How Trump Lost His Trade War [David Frum, The Atlantic, Feb 06, 2025] When the U.S. breaks its treaties, only China wins.
"New York City bankers learned 50 years ago that a Trump deal was worthless. Five years ago, Canada and Mexico made the mistake of trusting Trump's signature on a trade treaty. Now they are learning too." David Frum @davidfrum.bsky.social
"Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:
American tariffs hurt Americans.
President Donald Trump has always insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners, that they put free money into the U.S. Treasury. Trump’s week-long tariff war confirmed that nobody else in the U.S. government or in American business believes him. The National Association of Home Builders published a letter to the president predicting that his tariffs would raise the cost of housing construction. Automobile stocks slumped because investors expected Trump’s tariffs to add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new vehicle. The senior Republican in the Senate publicly pleaded for potash to be exempted from tariffs so as not to increase fertilizer prices for his farm constituents, belying Trump’s claim that the higher prices would be paid by the exporters.
Tariffs beget retaliatory tariffs.
When Trump paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those countries halted their retaliatory actions. But China is proceeding with a range of tariffs against U.S. exports, reserving more retaliation for later. Americans are already paying for previous rounds of Trump trade actions against China. In the first Trump presidency, China cut its purchases of U.S. soybeans by 75 percent over a single year in 2018. Brazil in 2018 overtook the United States as the world’s largest soybean producer. During the campaign of 2024, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lamented that the United States had become a net importer of food. He omitted to mention that a reason for this status was precisely the harm done to U.S. farm exports by Trump’s first-term tariffs.
There’s not much point in negotiating trade treaties with the United States.
Trump renegotiated NAFTA during his first term, replacing it with his USMCA deal. Now, in his second term, he has reneged on that. Trump’s version of NAFTA offered a range of legal ways to terminate the agreement; he did not use any of them. He did not even pretend that Canada or Mexico had somehow defaulted on their end of the bargain. He simply ignored the deal and proceeded with his tariffs under a series of contradictory excuses.
Days earlier, Trump had issued a flurry of threats against Colombia, which also has a trade agreement with the United States. Again, Trump ignored all the legalities of the treaty; again, he used trade as a weapon to resolve nontrade disagreements.
Mexico and Canada have oriented their economies to the U.S. under first NAFTA and then USMCA. That probably will not alter even after Trump’s episode of blackmail. But other countries, farther away, may wonder whether there’s any point in signing deals with such a bad-faith partner as the United States has become.
“Friend-shoring” is a fiction.
As relations have worsened between the United States and China, many in the U.S. government have looked to friend-shoring as a way to keep most of the benefits of free trade. The idea is to redirect U.S. purchasing power away from hostile China and toward more trustworthy partners. The assumption behind the term is that those partners will gladly trust the United States.
Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies in Congress have threatened unilateral military action against Mexico; Trump himself indulges in speculation about the forced annexation of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and about absorbing Canada as a 51st state.
Maybe that’s all just a lot of ugly talk. But the president has made clear that so-called friendship with the United States does not ensure anything for America’s partners: not trade access, not the security of treaties, not even their territorial integrity and national independence.
Friend-shoring imagined extending trade with American allies. Trump-shoring means that today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy, without cause or even warning.
Instability is the future.
Trump has now allowed North American trade a 30-day reprieve. His supporters want to claim that he won big concessions worth all the tumult he caused. Such claims are transparently untrue. Canada had made its big proposals for more cooperation on border issues back in December. In any case, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has observed, illegal drugs are much more likely to flow north into Canada than south from Canada. Mexico’s offer to (once again) shift National Guard units to the border from other duties inside the country is generally recognized as symbolic. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page correctly identified the embarrassing truth in a headline on Monday: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.”
Trump is a uniquely emotionally needy president, prone to impulsive vindictiveness.
In 2019, Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney forbade Homeland Secretary Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss threats to the integrity of the 2020 election. Such discussions upset Trump, The New York Times reported, by reminding him of questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election. In mid-November 2020, Trump refused to hear or think more about the coronavirus pandemic even as fatalities spiked to their peak. An aide explained to The Washington Post that Trump was “just done with COVID … It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” For two weeks after the election of 2020, he forbade his administration to cooperate with the transition process and denied Joe Biden’s team access to information and the funds required by law.
