President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was granting a month-long reprieve on unilaterally ordering tax increases on some goods imported from Mexico and Canada that will expire on April 2, when he is set to order reciprocal tariffs on imports from a broad range of countries.
After a telephone call with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum earlier in the day, Trump said he was granting an exemption on any goods imported into the U.S. that are compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement that he negotiated during his first term.
“After speaking with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, I have agreed that Mexico will not be required to pay Tariffs on anything that falls under the USMCA Agreement. This Agreement is until April 2nd,” he said in a statement posted to his Truth Social platform.
He added that the temporary reprieve was “an accommodation” made “out of respect” for Sheinbaum, who he credited for “working hard” with him to combat illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Our relationship has been a very good one, and we are working hard, together, on the Border, both in terms of stopping Illegal Aliens from entering the United States and, likewise, stopping Fentanyl. Thank you to President Sheinbaum for your hard work and cooperation,” he said.
Speaking in the Oval Office a few hours later, Trump called Sheinbaum “a wonderful woman” and said he’d “helped them out” by signing orders to pause the tariffs.
He claimed that both countries — and others — were “ripping off” the United States and downplayed the effects tariffs would have on American consumers.
“Now, these are countries and companies, foreign companies, that have been ripping us off, and no President did anything about it, until I came along, and I did a lot about it,” he said.
Trump also claimed that countries that were being harmed by the tariffs were “globalist in nature” and accused them of mistreating the United States.
“A lot of them are globalist countries and companies that won't be doing as well, because we're taking back things that have been taken from us many years ago. We've been treated very unfairly as a country,” he said.
The American president has spent months stoking a feud with his country’s northern neighbor and has claimed that there is an epidemic of fentanyl trafficking across the U.S.-Canada border, the largest unguarded land border in the world.
In reality, the vast majority of fentanyl entering the United States on land comes from Mexico through legal ports of entry smuggled by Americans. But this has not stopped Trump from using the alleged fentanyl trafficking as a pretext to unilaterally impose import taxes on goods from Canada and claiming that the tariffs — which are paid by Americans — could be avoided were Canadians to elect to have their country annexed by the United States.
Peter Navarro, the longtime Trump confidante who serves as the president’s top trade adviser while the Senate considers his nominee to serve as United States Trade Representative, told reporters on Thursday that the tariffs on Canadian goods were “all about fentanyl.”
Navarro claimed that a “wide panoply of fake prescription drugs” being imported from Canada contain illicit fentanyl that is contributing to deaths from the drug being undercounted.
“Somebody takes a Xanax or an Ambien or an oxycodone codon or a Valium, and it spiked with fentanyl, and they wind up on the floor, foaming at the mouth and dead. And that typically is not reported as a fentanyl death. It's often reported as a suicide or some other thing. But these the scope of the fake restriction prescription drugs is staggering,” he said.
“The point is that people in America really need to know when they try to get a bargain on the internet, because their budgets are squeezed by the Biden inflation, they can wind up dead simply if they're seeking out an anti depressant,” he added.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick also told reporters that the goal of the tariffs is to decrease fentanyl trafficking and said Canada and Mexico have “done a good job offering us ever more work to prove to us they're going to cut the fentanyl.”
But he dismissed criticism of Trump’s policies based on the negative effects the tariffs were having on the stock market, telling reporters: “The fact that the stock market goes up or down a half percent on any given day is not the driving force of our outcomes.”
Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, has called the unilateral tax increases imposed on Americans by his American counterpart “a very dumb thing to do” and has said the trade war started by Trump could continue for some time.
The prospect of a long trade war fought by the U.S. against two of its largest trading partners has depressed American stock markets to a point that all gains made since Trump was sworn in for a second term have been erased. Trump’s reliance on tariffs has drawn at least some criticism from a number of his Republican allies, particularly those in Congress who represent states that rely on cross-border trade.
Susan Collins, the longtime GOP senator from Maine, said on Thursday that it’s unclear whether Trump is aware of how the unilateral sales tax increases he is imposing will negatively impact her constituents.
“I don't know that he fully appreciates how integrated the economies are in border states with Canada, people cross every single day,” she said.
Trump has spent years touting the supposed benefits of tariffs, which he routinely describes as if they are fees paid by foreign governments as a sort of entry fee for the privilege of accessing American markets.
But tariffs aren’t paid by foreign governments. They’re taxes that are charged to American importers and passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices for imported goods.
Yet Trump has persisted in claiming that tariffs are paid by foreign governments.
At a press conference last week alongside British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, he claimed that the fact that tariffs are paid by importers is actually a “myth” that has been “put out there by foreign countries that really don't like paying tariffs.”
Eric Garcia contributed reporting from the Capitol
