In this trade war, there is no winning for the United States

For no apparent reason, other than boredom, the United States has entered into a trade war with Canada, Mexico, China, and who knows who else. The President of the United States, who has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t know what tariffs are, is throwing caution to the wind and completely disrupting the economy of the United States.

The most positive for Trump outcome here is that manufacturers — all of them, not just automotive — build 100% of the products they sell in the United States. Every component. Every widget. Even items that we can’t even produce in the United States due to technical or physical limitations. It doesn’t matter, they have to be made here.

If you were born with half a brain you know that’s impossible, but there are people out there gaming out how this could possibly work and how much it could cost. You can’t. It’s impossible. Unless the United States takes over the world — which is something I’m sure Trump and Musk have considered — items that are needed to build what we consume will need to be made outside of our borders.

If we try, though, to bring everything inside it’ll have a tremendous negative effect on our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), any exports that might remain, and any innovation that could happen.

No country, in a prolonged trade war, will buy stuff from us. They won’t buy our fruits and vegetables. They won’t buy our cows. They won’t buy our automobiles. Farmers suffer. Automakers suffer. Communities that rely on both of these things will suffer. You can’t force another country to buy our goods, and there’s no incentive for them to do it in a trade war.

We were pulling ahead of China economically out of the COVID recession, but not anymore. This trade war will cripple that difference, making China the dominant superpower for the next 100 years. And Chinese innovations in vehicles, especially EVs, will continue to move forward at a rapid pace. Those automakers will continue to sell in Europe — which will now be nuclear-armed for reasons beyond the scope of this editorial — and will likely even make inroads into Canada and Mexico. Automobile prices rise in a trade war, and China will offer a solution to a price-sensitive economy.

We could’ve been global leaders. We could’ve been innovators. Instead, our president has decided that the economics of the Great Depression are what will make America great. Those out there trying to tell you otherwise — that are trying to tell you it’ll take some time but it’ll all work out — are either high on drugs or kidding themselves. Like it or not, we have a global economy. It might not be perfect — in some areas, it could certainly be a lot better — but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and trying to do so will only cripple our already fragile republic.