As Trump confronts derision about his splendid little trade war of February 2025, will he lash out again? And how is any business of any size supposed to plan for the future when the president creates economic crises to act out his ravenous ego needs?
“America First” makes it safer not to be America’s ally.
In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion, only slightly less. Yet it was Canada, not Vietnam or Thailand, that Trump threatened with tariffs.
One difference: Canada is as a rule closely aligned with the United States. By geography, by history, by ideology, Canada has few geopolitical options. Vietnam and Thailand, however, have worked hard to balance their relationships with the two greatest powers, and hostile U.S. action against either could swing that country toward China, away from the United States.
A lesson of Trump’s trade war that all the world will hear: Countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump. Countries such as Vietnam and Thailand that carefully navigate between the two great economic powers without making undue commitments maximize their security and their dignity.
To reward non-aligned countries and punish U.S.-aligned ones might seem a reckless, even a perverse, choice by a U.S. president. But that’s the president Americans have, and the choice he has made for them."
You just have to love this stuff. Canada and Mexico played Trump; Trump played MAGA; Fox plays MAGA; MAGAs play each other. It’s just like Casino man Trump playing the banks and his investors in the past. As George W. bush said, “ Fool me once, shame on you;fool me twice and I get a MAGA hat”
Hah! This one is not at all surprised at The (Daily) Tory Mail's claim of exclusivity for "discovering the recirculation of video" featuring Duffy's dangly bits. They are, after all, extremely proud long-wallowing members of the Fleet Street gutter press.
No question that Trump is self-destructing. Caving on the tariffs may head off some of the damage, but not for long. Trump took an oath to defend the nation against all enemies, domestic and foreign. Then he handed the keys to the treasury and civil service to Elon Musk, whose previous brainstorm involved the emasculation of Twitter, for which he had just after he had paid a small fortune for it. Musk had previously come close to making a hash out of Tesla. Why not see what he could do with re-engineering the American system of government? In case, Musk couldn't manage to screw things up sufficiently on his own, he hired a bunch of guys, barely out of high school to have their go at government computer systems. Trump is neck deep in what the French generally refer to as merde. He'll probably drown in it, just as he did when he bankrupted Atlantic City. Everyone knew his reputation, they swallowed the cyanide pill anyway. The only question now is whether Mexico and Canada are still offering political asylum.
I like the way you calmly remind us that all actions resisting this hijacking of government is not
hair-on-fire reactions. MSM is such a skeery outrage machine right now.
I have one question for anyone more knowledgeable than me - These smash and grab kids are known entities (thanks Wired). They are breaking Federal law by hacking sensitive information, correct?
Are they going to find out the hard way that this was no Gamer Convention?
I have the same question. I’ve read the word “illegal” or “illegally” describing recent actions taken by Trump and/or Elon in least 10 news articles today; it seems logical (sane) to me that the next sentence should contain some semblance of “and law enforcement/ FBI (ha) responded and _________(did something). At least for Musk and his code-monkeys?
Alternatively, it would be nice to hear that (even though it is a pointless exercise, Dems are calling for impeachment of Trump (and what the hell, Vance).
“Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) say they’re going to roadblock every single Trump nominee until the attack on the U.S. Agency for International Development ends.” What a novel goddamn idea! But why limit it to USAID?
And I'll say it again, MAGAs = beta cucks. They LOVE getting pimped by the Big Hapless Sugardaddy. And these folks are, for all their crowing about winning this last election, a societal minority that's busy further underming itself. (Not that we have the time to wait around for them to finish it up.) So, yes, this tariff charade will "work" for its Trumpian purpose, aka the temporary ego sustenance of its purveyor.
SCOTUS hasn't erased all power but the Presidency. That sounds exciting, but it's not what's actually happened. It's also not going to happen. Meanwhile, Trump himself keeps saying, in writing, that Elon works for him. Which Elon does. Why are you working to unlink that chain? Because it sounds thrilling to say "coup"?
