White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow argued Sunday that tariffs are just a negotiating tool for President Trump and his ultimate goal is not have them at all.
That claim was countered by Marc Garneau, Canada’s minister of transport, who noted that tariffs on steel and aluminum are still being applied to his country despite both sides agreeing to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade.
“His goal down the road is zero tariffs,” Kudlow, a former Wall Street adviser and self-described free trader, said at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association. Any levies that the president has put in place are temporary measures, he said. “Tariffs are a negotiating tool. They are part of his quiver. No president, past or present, has stayed on China’s case as we have and he has used tariffs to bring China to the table.”
Kudlow was seeking to tamp down Trump’s image as somebody who likes imposing tariffs for their own sake. The president has on occasion publicly said, “I am a tariff man.”
Garneau, who was on stage with Kudlow, said if tariffs are just a temporary tactic, then Trump should have restored the exemptions from steel and aluminum tariffs that his country had prior to the negotiations over USMCA. The administration removed those exemptions during the talks as a means to pressure Canada to reach a deal. It was widely expected that the exemptions would be restored after the deal was reached in last year but the administration has thus far refused to do that.
Garneau said frustration over the tariffs is causing resistance to the trade deal in his country’s parliament. “We want to ratify the USMCA but we have a serious problem in Canada. It’s that those steel and aluminum tariffs are still in place,” he said.
Kudlow conceded it was a problem that needed to be addressed. “We are hard at work at solving that issue,” he said, without offering details on why the issue was so difficult.
