US-Canada trade war escalates as Trump threatens tariff hike on vehicles

25 August 2026

I have read that the talk now turns to carriages - that a tariff is to be laid upon vehicles crossing a border, and that the man who governs Canada will not sit at the table again until the other comes with what he calls “the right attitude.”

I must tell you what strikes me first, and it is not the diplomacy. It is the assembly line. A tariff on vehicles is not an abstraction; it is a wage. Every carriage built depends on parts crossing that border two, three times before it rolls complete, and every crossing now carries a tax. The man tightening the screw does not feel it turn. The machinist in Windsor feels it in his Friday envelope. So does his wife, who has already begun pricing the winter coat she must postpone.

You will say this is leverage - that one must squeeze before one can bargain. Perhaps. But I observe that no one doing the squeezing has recently stood in a kitchen where the arithmetic has changed mid-year. Leverage is a word for men in conference rooms. For households it is called uncertainty, and uncertainty is paid for by whoever cannot wait out the negotiation.

And I note something else: they speak of industries as though industries had no people inside them. An auto industry “destroyed” or “protected” - but within it are thousands of persons whose skill took years to build and whose mortgage does not pause while ministers posture. The rhetoric of nations is large; the ledger of families is small and exact, and only one of these ledgers appears in the reports.

If this continues, the talks resume when pride permits, the tariffs stay until then, and the cost lands precisely where it always lands - below the level where decisions are made. That is not strategy. It is simply who is not in the room.

25 August 2026.

“Right attitude.” That’s what the Canadian has to demand before trade talks resume. Not “right terms.” Not “fair deal.” Attitude. Like he’s negotiating with a teenager over curfew instead of a country with an assembly line in it.

And the other one threatens tariffs on vehicles. Tariffs on vehicles - say it plain and it’s a tax on getting to work. That’s the whole phrase. A toll booth between you and your job, staffed by a man who calls it “protecting American workers.” Protecting. Interesting word. Protection is what a racket sells you after they’ve picked which windows stay intact.

They used to call this stuff duties. Short word. You paid it, you knew why. Then it became tariffs, then “trade measures,” now we get “escalation” - a war word wearing a suit. Escalation implies both sides are climbing. Look at who’s holding the ladder.

The auto industry didn’t move north by accident. They built it as one machine across a border nobody’s car ever noticed crossing. Parts went back and forth seven times before the thing rolled off the lot. Now some guy wants credit for noticing the line on the map. The map was always there. The money just never cared about it until someone figured out fear polls better than trucks.

Carney says destroy. Trump says protect. Same verb, different costumes. And the workers - Windsor, Ohio, same hands, same grease - they’re the cargo in both men’s sentences. Neither sentence opens with them.

Attitude. Fine. Here’s mine: two countries arguing over who gets to charge you more for the same car. That’s not a trade war. That’s a duopoly with flags.

25 August 2026.

A fella up north who runs that country’s money business says he won’t sit down at the table again till we show up with the “right attitude.” Well, I’ve been to a lot of horse trades in my life, and I’ll tell you what I learned: the man who demands you bring an attitude to the sale is usually the one planning to do the selling. Both of them. The one hollering about tariffs and the one refusing to talk - they’re both standing on their own porch yelling across the fence, and meanwhile the fence posts are rotting and neither one owns up to it.

Here’s the part that gets me. We’re threatening to tax automobiles coming down from Canada. Now I don’t know much about how they build cars, but I know this much: a good many of those machines were never fully Canadian to begin with. Parts cross that border more times than a traveling salesman crosses a county line before the thing ever rolls off the lot. You put a tax on it going north, then another coming south, and pretty soon the cheapest part of the car is the sticker price and the most expensive part is the paperwork.

And who pays? Not the governments. Not the fellows giving the speeches. It lands on some plumber in Ohio who needs a truck, same as it always does. Every trade war I ever read about ended the same way: both generals declared victory, and both armies went home barefoot.

I’ve roped calves with two men pulling opposite directions, and I’m here to report the calf always wins. He just trots off while the rope goes slack and both fellas sit down in the dirt wondering what happened.

They’ll talk eventually. Pride is expensive, but nobody can afford it forever.

Shrugged, fed the horses, went to bed.