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But it's not. There's no secret 3D Chess game here. He renegotiated NATFA in his first term so any objections that he has with Canada are his own fault. There is no appreciable amount of fentanyl coming from Canada, less than 1% of it in the US comes from there. We have far more domestic production of it than what comes from Canada. Canadian tariffs on U.S. dairy and other ag products is because we heavily subsidize our agriculture industry because we over-produce. We were killing Canadian dairy farms because we were dumping so much federal money into our dairy farms. But again, this policy was agreed upon by Trump back in his first term. Tarrifing Canadian oil and car parts makes no sense. We've had a robust cross-border auto industry trade for 100 years. Parts can criss-cross the border multiple times before making it into final assembly on either side of the border. Disrupting that flow only harms the US Domestic manufacturers though since the foreign companies that manufacture here generally don't hop the border so much. Honda, Toyota, and Mercedes won't be affected nearly as much as GM, Stellantis, and Ford will be. Restricting Canadian oil, which we buy at a discount due to the ease of transport, does nothing to help our energy independence. Canadians ship their oil to the US because we have more of the refineries that can process the type of oil they produce. It's a symbiotic relationship. They ship us $100B worth of oil which we refine into $300B worth of other products and cut ourselves a hefty dividend check for the trouble. Restricting that oil just raises fuel and construction materials costs (their oil mostly goes to making asphalt, shingles, and the like) for the US and reduces the profitability of our refineries. It's lose-lose. No. You can't look for deeper meaning to these policies because there is none there. His goal is to shift the tax burden entirely onto the lower classes by tariffing imports, raising income taxes on the middle and lower classes, and lowering taxes on the rich. He's modeling himself on President William McKinley, and trying to set up a new gilded age with an even larger class/income divide than we have today. It also tracks with his tacky gilded personal style.

Kind of feeling like 2020 again... holding off on excess spending..though I do have some home remodeling projects I want to do in the next year... no car payments, Jeep (80k miles) and Cadillac (60k miles) running fine... will be a while before I need another vehicle (also have my sister's Equinox w/ 10k miles for around town driving). Work is going well, 5% raise for this year, got my annual and quarterly stock grants laid out for this year, company stock staying stable for now.