturally, Trump’s statement includes enough wiggle room to justify never actually implementing his threatened tariffs. In his post, Trump claimed the tariffs would remain until Canada and Mexico jointly cut off the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. In reality, that means the president-elect’s own loyalists at the Border Patrol — and ultimately Trump himself — will be in charge of deciding when he’s won his fight against fentanyl.  

We should greet any news of a final victory over fentanyl with deep skepticism. Trump’s history of repeatedly declaring victory over COVID-19 in 2020 is a reminder that he isn’t above declaring a victory simply for the quick dopamine hit of feeling like a winner. Trump’s upcoming trade war, much like his disastrous first-term standoff with China, will be decided more by the whims of Trump’s ego than by any actual, measurable data.  

Any reduction in U.S.-bound fentanyl is a good thing, but even sealing the nation’s northern and southern borders won’t fix the problem — not when China is producing record amounts of fentanyl and increasingly shipping it directly into the United States. Trump is now threatening China with up to 60 percent tariffs on imported goods, despite the fact that his last attempt at a Chinese trade war ended with American consumers and businesses paying $48 billion more than they needed to for imported goods. So much for learning from past mistakes. 

Trump is also still fuming about how completely China played his administration during their first trade battle. Despite Trump crowing that he’d cornered China into purchasing $200 billion in American goods, data from 2022 shows that never happened. To date, China has only purchased about half of what they promised, leaving American businesses holding the bag for Trump’s negotiating fumbles. 

In another post on Truth Social, Trump owned up to another failure, admitting that China still hasn’t instituted the death penalty for fentanyl traffickers — one of the core goals of his pressure campaign. If this is what we can expect from a second round of trade wars, this time involving Mexico and Canada, American consumers should buckle up for an especially painful few years. 

Trump is also hindered from implementing his ruinous tariffs by an unexpected opponent: His past self. Trump in 2020 negotiated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which largely replaced NAFTA with a new set of trade rules. Any effort to impose the tariffs Trump is proposing would violate the language of Trump’s own deal, meaning Trump will either need to scrap his own signature agreement or renegotiate the tariff restrictions first. Foreign leaders in Mexico and Canada certainly won’t be rushing to Washington for that meeting. 

“The [tariffs] will violate #TMEC and will put North American relations in a downward spiral,” former Mexican Ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan posted on X. “We will see how both governments, as well as American consumers and companies, react.” 

Trump’s rickety concept-of-a-plan trade war is designed to pick up easy media headlines and distract from the growing scandals surrounding his cadre of Cabinet nominees accused of sex crimes. There’s no meat on the bones. Even if there was, Trump’s own past agreements make implementing those tariffs nearly impossible without years of courtroom wrangling.  

In other words, Trump’s latest trade war is most likely destined to become another oft-promised and never detailed dream.

Trump’s return to the White House marks a return to the magical thinking that defined his failed first term, except now his plans threaten to raise costs on American consumers who are already hurting from high inflation. Now Trump faces the choice of looking like a failure for promising tariffs he can’t deliver or enacting tariffs that financially wreck his voter base. How familiar it all feels. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.