Here's Why the Tariff Threat Was Necessary

Joe Fried CPA Feb 04, 2025 @ Joe Fried CPA Election Central

Note: I published this article in the American Thinker yesterday, just before significant developments were announced. The Mexican President has agreed to station 10,000 troops on the border between Mexico and the USA. As a result, the tariff decision has been postponed for 1 month. Similarly, the tariffs between USA and Canada have been postponed for a month, in light of certain security concessions by Canada. 

The leaders of Canada and Mexico are indignant because Trump slammed 25 percent tariffs onto their exports. In this dispute, most of the world will side with Canada and Mexico, and Trump will be viewed as mean, erratic and even racist. It is likely that Democrats will also blast Trump, but that will be a mistake – for Democrats.

For years, the nation has talked about massive numbers of fentanyl deaths, yet there has been little or no relief. Trump is taking the only action that is likely to alleviate the problem in a significant way.

On this issue, the resistance offered by Canada and Mexico has been disgraceful. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico put the blame entirely on the United States, and promised her own 25 percent retaliatory tariffs.

Sheinbaum arrogantly declared that Americans can solve the fentanyl problem by combating “the sale of narcotics on the streets of their main cities, which they don’t do.” In an ideal world, that might be a solution. However, our “main cities” are run by Democrat mayors and district attorneys, and they don’t care much about crime unless it can be pinned onto someone in MAGA world. To solve the illegal migrant and drug problem, we need more cooperation from Mexico, as Sheinbaum should know.

The response of Canada’s Prime Minister is just as inadequate. Justin Trudeau indicated that Canada will issue its own 25 percent tariffs, targeted towards certain U.S. products. He then tried to sweet-talk Americans by claiming that the border and drug problems are not very significant (“...already safe and secure”), and that Canada has implemented a major plan to remedy the minor problem. Let’s examine Trudeau’s big plan.

Trudeau claimed that Canada has “launched a $1.3 billion border plan that is already showing results....” However, the Trudeau plan should be evaluated in light of these facts:

• $1.3 billion in Canada dollars is only $900 million in U.S. dollars.
• The plan was outlined for the first time just six weeks ago (December 17, 2024), so it is very unlikely that it “is already showing results.”
• The components of the plan are quite vague. There will be $667M for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and $355M of the Canada Border Services Agency. Are those funds for hiring more people — or for giving bigger pensions? And why is $77M allocated to Health Canada?
• The funds are for a period spanning SIX YEARS. On a yearly basis that is very small change.

As noted, Trudeau suggested that the northern border is already safe and secure, but what are the facts?

In an article posted by CBC News on September 12, 2024, there are many quotations from Canadian officials, and they describe a problem that is spiraling out of control. Kelly Sundberg, of Mount Royal University stated:

“I hate to admit it, but I think that Donald Trump is right on this, that there is a need to focus north.”

Sundberg added:

“The Americans are well aware that Canada’s capacity to screen people is really limited, if at all even existent. I mean, we do screen, kind of, but we don’t do a proficient or effective job. The Americans are well aware of this, so they can’t trust our system.”

Despite the weaknesses in their ability to detect illegal crossings, our Canadian neighbors discovered 19,498 migrant crossings to the USA between October 2023 and July 2024 — twice as many as in the previous year. But that is probably the tip of an iceberg.

Having lived in a northern border state, I guarantee you that anyone wanting to cross without detection would have no problem. Indeed, it is often difficult to even know exactly where the border is, since there are endless miles without fencing.

The northern border was described this way in an article in Newsday:

“No fence. No barricade.... The U.S.-Canada border is the longest in the world at 5,525 miles — more than twice as long as the border with Mexico — and it's pretty porous.”

For that reason, the serious criminals —drug runners, cartel operatives, sex traffickers, terrorists — are starting to cross into the USA from the north. Those criminals don’t want to be detected, so they are not in the official statistics.

Sgt. Charles Poirier of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) described the growing problem this way:

“There isn’t a day or night where there isn’t a crossing... For the past few months, what we’re seeing is a lot of people landing at international airports, at either Montreal or Toronto. And then within a few hours of their arrival, we catch them at the border, either attempting to cross or they’ve already successfully crossed.”

In all likelihood, it is far more difficult to detect illegal crossings at the northern border than at the southern border. However, there is an additional problem: Once they catch a migrant crossing into the USA, the Canadians don’t know what to do about it. The problem was outlined by Chief Supt. Mathieu Bertrand, head of Serious and Organized Crime and Border Integrity (RCMP):

“If we intercept individuals prior to them crossing the border, they’re in fact not committing any offence. We have no authority to ask questions or begin an investigation at that time. It’s very hard to identify elements of the offence to charge those individuals and bring them to court.”

All of the problems outlined above explain why President Trump is playing hardball, with justification. Perhaps the price of avocados will increase, and maybe even the price of automobiles. But can’t we put up with those high prices in order to save thousands of young lives?

