Opposition continues to surge against President Donald Trump’s recently announced plans for tariffs on Mexico as a punitive response to ongoing undocumented immigration. Now, such has emerged in the pages of the normally conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal. In the wake of Trump’s newly announced tariffs — which will begin at 5 percent on June 10 before gradually growing to a potential level of a full 25 percent this fall — their editorial board has issued a scathing takedown of the president’s approach to trade policy.
Using a nickname that he made up for himself, having at one point paraded himself on Twitter as a “tariff man” as if there’s some kind of systematic sense to his moves, the Journal shared:
‘The biggest economic risk of a Donald Trump Presidency has always been that his trade obsessions would swamp the benefits of tax reform and deregulation. For two years he has kept his worst protectionist impulses mostly in check, but as he seeks a second term we are now seeing Tariff Man unchained. Where he stops nobody knows, which is bad for the economy and perhaps his own re-election.’
The tariffs against Mexico come on the heels of him again upping the ante of his ongoing trade war with China. After months of calm, Trump abruptly announced that he was upping the tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods to a full 25 percent, and the country promptly retaliated with similarly spiked tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of American exports.
Trump claims the tariffs are necessary to defend against Chinese exploitation of American economic interests, although they’re by and large paid by the American interests trying to do business with China and bring goods into the United States they need to keep their own businesses going. In light of that same kind of situation persisting into the presently unfolding tariff debacle with Mexico, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been considering legal action against the Trump administration over their newest tariff threats.
The Journal notes that they don’t even have anything to do with the actual southern U.S. border issues on the ground that the president is supposedly so concerned about addressing. They share:
‘The risk is that Mr. Trump has come to view tariffs as a blunt-force tool to achieve any diplomatic goal. They are Mr. Trump’s magic elixir that will solve any political ailment … No supply chain is safe from Tariff Man.’
The reality of the southern border situation is that asylum seekers continue to come to the U.S. in hopes of a safer, more secure life, not out of some kind of conspiracy by the Mexican or any other Central American government as Trump repeatedly suggests. These asylum seekers do not pose a security crisis; their arrivals constitute a humanitarian one, considering the prevailing lack of accommodations for them.
Trump’s solution to this situation is to put up a wall and penalize not just the asylum seekers who do make it here, but Americans at large in the face of this threat from immigration that we’re apparently supposed to be so terrified of — and at the same time, he wants to get re-elected.
Featured Image via screenshot
