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Trumpism is a movement defined by outrageous statements, only some of which they are serious about and it's up to you to guess what. Does Navarro (or Trump) really believe that Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels? Probably not, but you can't dismiss the possibility. Either way, why not say it?
Trump's messaging on tariffs has been incoherent. On the one hand, tariffs are industrial policy, meant to bring back American manufacturing. On the other hand, tariffs are a negotiating tactics, to be dropped in exchange for concessions. On the mutant third hand, tariffs are a revenue alternative - a way to replace income taxes with consumption taxes (though Trump clearly doesn't think of them that way, quite possibly because he doesn't know how tariffs work).
The problem is that at most one of these things can be true. Taking it as a given for now that tariffs-as-industrial policy is effective, you need to maintain the tariffs (so no dropping them as a concession) and you need American consumers to shift to American-made goods (so tariff revenues must decline substantially). If tariffs are a negotiating tactic, you're giving them up for whatever objective you're pursuing and therefore forgoing both industrial development and revenue. If tariffs are supposed to be a revenue stream that substitutes for income taxes, you need Americans to keep buying imports, which means not buying American-made goods at the scale you're expecting for an industrial revival driven by domestic demand.
(In reality, the only one of these that makes any measure of sense is tactical tariffs)
All of which is to say that what Canada can do to reverse the tariffs is probably lobby members of Trump's inner circle to try and change his mind. The likely (but unfortunately not overwhelmingly likely) outcome is that someone prevails upon Trump that this idea is really fucking dumb and Canada makes some symbolic concession so Trump can feel like he got a win. But, there are also quite a few people in the Trump administration who unironically think tariffing everyone is a great idea, so who knows.
Lying is a sin.
That doesn't appear to have been an overriding concern for Trump or his associates thus far.
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