In any event, it won’t take too long because any pain we feel will be minor compared to that of Canada and, especially, Mexico. Their sales to the USA are vital to their economies. Our sales to them are important to us, but not vital.

TDS still rages among Democrats, so they will probably side with Canada and Mexico. Sooner or later, however, President Trump will win this trade war. When that happens, many fentanyl deaths will be avoided, and Democrats will wish they had supported the President in this vitally important endeavor.

Biden’s Fentanyl Deal With China Failed to Stop Overdoses

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Last November, Biden met with China’s Xi and the two leaders reached an agreement to tackle the fentanyl crisis fed by the traffic in precursor chemicals from the Communist dictatorship.

 

Three months later, the bodies are everywhere.

Fentanyl overdoses rose fourfold in Marin County in just 2 weeks, Oregon has the largest overdose rates in the nation and even children under 5 are dying of it in Tennessee.
And there’s no sign that the carnage is slowing down. 66 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco in just the month of January. The majority of those deaths were fentanyl related.

Biden claimed after the meeting with Xi that China is “taking steps to shut down companies dealing in illicit trade and precursor chemicals.”

But officially what China did was send out warning letters to the firms shipping precursor chemicals to the cartels. Rather than warning Chinese companies that they faced action from their own government, the letters cautioned them that they faced legal action from America.

The companies making the poison killing Americans then had every reason to laugh it off.

Chinese firms were told to be “cautious about orders from the United States and Mexico and be wary of the exported items being used to manufacture drugs.”

Telling companies to be cautious and wary, is a long way from a crackdown.

In sharp contrast to the warning letters, earlier that same year Chinese authorities had raided the offices of American companies auditing local firms on behalf of U.S. investors.

Televised footage all over Chinese media showed blue uniformed thugs breaking into offices, carrying away boxes of files and manhandling employees. The regime was sending a message and it did so in the usual unsubtle way that Communist governments always operate.

The People’s Republic of China was far more interested in cracking down on American firms detecting fraud in China’s Potemkin village economy than on the drug rings and firms that bribe local officials to be able to continue murdering hundreds of thousands of American citizens.

China has spent far more time cracking down on tech firms than it has on drug precursor dealers. And, like the crackdown on auditors, it has done so publicly and prominently.

By contrast, China’s response to the fentanyl crisis has been to sweep it under the table.

In 2019, Chinese officials claimed that all the issues had been “resolved” after a handful of members of one smuggling network were convicted. Fentanyl was finally treated as a controlled substance. Some of the most blatant online pitches for drug sales were toned down. And hundreds of thousands of Americans still went on to die of fentanyl because none of this substantively stopped the manufacture and traffic in precursor chemicals out of China.

Now once again, Chinese authorities are sending out warning letters to companies and telling them that the government is keeping an eye on them. But smaller companies, which exist only on paper, just swap out old names for new ones and keep right on killing Americans.

Beijing had pulled this same scam in 2019 only for the fentanyl crisis to grow worse.

Even as Biden administration officials claim that the Chinese crackdown is working, it’s easy to find Chinese manufacturers still pushing precursor chemicals through Whatsapp messages.

Biden administration officials keep claiming that every meeting with Chinese officials moves things forward, but the Chinese officials tend to have a different story. In February,

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong in Vienna. Biden officials claimed that progress had been made on battling fentanyl while Chinese media claimed that the focus was on letting Chinese students enter America.

Fentanyl is profitable for Communist China both economically and politically. The mass deaths of Americans provide Beijing with leverage on everything from tariffs to visas to Taiwan.

Lenin had once reportedly bragged that the capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them. Americans are buying the fentanyl rope with which China is hanging us. Every shipment puts more money into China’s pockets while undermining America. And when American leaders ask China for help, they offer some limited cooperation, hold meetings at which they issue their own demands and then the regime which runs slave labor camps and conducted forced abortions claims that there are legal obstacles in the way of a crackdown.

The official line is that the marketplace is just too complicated for China to crack down on. The same regime which relentlessly monitors every aspect of life, especially economic activity and contact with foreigners, claims to be helpless to stop a major form of international trade.

Chinese authorities are aware of which precursor chemicals can be used for the drug trade, where they are manufactured and then shipped. And if these were being used to kill their own citizens, the crackdown would have been immediate, ruthless and thoroughly comprehensive.

But the Biden administration has been more than happy to accept the myth of Chinese helplessness. Rather than seriously taking on China, Biden’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy focused on working together with the Communist regime “on shared drug priorities”.

But Beijing has very different drug priorities than we do.

The Biden administration keeps holding out for empty promises. A White House adviser claimed that her boss believes the China deal has “the potential to make a real difference in the lives of Americans”. The potential is there but only if Biden really gets serious about pressuring China.

And he isn’t.

Beijing understands that American politicians have short attention spans and want some sort of photo op that allows them to claim that they’re handling the problem. And the Communist regime is occasionally willing to play the game and go through the ritual of meetings and form letters even while the underlying problem not only continues, but gets even worse.

