Transcript: Trump Is Screwing His Voters in “Mind-Boggling” New Scam
Sargent: OK, so let’s talk about Trump’s eruption at Canada. On Truth Social, he suddenly ranted that Canada is putting a digital tax on American technology. He then said, “[W]e are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately. We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.” Now, when Trump starts using the word “hereby,” you know you’re in trouble. Trump is going to hit Canada with new tariffs. Jared, what does this mean? What does a ramped-up trade war with Canada look like?
Bernstein: Canada is an important trading partner, particularly when it comes to energy. So here’s something that I haven’t heard emphasized enough. Canada provides the Midwest—the U.S. Midwest—with 100 percent of that region’s crude oil imports. So not every barrel of oil that they refine in the Midwest comes from Canada—but if it’s imported, it comes from Canada. And in fact, the vast majority of all crude oil processed in the Midwest is from Canada. We are very large energy trading partners with Canada. We also export over $400 billion of our own exports to Canada. And I suspect they’re going to put on reciprocal tariffs, and that’s going to hurt American companies that send food up there, automobiles, machine tools. So this is going to hurt employment and it’s going to raise prices, particularly, I believe, in the Midwest.
Sargent: Right. And we’re talking about a lot of Trump voters here in the auto industry and agriculture and so forth, right?
Bernstein: Yeah. I think the important thing when it comes to Trump voters and tariffs is to remember the following: Tariffs are import taxes, and they are regressive import taxes. They fall disproportionately on people in the bottom half. And just pulling back the lens a bit, if you think about the kinds of promises that Trump made to voters, particularly voters who are being hit by this affordability crisis that has been very much in the news lately, especially with Mamdani’s win in New York, tariffs very much hit Trump’s voter base because tariffs or import taxes—that’s what they are—are a highly regressive tax. They disproportionately fall on middle- and low-income people. These import taxes will eventually show up as higher price tags for much of what these folks purchase, whether it’s energy or whether it’s the kind of goods that energy is an input for [like] plastics, a lot of the things you see at the shelves at Target or Walmart. These are definitely going to be hitting middle- and low-income people, many of whom in this part of the country in particular were Trump voters.
Sargent: Just to pull back a little bit as well, one of the paradoxes of the trade debate is that tariffs code as pro-worker because they constitute a president seeming to act and use his power to protect Americans, right? But of course, in a globalized world, working people are hurt by lot of different types of trade barriers. Can you talk about the communication challenge here? This stuff codes in a very pro-worker way—tariffs do—but the paradox is that that’s not how it actually works. How do we get our point across here?
