On February 1, 2025, President Trump announced new tariffs — you might call them “stackable tariffs,” since they are in addition to the existing mix of duties and other tariffs — on goods of Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese origin.
The Left, through its puppets in academia, the media, and the pop culture, immediately launched into their standard response. The weekend was therefore full of a single, unified message, paraphrased as follows: “A tariff is a tax. If you impose new taxes, you’re raising prices on goods. This is inflationary. These tariffs will therefore likely cause a recession and a stock market crash.”
These statements all make sense on their own, in a vacuum.
But when was the last time that anything in the American economy happened in a vacuum?
The truth is, we don’t know — yet — exactly what the result of these new tariffs will be.
By midday Monday, for example, we had already begun negotiating postponements of the tariffs as Mexico committed to sending 10,000 troops to better secure the border. The markets opened 3% down, but then climbed back up as fears were calmed. The fearmongering of the weekend was overblown.
Here’s what we do know:
The Trump-Vance administration is slashing the regulations that have held back traditional energy exploration, development, production, and sales in the United States for the past four years. This will quickly cause an increase in energy sector jobs and a reduction in the transportation and energy costs that have driven much of the inflation of the Biden-Harris years.
The Trump-Vance administration is working with Congress on a new tax cut program, and is also working within the executive branch to slash all regulations, up and down the bureaucracy, hopefully across every sector. They have set an ambitious target of cutting ten regulations for every one they add. These cuts in costly red tape and business taxation will enable Americans to be paid better, and will simultaneously enable American-made products to be more cost-competitive against imported goods than they are today.
and the fact sheet accompanying it, these three countries have not been behaving like partners and allies.
All three have, to varying extent, neglected or even facilitated the drug trade that is destroying America’s inner cities. All three have, to varying extent, neglected or even facilitated the illegal immigrant invasion that is crippling our social safety net, bankrupting our state and local governments, and intensifying the crime wave. All three have, to varying extent, fallen short of their past commitments in existing trade agreements where we have tried to increase our export volumes to balance out our import volumes.
To solve these problems would be a massive cost savings for every level of government, and would result in a boost in the standard of living of the very Americans who will allegedly suffer from these new tariffs.
But do the talking heads discuss these issues in their assaults on the tariffs? Very little, if at all.
They know that tariffs, being a form of taxation, can be easily demonized as a certain negative. So they attack the tariffs and warn that they could cause inflation, unemployment, a stock market crash, a depression. No exaggeration is too great for those who oppose this administration; once they get their fangs into a target, they won’t let go.
So, they don’t mention the reasons behind the decision to implement the tariffs. They don’t mention the drugs, the gangs, the illegal aliens, the loss of American manufacturing.
Why not? Perhaps because they know that the American people are on President Trump’s side in all these areas, so they’d rather not mention them at all. In fact, dismissing these valid concerns is exactly what put the American Left in the doghouse in the first place.
Whether these tariffs succeed in their stated goals or not, the American public is rightly happy that the Trump-Vance administration is keeping its promises to tackle the issues that matter, even the difficult ones.
And the American people respect the administration’s commitment enough to give them some room — to try every tool in the toolbox — as they fight this worthy fight.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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