I don't think Trump fully understands what Elon is doing or what laws are being broken---in case you haven't noticed, he isn't all that mentally competent, these days. Also, I'm not into excitement. Tell me who is going to physically stop Elon's guys from continuing to alter the code in the payments system, in the Treasury Department, please. Because I don't know who is going to physically change the situation.
Trump is as mentally capable as he's ever been. But even if he's senile, he is the President of the United States and is ordering these incursions to happen. Why would you want to help him and his enablers transfer that off to Musk? Because it's easier than sticking to the point? And, by the way, what makes you say Musk is altering the Treasury codes? That's not the same thing as looking at them. Do you have a source there? Please name it.
Yes, I do have a source. I read it at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/, in the editor's blog, but he cited Wired, who published it this morning. They probably have the more complete story, and I'll read it later today.
I don't want to displace responsibility from Trump. Far from it. I do want to know who is going to cause Musk's guy's changes to the government payments system to be removed, along with that agent of change. The capitol police, maybe, on judicial orders? What happens when the FBI tells them to stand down, because they're there on Trump's orders? This is where I think things could be mired down for too long.
It's a fascinating possibility, but that's not evidence that it's happened. If it does, it would almost certainly be a crime, and perhaps treason. Our legal system is still very robust, and we still have lots of cops who want to do their proper jobs. I still see no reason not to lay this all, 100 percent, on DJT. If he ever gets charged, he'll surely use the "Musk was a rogue" defense.
Why are we more angry at Musk than Trump? As for our information, Musk already has that. Corporate capitalism is the ultimate data harvesting operation, far beyond what the Treasury has.
How Trump Lost His Trade War [David Frum, The Atlantic, Feb 06, 2025] When the U.S. breaks its treaties, only China wins.
"New York City bankers learned 50 years ago that a Trump deal was worthless. Five years ago, Canada and Mexico made the mistake of trusting Trump's signature on a trade treaty. Now they are learning too." David Frum @davidfrum.bsky.social
"Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:
American tariffs hurt Americans.
President Donald Trump has always insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners, that they put free money into the U.S. Treasury. Trump’s week-long tariff war confirmed that nobody else in the U.S. government or in American business believes him. The National Association of Home Builders published a letter to the president predicting that his tariffs would raise the cost of housing construction. Automobile stocks slumped because investors expected Trump’s tariffs to add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new vehicle. The senior Republican in the Senate publicly pleaded for potash to be exempted from tariffs so as not to increase fertilizer prices for his farm constituents, belying Trump’s claim that the higher prices would be paid by the exporters.
Tariffs beget retaliatory tariffs.
When Trump paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those countries halted their retaliatory actions. But China is proceeding with a range of tariffs against U.S. exports, reserving more retaliation for later. Americans are already paying for previous rounds of Trump trade actions against China. In the first Trump presidency, China cut its purchases of U.S. soybeans by 75 percent over a single year in 2018. Brazil in 2018 overtook the United States as the world’s largest soybean producer. During the campaign of 2024, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lamented that the United States had become a net importer of food. He omitted to mention that a reason for this status was precisely the harm done to U.S. farm exports by Trump’s first-term tariffs.
There’s not much point in negotiating trade treaties with the United States.
Trump renegotiated NAFTA during his first term, replacing it with his USMCA deal. Now, in his second term, he has reneged on that. Trump’s version of NAFTA offered a range of legal ways to terminate the agreement; he did not use any of them. He did not even pretend that Canada or Mexico had somehow defaulted on their end of the bargain. He simply ignored the deal and proceeded with his tariffs under a series of contradictory excuses.
Days earlier, Trump had issued a flurry of threats against Colombia, which also has a trade agreement with the United States. Again, Trump ignored all the legalities of the treaty; again, he used trade as a weapon to resolve nontrade disagreements.
Mexico and Canada have oriented their economies to the U.S. under first NAFTA and then USMCA. That probably will not alter even after Trump’s episode of blackmail. But other countries, farther away, may wonder whether there’s any point in signing deals with such a bad-faith partner as the United States has become.
