There was the fentanyl emergency, the auto emergency and the steel emergency. There is an emergency because importing kitchen cabinets might damage the fabric of the United States of America. Now there is the TV ad emergency.
This is the emergency that has led U.S. President Donald Trump to cut off talks and threaten an
additional 10-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods, because an Ontario government ad
featuring former president Ronald Reagan saying tariffs are bad for the U.S. economy and jobs could warp the minds of Americans.
One has to suspect that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Trump isn’t really protecting the people of the United States from imminent disasters but is in fact using these slim pretexts to threaten his trading partners. This is a shakedown.
Despite a trade deal being in sight, Donald Trump sees Ontario ad as another excuse to tighten the screws
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In the meantime, there’s the Ronald Reagan TV Commercial Emergency, which will apparently see the White House draft an executive order declaring the invasion of Ontario TV ads to be a threat to national security. Since it is Congress, not the president, that has jurisdiction over trade, Mr. Trump needs to declare an emergency to impose tariffs.
Some U.S. experts have already noted that the legislation he has repeatedly used to invoke non-trade national emergencies, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, specifically prohibits the regulation of “information or informational materials” – such as TV ads. And the whole issue of whether the IEEPA gives the president any authority to apply tariffs is already to be considered by the Supreme Court in November.
But in real-world terms, Mr. Trump has conclusively exposed his own emergencies as a sham by declaring a TV commercial to be a threat. But the pretext doesn’t matter.