I think it's motivated entirely by schemes to stuff his pockets with money.
i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893397/trump-again-shr...
EDIT: Adding a TL:DR, this article explains how the Trump admin reduced the size of two national monuments by 90% and 91% respectively. This is just one example, there are more and most of them are out west in lands untouched for nearly a century. Saved for posterity because once they're gone, they're gone.
Someone's pockets, must be gnomes:
• PHASE 1: COLLECT UNDERPANTS. (tariff "foreign" goods desired by Americans, collect upon import from companies, clarify spiked prices experienced by consumers ‘entirely’ due to prior admin policies)
• PHASE 2: … (let simmer)
• PHASE 3: PROFIT. ("return" tariff costs to companies)
May 16: Vietnam approves $1.5B Trump hotel project (https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-trump-golf-estate-investm...)
July 2: US lowers tariffs on Vietnam to 20% (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500738/pdf/DCPD-...)
Love the see-how-ignorant-I-am type of comments.
Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.
Watch what they do, not what they say. They say a lot of things, and where they can they take all positions.
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/2275fbf2d96f518e54c2b72edf163f8...
Two things that will prevent that:
- inertia
- it's likely that Canadian lumber before the tariffs wasn't the marginal good, wasn't the highest cost supplier. If Canadian suppliers were making 10% more profit than the previously marginal supplier, the price will go up 40% instead of 50%, Canadian suppliers absorbing that 10%.
Canada also participates in trade, is located in the same geographic continent, and is also suffering housing issues.
I too struggled to identify which “our” the comment referred to
Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?
But you burn the ability to make more deals with the same counterparty again.
If you played this game with your neighbor over a fenceline or tree limb dangerously overhanging into your yard.. you would save a few bucks once, and have an antagonistic relationship for the next 10-20 years of living next to them. Good luck getting the benefit of the doubt next time.
Apparently Machiavelli was onto something
Do you have to talk like this? How difficult is it to rewrite this as "I don't believe this is the message conveyed in The Prince."
There is always someone out there trying to push on people just like you and the phrasing is not really that offensive and as one would say "tongue-in-cheek".
Do you enjoy finding weak people telling them "don't do this" when they barely step outside of "being utterly polite"?
So there must be something specifically interesting for you I suppose.
Even positive reporting of the man makes him out to have a massively fragile ego.
And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.
Trump is doing exactly the things the people who voted for him want him to do, however backwards that is on the whole or however backwards it appears to white collar well paid service industry workers (the richest class of Americans,richer than the 1%, FYI)
This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.
The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.
The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.
You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.
The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better.
Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering.
Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world.
Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that.
The right says protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.
The right says give them jobs, but in reality, their policy destroys jobs. It doesn't help that GOP fiscal policy also implodes the deficit further than it already is, so now you can't even use that money to stimulate businesses. We're stuck in a corner. It will take decades to fix this fiscal mess, and in the meantime a lot of people are going to suffer.
Tariffs have been used to protect industry for centuries by every country in the whole current debacle.
Again I'm just speaking about what the wrench does, not how the guy wielding is working.
If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?
Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that
Going against "business as usual" resulted in higher prices, as predicted and promised.
Nearly everyone here benefited from lower prices afforded by reduced trade barriers. This isn't some obscure hidden fact.
His second weapon is throwing a monkey wrench into the works after agreeing to something. Keep the opponent on their back heel.
It works well, until it doesn't. Once you meet an opponent who stands firm no matter what you threaten, you lose your bargaining position. Carney is well-versed in this kind of negotiation.
May also explain why he stopped doing actual NYC RE dev and moved onto his licensing model in dozens of cities (new pools of suckers).
But when every threat & walk back is covered in national media, and he is playing the same game with the same big trading partners .. it loses its effect. Similarly he’s quite old and certainly lost any touch he had.
Lumber is a different long standing trade dispute going back to the 80s unrelated to the industries targeted by the 50% tariffs.
Trump created a 10% Lumber tariff in Sept 2025, but it was already tariffed before that. Canadian lumber today isn’t suddenly 50% more expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy as the largest industries.
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...
According to your own article lumber is included already You’re wrong. It was already 45%!
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/202...
The new 50% tariffs don’t suddenly make Canadian lumber more expensive. It was already expensive.
This was all being negotiated together between Canada and US, but it’s not part of the new tariffs.
I tried to do some more research before my coffee finishes in 5 minutes, you're right it's not ALL Canadian products or even all Canadian lumber products.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/world/canada/trump-tariff...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...