“Friend-shoring” is a fiction.
As relations have worsened between the United States and China, many in the U.S. government have looked to friend-shoring as a way to keep most of the benefits of free trade. The idea is to redirect U.S. purchasing power away from hostile China and toward more trustworthy partners. The assumption behind the term is that those partners will gladly trust the United States.
Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies in Congress have threatened unilateral military action against Mexico; Trump himself indulges in speculation about the forced annexation of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and about absorbing Canada as a 51st state.
Maybe that’s all just a lot of ugly talk. But the president has made clear that so-called friendship with the United States does not ensure anything for America’s partners: not trade access, not the security of treaties, not even their territorial integrity and national independence.
Friend-shoring imagined extending trade with American allies. Trump-shoring means that today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy, without cause or even warning.
Instability is the future.
Trump has now allowed North American trade a 30-day reprieve. His supporters want to claim that he won big concessions worth all the tumult he caused. Such claims are transparently untrue. Canada had made its big proposals for more cooperation on border issues back in December. In any case, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has observed, illegal drugs are much more likely to flow north into Canada than south from Canada. Mexico’s offer to (once again) shift National Guard units to the border from other duties inside the country is generally recognized as symbolic. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page correctly identified the embarrassing truth in a headline on Monday: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.”
Trump is a uniquely emotionally needy president, prone to impulsive vindictiveness.
In 2019, Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney forbade Homeland Secretary Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss threats to the integrity of the 2020 election. Such discussions upset Trump, The New York Times reported, by reminding him of questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election. In mid-November 2020, Trump refused to hear or think more about the coronavirus pandemic even as fatalities spiked to their peak. An aide explained to The Washington Post that Trump was “just done with COVID … It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” For two weeks after the election of 2020, he forbade his administration to cooperate with the transition process and denied Joe Biden’s team access to information and the funds required by law.
As Trump confronts derision about his splendid little trade war of February 2025, will he lash out again? And how is any business of any size supposed to plan for the future when the president creates economic crises to act out his ravenous ego needs?
“America First” makes it safer not to be America’s ally.
In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion, only slightly less. Yet it was Canada, not Vietnam or Thailand, that Trump threatened with tariffs.
One difference: Canada is as a rule closely aligned with the United States. By geography, by history, by ideology, Canada has few geopolitical options. Vietnam and Thailand, however, have worked hard to balance their relationships with the two greatest powers, and hostile U.S. action against either could swing that country toward China, away from the United States.
A lesson of Trump’s trade war that all the world will hear: Countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump. Countries such as Vietnam and Thailand that carefully navigate between the two great economic powers without making undue commitments maximize their security and their dignity.
To reward non-aligned countries and punish U.S.-aligned ones might seem a reckless, even a perverse, choice by a U.S. president. But that’s the president Americans have, and the choice he has made for them."
wow -- great report
Congratulations! 16K is huge!!!
🤡😎
Great job, great reporting!
This just posted...
https://youtu.be/ACJiTF4NP8Q?feature=shared
Orange head is total shite. He’s a grifter with a fat checkbook provided by avaricious chancers. Thanks for the clarity.
You just have to love this stuff. Canada and Mexico played Trump; Trump played MAGA; Fox plays MAGA; MAGAs play each other. It’s just like Casino man Trump playing the banks and his investors in the past. As George W. bush said, “ Fool me once, shame on you;fool me twice and I get a MAGA hat”
Hah! This one is not at all surprised at The (Daily) Tory Mail's claim of exclusivity for "discovering the recirculation of video" featuring Duffy's dangly bits. They are, after all, extremely proud long-wallowing members of the Fleet Street gutter press.
No question that Trump is self-destructing. Caving on the tariffs may head off some of the damage, but not for long. Trump took an oath to defend the nation against all enemies, domestic and foreign. Then he handed the keys to the treasury and civil service to Elon Musk, whose previous brainstorm involved the emasculation of Twitter, for which he had just after he had paid a small fortune for it. Musk had previously come close to making a hash out of Tesla. Why not see what he could do with re-engineering the American system of government? In case, Musk couldn't manage to screw things up sufficiently on his own, he hired a bunch of guys, barely out of high school to have their go at government computer systems. Trump is neck deep in what the French generally refer to as merde. He'll probably drown in it, just as he did when he bankrupted Atlantic City. Everyone knew his reputation, they swallowed the cyanide pill anyway. The only question now is whether Mexico and Canada are still offering political asylum.
