Trump's Trade War With Canada Is Costly, Absurd, and Unfunny
· Reason
As the Trump administration escalated its trade war with Canada last week, the White House's official Twitter account shared a photo of a bald eagle tackling a Canadian goose.
The intended message was not exactly a subtle one.
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But the post did illustrate how the administration views America's economic relationship with Canada, and how President Donald Trump thinks about international trade more broadly: as a win-or-lose struggle in which America must bully its trading partners and fight its allies, lest they keep "ripping us off."
That logic completely unravels if you think about it for more than a minute. American consumers and businesses are being taken advantage of by Canadians who…are offering to sell us aluminum, oil, and wood while buying our farm goods, machinery, and ethanol? Americans and Canadians trade hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods every year in voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions.
But Trump doesn't want to think about it for more than a minute. He wants a fight for the sake of a fight, and the details don't matter.
For one thing: In that fight between the bald eagle and the goose, the goose won.
More importantly, there is unlikely to be a winner in a trade war between the U.S. and Canada, because higher tariffs on both sides of the border will make both countries poorer. Trump has ordered tariffs of up to 50 percent on Canadian imports, and Canada has retaliated with similar taxes on American goods.
We've had a years-long lesson in how tariffs can increase prices for consumers, but why worry about that? Didn't you see the photo of the eagle and the goose? Didn't you hear that Trump renamed Lake Ontario?
"All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence," Trump said in a video recorded from the Oval Office as he announced the new "Lake America."
Well, it requires half of those things.
Just to give some idea of how absurd things have gotten, consider this: Days after Trump returned to office in January 2025, the satirical social media account belonging to the fictional "Rep. Jack Kimble" called on the president to change Lake Ontario's name to Lake America.
From social media parody to real-life executive order in less than 19 months. Like a lot of jokes, this one is less funny the second time around.
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers argues that Trump's ridiculous escalations of the trade war actually do matter. Trump's "childish taunts" have "stirred such anger among Canadians that Carney now has less room to give Trump what he wants….He has made it harder for Canada's leaders to make concessions to the United States."
The mistake there may be in assuming that Trump wants a deal at all. There is little indication that he does.
At one point during recent negotiations, The New York Times reported, American officials said the U.S. "would retain the power to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement."
What good is a deal that's subject to be changed at whim? It's hard to blame Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for rejecting that ridiculous proposal.
Even before that, Carney had good reason to be distrustful. After all, the two countries had a deal—the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which Trump negotiated and hailed as "the best agreement we've ever made" during his first term.
Trump decided to tear up that deal because he wants a fight—even a nonsensical one that will harm American consumers and businesses—more than he wants trade with Canada. (By retaliating against Trump's foolishness, Canada is compounding the error. As J.D. Tuccille wrote last week, Canada ought to pursue a policy of unilateral free trade, rather than hurting its own people in a showdown with Trump.)
During Trump's first term, the president's defenders pointed to the USMCA as proof that Trump was using tariffs only as leverage to secure better trade deals for American companies. If that was ever true, it's obviously not the case anymore. For Trump, tariffs and trade wars have become an end unto themselves, no matter their consequences.
The root of this foolishness is the president's inability to understand why trade is valuable.
Free trade is not an eagle and a goose fighting over a frozen lake. It is a complex web of consensual transactions. It is the Ford pickup truck that's built in Michigan with an engine that's made in Canada and powered by fuel that was pumped out of the tar sands of Alberta and turned into gasoline. It is more than $800 billion in commerce each year between people living in the two countries.
Trump doesn't care about that, and so we will have the stupidest trade war of all time. Like the real war Trump launched in Iran, this one seems to have no clear objectives or purpose. It will raise prices at home and hurt America's standing in the rest of the world. It is destruction for the sake of destruction—and for the social media memes.
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