As Trump’s tariff pledge comes due, he vows to follow through on key campaign promise
CNN
On Friday afternoon, around the same time a delegation of senior Canadian officials was preparing to meet with President Donald’s Trump’s border czar in a bid to stave off withering new tariffs, Trump himself essentially told them from afar: Don’t bother.
On Friday afternoon, around the same time a delegation of senior Canadian officials was preparing to meet with President Donald’s Trump’s border czar in a bid to stave off withering new tariffs, Trump himself essentially told them from afar: Don’t bother. “No,” he said when asked by a reporter in the Oval Office if there was anything Canada, Mexico or China could do to forestall the new tariffs he’d promised to apply by February 1. “Not right now.” After threatening for months to impose steep tariffs on the United States’ neighbors, Trump’s vow to follow through on them should hardly come as a surprise. With the deadline due, officials said the tariffs would be available for public inspection by midday Saturday. Still, until the final hours before Trump’s start-of-month deadline, many on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill – not to mention in Ottawa and Mexico City – held out hope he might back off. The delegation of senior Canadian officials had been in Washington for several days, meeting with various administration officials – including border czar Tom Homan – to try to avert the imposition of 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods that Trump had promised for February 1. Traveling across Washington armed with videos and documents showing a reinforced US-Canada border, Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly hoped to demonstrate the steps her country had taken to fulfill Trump’s demands that more be done to stop flows of illegal immigration. Yet it has never been particularly clear what Canada and Mexico could do specifically to avoid the new tariffs – least of all to those country’s negotiators, who spent most of January working to ascertain what, if anything, they could do to appease Trump’s demands.
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