NORTH AMERICAN FOOD FIGHT

Trump’s plan to slap massive tariffs on Canada and Mexico could become reality tomorrow. But suddenly he’s facing the consequences of his overblown rhetoric — and there are several ways this could detonate in his face.

• One of President Donald Trump’s core campaign promises was to place hefty tariffs on countries around the world, even those that the U.S. relies upon for groceries, oil and other products you buy all the time. Tariffs are a tax on imported goods from a country — driving up the cost of, say, electric vehicles from China so that you’re incentivized to buy an American-made car. Trump claims that the move hurts foreign business because people won’t want to buy expensive products, acting as a “big stick” for him to wield against the world. In reality, tariffs can drive up costs for Americans and cause inflation to rise, according to experts.

• Trump promised to hit Canada and Mexico on Saturday… with an incredibly high 25 percent tariff on imported goods, along with a 10 percent tariff on goods from China. But the plan appears to stand in direct opposition to another Trump promise: keeping prices down. Canada and Mexico provide a combined 70 percent of U.S. oil imports. Slapping tariffs on all that energy could send gasoline prices spiking — a move guaranteed to make Trump more popular with average folks! Then there’s food: About 60 percent of fruits and 40 percent of veggies in the U.S. come from Mexico, especially avocados, along with over $10 billion of beer and distilled spirits.

• Canada and Mexico have said they’ll retaliate with tariffs of their own, targeting Florida orange juice, Tennessee whiskey, agriculture, refined oil products and manufacturing. The U.S. auto industry is deeply intertwined with both Canada and Mexico, meaning tariffs on both sides could cause chaos among American automakers. U.S. stocks tumbled today thanks to Trump’s tariff threats — in a foreshadowing of things to come.

• Trump’s own advisers see trouble ahead, according to the Wall Street Journal. They’ve been working to find ways to prevent their boss from haphazardly slapping the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Several people close to Trump leaked to Reuters that the tariffs might get pushed back to March 1 instead, but the White House immediately pushed back on that idea.

• “Starting tomorrow, those tariffs will be in place,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this afternoon. “These are promises made and promises kept by the president.” It’s all supposedly retaliation for Canada, Mexico and China allowing opioids to flow into the United States, she said. Trump added his own totally reassuring message: “Tariffs don’t cause inflation. Tariffs cause success. There could some temporary short term disruption.”

Even the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is calling it “The Dumbest Trade War in History.“

Got any tips or emails from the Trump administration? Reach me on Signal at 413-726-4767 or email at whataday@crooked.com. I’ll keep you totally anonymous — I’d love to chat!

CRASH MISINFO

Donald Trump’s absurd claims that diversity, equity and inclusion programs are to blame for the deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C. are — surprise surprise — fueling rampant misinformation on the right.

After the crash, rumors began swirling on social media that Jo Ellis, a transgender military pilot, was flying the helicopter that crashed into the American Airlines passenger plane. This morning, Ellis posted on Facebook that she, obviously, was not the pilot.

“Some craziness has happened on the internet and I’m being named as one of the pilots of the DC crash,” Ellis wrote. “Please report any accounts or posts you see. It’s insulting to the victims and families of those lost and they deserve better than this BS from the bots and trolls of the internet.”

Ironically, Trump’s fake news dump largely focused on him bashing the Federal Aviation Authority’s diversity program — which he launched during his first term. What’s more, data shows that air traffic controllers are predominantly white males, contrary to Trump’s insinuation that people of color are to blame. Even a top Republican lawmaker who oversees the FAA said the crash wasn’t caused by DEI.

When Trump makes baseless claims about DEI, you have to chalk it up to his racism or his efforts to polarize and divide the population, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told our friends at the What A Day podcast.

“DEI has now become the all purpose excuse for everything,” he said.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

The Trump administration shut down some government websites this evening to remove mentions of DEI-related terminology. Even the FAA site is down, two days after the deadliest plane crash in recent U.S. history.

Dozens of FBI agents who worked on investigations against Trump, including his involvement in the January 6 riots, are expected to be fired by the end of today, CNN reports. Firing intelligence agents who investigated him, taking down portraits and scrubbing mentions of the previous administration. Damn, it’s almost like he’s an aspiring authoritarian!

Trump’s deportation flight on a military plane this week cost at least $4,675 per migrant, Reuters reports. That’s five times more expensive than a one-way first-class American Airlines flight from Texas to Guatemala. What a great use of taxpayer dollars. Surely this will help bring down the price of groceries.

Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) office has received multiple threats that are “different than anything we had received prior to the pardoning of January 6 protesters,” he told Crooked’s Jon Favreau for the Offline podcast. He cited centibillionaire Elon Musk’s influence over the online far-right as a likely contributing factor. “It probably also has to do with why there hasn’t been a concentrated effort to take him on personally,” Murphy said.

Speaking of which, Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) is blocking Illinois from hiring any January 6 rioters to work for the state. “No one who attempts to overthrow a government should serve in government,” he wrote in a letter. Sounds pretty reasonable to me!

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experienced a “cyber attack” yesterday that caused many “extremely offensive” messages to be sent to over 10,000 employees, according to an email obtained by What A Day. “It’s certainly odd trying to focus on your work when someone’s throwing a barrage of rubber chickens at your desk,” one NOAA employee told me. That’s much more diplomatic than I would be about the situation!

How could that have happened? One possibility: Musk’s aides locked career employees out of computer systems that have millions of federal workers’ data stored on them. “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” an official told Reuters. “There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

Defense Department officials are scrambling to figure out how to accommodate Trump’s order to hold 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo Bay, which held fewer than 800 people during its peak use. “The total cost for this would quickly skyrocket into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars,” a former U.S. official told Politico. Lawyers also believe it could be illegal. A money pit AND possibly illegal? The Business Genius is hard at work again!

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr ordered an investigation into whether NPR and PBS should receive public funding. He accused the outlets of possibly violating government rules by airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.” This sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to target perceived “left-wing” media, despite the fact that both networks go out of their way to be nonpartisan.

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