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Why? That’s a question people are asking a lot these days. Why is President Donald Trump picking unnecessary fights with America’s allies? Why is he repeatedly punishing Maine over two transgender athletes? Why is he allowing unelected billionaire Elon Musk to gut government programs with no regard for their missions and value, and how they improve the lives of Americans while bolstering our economy?
Why is he punishing American consumers with tariffs that have, predictably, launched trade wars with numerous countries around the globe, including our neighbor Canada? Why is he tanking the stock market (the place where the bulk of Americans have their retirement savings, whether through pension systems, 401(k)s or their own savings)? Why won’t more elected officials speak out about these dangerous actions, and take actions to try to stop them?
Questions like these, about the president’s motives and seeming lack of concern about consequences, have focused this week on tariffs. Wednesday was deemed “Liberation Day” by Trump. “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said in a White House Rose Garden ceremony where he announced new tariffs against countries around the world. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”
Experts had long warned that such tariffs, which will launch reciprocal tariff levies from the targeted countries, will result in higher costs for American consumers. Maine, which shares a long border and does most of its international trade with Canada, will be especially hard hit.
Still, the Trump administration forged ahead, with faulty math and faulty logic about how tariffs work. They even imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands. Stock markets around the world predictably plunged after Trump’s announcement.
We can’t read Trump’s mind, but his praise of tariffs — and President William McKinley, who disastrously imposed them in the late 1890s — seems to coincide with his love of the concept of a gilded age of America, when a few rich men essentially controlled the country, growing their wealth thanks to lax or nonexistent regulations on working conditions, pollutants and many other health and safety standards that we take for granted today.
Trump, and some of his deep-pocketed backers, may want to return to such a time, but most Americans do not.
Thankfully, some members of Congress, notably Republicans, are pushing back. Sen. Susan Collins was one of four Republican senators to vote this week to strip Trump of the emergency powers he used to impose tariffs on Canada. Although the resolution passed the Republican-controlled Senate, it faces difficult odds in the House, which also has a Republican majority.
Trump seems to be confused about how tariffs work. In addition to incorrectly thinking that other countries, not U.S. consumers, cover the costs of tariffs on imported goods, he also seems to think the levies can be applied to illegal activities.
Trump blasted Collins and the other Republican senators who voted to stop the tariffs against Canada in a fact-challenged post on his social media network, Truth Social.
“Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy,” he wrote early Wednesday morning.
First, as Collins noted in a speech on the Senate floor this week, the amount of fentanyl coming into the U.S. across the Canadian border is miniscule. Nearly all of the fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. comes through Mexico.
Second, imposing a tariff on legal imports from Canada has no impact on fentanyl trafficking. You can’t put tariffs on goods that are illegally smuggled across the border.
Which brings us back to the original question: Why? Why is an administration that is so poorly informed and misunderstands (and misconstrues) reality so determined to bulldoze ahead with policies that are harming Americans?
The potential answers — to rebuild an unaccountable class of oligarchs, to consolidate power in the White House, to feed Trump’s insatiable ego — are as untenable as they are unbelievable.
Collins, and her Republican colleagues, who stood up to Trump on Canadian tariffs, have begun to lay the groundwork for opposing the many other irrational policies and actions that will harm Americans. They have a lot of work yet to do, and more of their colleagues must join them in standing against these irrational and dangerous policies.
