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

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.