Why Did Trump Use Tariffs Against Canada and Mexico?

Numerous Americans – mostly on the Left – worried about the effects of President Donald Trump’s threats to levy tariffs against Canada and Mexico. Trump wanted both neighboring countries to do more to shut down the flow of fentanyl from their countries into the United States, and they were not responding as he thought they should. So, he threatened to levy 25% tariffs on each neighboring country. George Caldwell wrote about the “novel legal theory pursued by Trump. 

[Trump] declared an emergency then used his emergency authority to threaten to impose tariffs to get our neighbors to comply with his border enforcement and economic policies.

Trump bypassed the typical avenues of tariff policy and instead used the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare the emergency and justify his tariff threats.

The act has been used by various presidents since the 1970s to respond to threats such as the Iran Hostage Crisis, the international drug trade, and the rise of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok.

But presidents have only used it to freeze transactions or seize properties – never to implement broad tariffs….

After a call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Monday where she pledged to immediately order 10,000 Mexican troops to the border to prevent the flow of fentanyl into the United States, Trump agreed to put tariffs on hold for a month.

Just hours later, Trump put a similar one-month hold on tariffs when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged 10,000 troops of his own to guard the northern border.

Although Trump’s methods for addressing the fentanyl crisis were unprecedented, they seem to have been effective.

Canada and Mexico should have stopped the immigrants moving through their countries to the United States, and they should have stopped the fentanyl. The fact is that neither of them cared about what was happening in the United States. The threat to levy tariffs against them made the situation personal to each country, so they began to care. In other words, Trump used the threat of tariffs to get their attention and cause them to act as they should have been acting previously.