For the past couple of weeks, President Trump has been railing against the trade treachery of our neighbor to the North, Canada. Canada has replaced China as Trump's new bugaboo. At the same time, Trump turned his anger against the evil Canucks. He said China was not a current to manipulator. That's because Trump is now attempting to appeal to the blue-collar workers in the swing states who've been harmed by Canada's protectionism. There's nothing wrong with Trump ripping Canadian protectionism on milk importation. It's true that Canada has been tariffing American milk products in order to subsidize its domestic farming industry. Here's what Trump tweeted today. Quote, Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult. We will not stand for this. Watch. But it's Trump's solution that's sort of a problem. Instead of pressuring Canada to lower its tariffs on Wisconsin milk, Trump has decided to retaliate via tariffs of his own, with no sign that he's using those tariffs as leverage to tamp down protectionism from the Trudeau administration. On Monday night, Trump announced to conservative allies he would put a, quote, countervailing duty of somewhere between 3 and 24 percent on Canadian lumber. The United States buys nearly 80 percent of all Canadian

softwood lumber exports. This means builders will pay the price for Trump's trade retaliation.

As Cato Institute pointed out a decade and a half ago, quote, the resulting addition of $800 to

$1,300 to the cost of a new home prices some 300,000 families out of the

housing market. Workers in the major lumber using sectors outnumber logging and sawmill

workers by better than 25 to 1. But this tariff does pay off domestic loggers who are

celebrating along with their Democratic representatives. Senator Ron Wyden is a radical leftist,

and he called the move a quote message that help is on the way.

Herein lies the problem.

The truth is that the trade dispute over lumber has nothing to do with the trade dispute over dairy. The issues are not linked. America has had a longstanding dispute with Canada over lumber for the past three decades, but Trump likes tariffs and he wants to raise them. He has a particular constituency that he wants to protect, and just as Democrats due with domestic spending, he's going to use trade to help them out through indirect taxation. That's why Trump has blamed NAFTA for Canadian trade intransigence, which doesn't make a lot of sense, considering that NAFTA lowered tariffs rather than raising them. If Trump were using the new lumber tariffs as leverage, for future negotiations, that would be understandable. But it appears he's just using the milk dispute as a trigger for the protectionism he so desperately seeks. Look for more punitive measures that harm American producers and consumers from the Trump

administration, unfortunately. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro show.

So, tons of breaking news this morning.

We're going to get to the latest on Mike Flynn.

It now appears that Mike Flynn may have broken the law,

and the White House is sort of stonewalling for him, which is really not good.

Meanwhile, we'll talk about the government shutdown, which is not just Trump's fault.

Republicans do not know how to handle government shutdowns.

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