Kevin Hassett, the Trump administration’s national economic council director, said the United States has not launched a trade war with Mexico and Canada, but launched “a drug war.”
Hassett joined ABC News’s “This Week” where he spoke about the evolving nature of President Trump’s tariffs on the neighboring countries.
“What happened was that we launched a drug war, not a trade war, and it was part of a negotiation to get Canada and Mexico to stop shipping fentanyl across our borders,” Hassett said.
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Trump proposed the 25 percent tariff plan as a way to get the neighboring countries to step up and curb the flow of migrants and fentanyl across the shared borders. They were paused for a month after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to aid the border.
Hassett said the U.S. has seen that Mexico and Canada have made progress to stop fentanyl from coming into the country, which allowed for Trump to sign tariff exemptions for most imports from the two countries, delaying their implementation until April 2.
“As we’ve watched them make progress on the drug war, then we’ve relaxed some of the tariffs that we put on … them because they’re making progress,” Hassett said. “And so, that drug war is something that’s been going on since really the beginning of the Trump administration.”
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Hassett later added that the administration hopes to have solved the drug war “by the end of the month.”
“Hopefully, that we’ll actually round up the people in the cartels and stop the flow of fentanyl that’s killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then we’ll be focused on the reciprocal thing,” he said of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan.
As concerns about Trump’s tariff plan began, the administration has sought to reframe the action. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick similarly called the tariffs a “drug war,” not a “trade war.”