Or he just wanted to short the stock market and cause chaos
I like the way you calmly remind us that all actions resisting this hijacking of government is not
hair-on-fire reactions. MSM is such a skeery outrage machine right now.
I have one question for anyone more knowledgeable than me - These smash and grab kids are known entities (thanks Wired). They are breaking Federal law by hacking sensitive information, correct?
Are they going to find out the hard way that this was no Gamer Convention?
I have the same question. I’ve read the word “illegal” or “illegally” describing recent actions taken by Trump and/or Elon in least 10 news articles today; it seems logical (sane) to me that the next sentence should contain some semblance of “and law enforcement/ FBI (ha) responded and _________(did something). At least for Musk and his code-monkeys?
Alternatively, it would be nice to hear that (even though it is a pointless exercise, Dems are calling for impeachment of Trump (and what the hell, Vance).
“Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) say they’re going to roadblock every single Trump nominee until the attack on the U.S. Agency for International Development ends.” What a novel goddamn idea! But why limit it to USAID?
My question, too. Presumably because that's where the Musk speartip landed, but we'll see!
And I'll say it again, MAGAs = beta cucks. They LOVE getting pimped by the Big Hapless Sugardaddy. And these folks are, for all their crowing about winning this last election, a societal minority that's busy further underming itself. (Not that we have the time to wait around for them to finish it up.) So, yes, this tariff charade will "work" for its Trumpian purpose, aka the temporary ego sustenance of its purveyor.
Someone explain to me why I'm wrong: https://fpkoshka.substack.com/p/the-anatomy-of-a-coup?r=3noej8
SCOTUS hasn't erased all power but the Presidency. That sounds exciting, but it's not what's actually happened. It's also not going to happen. Meanwhile, Trump himself keeps saying, in writing, that Elon works for him. Which Elon does. Why are you working to unlink that chain? Because it sounds thrilling to say "coup"?
I don't think Trump fully understands what Elon is doing or what laws are being broken---in case you haven't noticed, he isn't all that mentally competent, these days. Also, I'm not into excitement. Tell me who is going to physically stop Elon's guys from continuing to alter the code in the payments system, in the Treasury Department, please. Because I don't know who is going to physically change the situation.
Trump is as mentally capable as he's ever been. But even if he's senile, he is the President of the United States and is ordering these incursions to happen. Why would you want to help him and his enablers transfer that off to Musk? Because it's easier than sticking to the point? And, by the way, what makes you say Musk is altering the Treasury codes? That's not the same thing as looking at them. Do you have a source there? Please name it.
Yes, I do have a source. I read it at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/, in the editor's blog, but he cited Wired, who published it this morning. They probably have the more complete story, and I'll read it later today.
I don't want to displace responsibility from Trump. Far from it. I do want to know who is going to cause Musk's guy's changes to the government payments system to be removed, along with that agent of change. The capitol police, maybe, on judicial orders? What happens when the FBI tells them to stand down, because they're there on Trump's orders? This is where I think things could be mired down for too long.
It's a fascinating possibility, but that's not evidence that it's happened. If it does, it would almost certainly be a crime, and perhaps treason. Our legal system is still very robust, and we still have lots of cops who want to do their proper jobs. I still see no reason not to lay this all, 100 percent, on DJT. If he ever gets charged, he'll surely use the "Musk was a rogue" defense.
Even if they turn FELon Trusk around and they throw him out, won’t he still have all our information? it’s basically an unparalleled cyber crime.
Why are we more angry at Musk than Trump? As for our information, Musk already has that. Corporate capitalism is the ultimate data harvesting operation, far beyond what the Treasury has.
I’m equally angry at both.
Why? Which one is both President and the figurehead of MAGA? I don't get the equivalence.