Here Is How Trump Can Falsely Claim His Tariff Threats Helped Win the Drug War
It seems President Donald Trump’s plan to fight drugs with punitive tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, which never made much sense, was little more than an attempt to look tough. Trump threw his weight around, and now he can claim victory after extracting concessions that will have no meaningful impact on the problem he claims to be addressing.
In exchange for a one-month delay in the 25 percent tariff that Trump announced over the weekend, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is assigning 10,000 members of Mexico’s National Guard to border control. As Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola notes in an El Universal column, this is essentially the same deal that Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, struck with Trump in 2019 during a similar tariff showdown. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won the same dispensation simply by proceeding with preexisting anti-drug plans. And although Trump’s 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports took effect today, negotiations with the Chinese government may yield a promise to crack down on manufacturers of fentanyl precursors.
None of this will do much to stop “dangerous narcotics” from entering the United States, which is Trump’s avowed goal. Interdiction efforts are doomed by the economics of drug prohibition, a challenge that is compounded by fentanyl’s potency, which allows traffickers to distribute large numbers of doses in small packages by land or mail. And Mexican cartels are already working on domestic production of fentanyl precursors in case shipments from China are curtailed. Despite those realities, Trump can still falsely claim he is winning the war on drugs by citing misleading metrics.
Trump said the tariffs would remain in place until the targeted countries took “adequate steps to alleviate the opioid crisis.” Since that criterion is deliberately vague, Trump can simply declare that whatever Mexico, Canada, and China agree to do is “adequate.”
In case that seems too slippery, Trump could cite drug seizure numbers as proof of his success. The beauty of this approach is that Trump can claim victory no matter which way the numbers go.
Given Trump’s promise to “seal the border,” you might expect U.S. drug seizures to go up. But he has previously argued that increased seizures are a sign of failure rather than success.
“Drugs are pouring in at levels neve
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