Another day, another shock announcement. If he’s not nominating incompetents for attorney general or TV doctors to head Medicare and Medicaid, president-elect Donald Trump is threatening to slap 25% tariffs on anything built in Mexico and Canada crossing America’s borders.
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The media has gone apoplectic, none more so than automotive analysts who have predicted all manner of doom and gloom for automakers. Reuters, for instance, says that General Motors alone will import almost 750,000 vehicles from Canada and Mexico this year. More importantly, say authors Cassandra Garrison, David Shepardson, and Ben Klayman, is how important those imported vehicles are to The General, almost half being high-profit Chevrolet Silverados and GMC Sierras, as well as the only two electric vehicles worth talking about, the Chevy Equinox and Blazer EVs.
Nor is the pain reserved for Generous Motors. Of the top four importers from Mexico, three are domestic automakers (or, in the case of Stellantis, quasi-domestic). With the resultant bump in prices — which the automakers will no doubt try to mitigate with expensive subsidization — increasing the burden on already cash-strapped consumers, many analysts find it hard to see how American automakers or consumers benefit from the president-elect’s promise to enact “tough tariffs” by executive order on his first day in office.
Except that, as so many other analysts have dutifully pointed out, this is possibly — more like probably — all just theatre. Trump has always liked playing tough to his audience. But, if his first term in office is any indication, the tariff talk is just a negotiating tactic. As long as there’s a photo op of Trump in front of an assembly plant he “saved,” the tariff disappears. Hell, the USMCA, the plan he and then-chief trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer drew up — the one he now demands be renegotiated! — was itself the product of just such a Trumpian threat.
In other words, there’s a good chance this is all bluster and bluff, Trump thinking he’s being really sneaky and sophisticated as he brings entire countries to their knees. Hell, even Trump’s purported ruse for including Canada in this commedia del’tariff — that we aren’t being tough enough on drugs and immigration — is ridiculous.
Prime Minister Trudeau, to his credit — bet you didn’t think you’d read that phrase here — has already schooled the president-elect and informed him U.S. authorities intercepted just 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border last year, while more than 20,000 pounds were seized at the Mexican border. And, while the American border patrol had 1,520,523 “encounters” at the Mexican border last year, there were only 23,721 along the Canada-U.S. border.
If our politicians are smart, they will, as Motor Mouth was the first to predict, ditch Mexico in the upcoming 2026 USMCA re-negotiations and let Mexico settle its own borders disputes with Trump. If sane heads prevail, Canada will have to make a few concessions on its (admittedly ridiculous) “supply management” of dairy products, and all this tariff nonsense will all go away, the collapse of our auto industry once again averted.
That’s not to say the Trump administration isn’t going to send the industry reeling. Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for instance, is former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who the president-elect describes as a “true fighter for America-first policies.” Zeldin, according to NBC News, takes this accolade to mean “he would prioritize efforts to ‘roll back regulations,’” the first of which is almost assuredly the watering down of tailpipe emissions standards — already rolled back under current President Joe Biden — to such a degree that legacy automakers could probably, if they chose, all but abandon their EV plans.
Even worse will be Trump’s long-standing desire to rescind California’s right to set its own automotive tailpipe emissions. You might remember that California does, in fact, have an “EV mandate” like those president-elect Trump has promised to eliminate, and that 17 other states have adopted the Golden State’s rules — jurisdictions that represent some 40% of all auto sales in the U.S. of A. — would no longer be able to force consumers to buy electric. Both EV proponents and automakers — who have committed much of their available capital to battery production — are askance at the emissions rollbacks and the possible elimination of California’s waiver.
But, as it is with all news weird and wonderful related to cars, the final word on the fantastical remains with Elon Musk. Now, we’ve already established that Musk — along with Vivek Ramaswamy — will be in charge of Trump’s ex-officio Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which seems intent on eliminating as many as 75% of the employees within the federal government. Musk is well-suited to the job because, as we all know, he famously fired Tesla’s entirecharging division — arguably the most important employees working for the EV automaker — because he had a disagreement with its manager, Rebecca Tinucci.
That leads to the small matter of whether he might be put in charge of culling employees from such groups as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which just happens to be the organization that is investigating Tesla Autopilot safety, and is also responsible for drafting a national standard for the autonomous vehicles that Musk so loudly proclaims are the future of his company. Can you say “conflict of interest?” Somewhere Sam Bankman-Fried must be wondering if he might have been spared 25 years in jail if only he could have convinced Trump to make him Secretary of the Treasury.
The tariff talk may just be a negotiating tactic—as long as there’s a photo op of Trump in front of an assembly plant he ‘saved,’ the tariff disappears
But wait, it gets worse. Lord Elon will have someone overseeing his decimation of governmental ranks. Surely, that person, whomever they might be, would prevent any corruption of the process that affect Tesla’s fortunes. Except, according to The Hill, that person is none other than that paragon of governmental propriety, that connoisseur of all things constitutional, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene will chair the newly formed Delivery of Government Efficiency subcommittee (same acronym, different wording, as Musk’s DOGE).
It’s almost impossible to capture how sim—er, ill-informed Ms. Greene can truly be. New York magazine gives it a valiant effort with its description of the representative from Georgia as someone “not afraid to speak authoritatively about stuff she knows literally nothing about.” But even that fails to capture her inadequacy. She is, after all, the person who, according to CNN, has agreed with social media posts claiming Sandy Hook was a “false-flag” operation; that Democratic politicians should be executed; and, according to Media Matters, “endorsed a conspiracy theory that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was videotaped murdering a child during a satanic ritual and then ordered a hit on a police officer to cover it up.”
So, to wrap it all up, what we have is Elon Musk seemingly in a position to fire employees, some of whom might be “inefficiently” investigating him and others who might be tasked — we’ll assume “inefficiently” again — with writing the regulations that would determine the future of his prized robo-taxis, all while being overseen by a woman who thinks that Jewish space lasers might have caused 2018’s California wildfires. What do the kids call it when something goes really sideways? A cluster-something-or-other?
Seriously, I could not in a million years — and frequent readers know that I have tried — predict anything so monumentally inane. Indeed, for the next four years, Motor Mouth will adapt a new strategy for forecasting the future, which will, when analyzing the machinations of the American government vis-à-vis the North American auto industry, be predicated on the worst-case scenario possible being managed by the most ill-suited people available. Buckle in: it’s about to get stupid.
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