President Trump's renewed trade fight with Canada is taking flak from the left and right in two opinion pieces. On the right, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal doesn't mince words, asserting that "the dumbest trade war in history" just "got dumber." The piece recounts how Trump dusted off an obscure 1930 law—Section 338 of the Tariff Act—to slap tariffs as high as 50% on $20 billion in Canadian goods after last-minute talks collapsed. No president had touched that authority before. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed dollar-for-dollar retaliation, even as both countries had been close to a deal to scale back existing auto and metal tariffs.
The Journal calls the dispute unnecessary and self-defeating, noting that US automakers, distillers, and manufacturers largely oppose the moves. The editorial points out that the oft-cited US trade deficit with Canada is driven by oil that US refineries rely on, and that Trump's team had loaded the talks with grievances on dairy, alcohol, tech, and digital taxes that could have been handled inside the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement framework. "Republicans are already getting pounded on the campaign trail over his tariffs and inflation," the editors warn. "One reason for Mr. Trump's frigid approval rating is that voters believe Mr. Trump is waging blunderbuss wars without a strategy, and on trade they're right."
On the left, Paul Krugman maintains that the US economy "is far more dependent on Canadian goods than most Americans realize." Lumber, crude oil, and electricity in the Northeast are examples. "The bottom line is that Trump is going to lose his trade war with Canada as thoroughly as he has lost his shooting war with Iran," writes Krugman in a Substack piece headlined "The Moose That Roared."
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