In response to past pressure, China rerouted the fentanyl pipeline away from direct sales and toward cartel middlemen. The deals cut profits for Chinese dealers but maintained the core priority of harming Americans. The regime will similarly allow domestic manufacturers to play musical chairs with chemicals as they and their partners develop new even deadlier drugs.

Plausible deniability allows Xi and Biden to pretend that they’re tackling the fentanyl crisis, but both men have more to gain than to lose from the epidemic. The drug trade is lucrative for China and the suffering from the fentanyl epidemic feeds the welfare state that serves as a core organizing and campaign mechanism for the Democratic Party. It’s a win-win situation.

And a lose-lose situation for millions of Americans.

42% of American adults in one survey said that they knew someone who had died of a drug overdose. Our communities are filling up with the casualties of a drug war that China is winning.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

The Border, The Economy, China, Fentanyl, Chocolate Milk (Guess Which One Biden Chooses?)

By Milt Harris ——Bio and Archives--May 22, 2023

Sigh. When I see polls that show Biden’s approval rate is hovering around 38-40 percent, I can’t believe it. Some would think that is low, but I honestly can’t believe that there are that many Americans who are blind. Who in their right mind would vote for this incapacitated meat puppet? In around 28 months, Biden has proved to be beyond an unmitigated disaster. He has destroyed our border security, destroyed our energy independence, increased cartel activity including the deadly drug fentanyl, increased inflation to its highest rate in at least 45 years, inspired the radicalized left to promote transgenderism, which essentially has destroyed our educational system through division and has weakened us on every front in the view of the world.

Instead of addressing the REAL issues of the day, meaningful things that will help all U.S. Citizens, Sad, Sad, Sad, Uncle Joe instead spends his time piddling in matters that the petulant brats that make up his administration bring to his very limited attention. ............. To Read More

AMLO confirms that fentanyl is coming from China

By Silvio Canto, Jr.  May 10, 2023

Down in Mexico, President Andres Lopez-Obrador has confirmed what most of us knew.  Here is the story:   

The Mexican president says his country has proof that illegal shipments of the powerful opioid drug fentanyl are arriving from China.  A container with hidden packages of the drug was intercepted in the Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said........... "We already have proof," he said, adding that he would ask the Chinese government to help stop the shipments........... Mexican Navy Secretary Rafael Ojeda said the container intercepted in Lázaro Cárdenas had packages weighing 34-35kg (75 pounds) with traces of fentanyl and methamphetamine hidden in fuel resin. The cargo had left the Chinese city of Qingdao and passed through Busan in South Korea before reaching Mexico.

Well, now we know, don't we? Is anyone shocked?  The question is, what is Mexico going to do about it? That answer is a bit more complicated because China denies its role in this game.........To Read More...

Report: 6K Migrants Wait in Tijuana to Rush U.S. Border as Biden Ends Title 42 - Thousands of migrants are waiting in Tijuana, Mexico, just across from San Diego, California, to rush the United States-Mexico border as President Joe Biden is scheduled to end Title 42, one of only a few border controls remaining, this week................

Border Patrol Clears Way for More Migrant Releases to City Streets, Sources Say -  "The dam is about to break."  The Biden administration’s top border officials in Washington, D.C., have decided to authorize all Border Patrol sectors to begin “safe” mass releases of migrants to city streets if non-governmental organizations don’t have the capacity to hold them, multiple sources tell Fox News.  The consequence of this decision is that migrants will be mass released at bus stops, gas stations, supermarkets and in towns and cities across the border as Customs and Border Protection facilities are already over capacity in multiple sectors, according to CBP sources who were not authorized to speak publicly............

How Should We Regard the President’s Treason?

As an unmentionable subject or an existential threat? 

March 7, 2023 by David Horowitz 59 Comments

In the four years of World War II, 300,000 American soldiers lost their lives, or 75,000 per year. In the last four years, the number of Americans poisoned by fentanyl, has approached that number. These poisons, deliberately designed to kill Americans and especially young Americans, are supplied by China and smuggled across our open southern border by Mexican drug cartels. These attacks have taken place without America’s commander-in-chief issuing a single protest or threat against the governments of Mexico and China, even though his primary responsibility is the protection of American lives.

Nor is this the first deadly assault on American citizens by the Chinese Communist Party – or enabling response by the Biden administration. Over one million Americans were killed by the coronavirus, a biological weapon funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci and America’s Centers for Disease Control, and created in a Chinese military lab in Wuhan. 

The Chinese government lied about the contagious and deadly nature of the virus, and permitted millions of Wuhan inhabitants to travel abroad for the Lunar New Year and infect the globe. Immediately after the World Health Organization formally declared the spread a “pandemic,” President Trump barred Chinese travel to America, an act for which he was viciously attacked by the leaders of the Democrat Party including Joe Biden who described Trump’s precautionary travel ban as “hysterical and xenophobic,” “fear mongering” and “racist.”.............To Read More....