Wall St. Journal Scoffs as ‘Dumb’ Trump Uses Tariffs to Reduce American Drug-Deaths

There is “no sense” in President Donald Trump using economic tariffs to reduce the mass death of Americans by fentanyl, says the Wall Street Journal.

“If a North American trade war persists, it will qualify as one of the dumbest in history,” the editorial declares in a January 31 editorial.

The newspaper’s blase attitude towards the mass death of myriad Americans is explained by its business readers’ intense focus on the economic payoff from cross-border trade between low-wage Mexicans and high-consumption Americans.

“Take the U.S. auto industry, which is really a North American industry because supply chains in the three countries are highly integrated.” the journal wrote in its editorial “The Dumbest Trade War in History“:

In 2024 Canada supplied almost 13% of U.S. imports of auto parts and Mexico nearly 42%. Industry experts say a vehicle made on the continent goes back and forth across borders a half dozen times or more, as companies source components and add value in the most cost-effective ways.

Trump has repeatedly described his 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as a response to those two countries’ failure to block the export of deadly drugs into American communities.

On February 1, he posted:

Today, I have implemented a 25% Tariff on Imports from Mexico and Canada (10% on Canadian Energy), and a 10% additional Tariff on China. This was done through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) because of the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl. We need to protect Americans, and it is my duty as President to ensure the safety of all. I made a promise on my Campaign to stop the flood of illegal aliens and drugs from pouring across our Borders, and Americans overwhelmingly voted in favor of it.

A White House document detailing the tariffs points to the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl,” adding it “constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).”

On February 2, he responded to the Wall Street Journal article:

The “Tariff Lobby,” headed by the Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal, is working hard to justify Countries like Canada, Mexico, China, and too many others to name, continue the decades long RIPOFF OF AMERICA, both with regard to TRADE, CRIME, AND POISONOUS DRUGS that are allowed to so freely flow into AMERICA

Notably, the Wall Street Journal declined to admit the damage caused to ordinary Americans by the easy trafficking of drugs within the trucks that also carry auto parts and farm products.

“Over the past 25 years, more than 727,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses, marking a tenfold increase in mortality rates from 1999 to 2022,” wrote Nicholas Dockery, in a January article about the drug epidemics’ damage to national security:

Nearly half of these deaths occurred between 2017 and 2022, with 81,806 lives lost in 2022 alone. Synthetic opioids, primarily illegally manufactured fentanyl, contribute an estimated 90 percent of these deaths.

The drug deaths are also caused by international trade, Dockery noted:

The global supply chain for fentanyl involves complex geopolitical dynamics, particularly with the Peoples Republic of China and Mexican Cartels. From 2014 to 2019, approximately 70-80 percent of confiscated fentanyl in the United States originated in Chinese labs. Today, most fentanyl is produced in Mexico using precursor chemicals sourced from China. Mexican cartels, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, dominate this trade by leveraging alliances with Chinese triads to access chemical precursors.

The drug threat from Canada has spiked since Canada imported millions of Indian migrants, some who help manufacture and transport the drugs to American victims. The threat from Mexico has worsened since President Joe Biden’s deputies welcomed tens of thousands of Chinese migrants across the border.

Biden’s border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — refused to publicly pressure Mexico on drugs as he also negotiated deals with Mexico to smoothly manage the cross-border flow of migrants.

“The economic toll is staggering,” Dockery noted:

The US Joint Economic Committee estimated that the opioid crisis cost the country $1.5 trillion in 2020, a 37 percent increase from 2017. This figure encompasses healthcare costs, lost productivity, criminal justice expenses, and reduced quality of life for overdose survivors. The crisis has significantly impacted the US labor market, accounting for 43 percent of the decline in men’s labor force participation rate and 25 percent for women between 1999 and 2015.

“The fentanyl crisis represents a clear and present danger to US national security … the United States can work towards mitigating this threat and safeguarding its citizens and interests,” he wrote.

But the Wall Street Journal‘s editors prefer to throw up their hands than slow the massive death toll among their fellow American workers, consumers, and renters:

Mr. Trump’s justification for this economic assault on the neighbors makes no sense. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says they’ve “enabled illegal drugs to pour into America.” But drugs have flowed into the U.S. for decades, and will continue to do so as long as Americans keep using them. Neither country can stop it.

Still, the Wall Street Journal editorial board also has a way to offset the deaths, civics chaos, and economic distortion caused by international trade. “U.S. workers, taxpayers, and businesses would benefit from more immigrants of all skill levels,” the board wrote in 2019.

For example, the migrants help to replace the midwestern Americans who have been dying of despair and drugs since the Journal‘s readers began sending their jobs overseas, the board wrote:

Low-skilled immigrants are contributing heavily to the nation’s entitlement programs and sustaining Rust Belt communities that otherwise would be losing population.

However, the Journal’s no-compromise demand for a continued policy of Extraction Migration betrays the invigorated populist politics of America.

Those new politics, carried by Trump into the White House, show that ordinary Americans expect decent treatment from business and university elites in exchange for jointly rejecting the Democrats’ package offer of elite-guided lives and government-managed subsistence.