President Trump's tariffs on Canadian imports and Canada's retaliatory measures are impacting key economic sectors in several Republican-leaning states, potentially affecting upcoming midterm elections.
Page F7From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 15 September 2026
Trump's tariff leverage against Canada boomerangs onto the lobstermen and farmers who elected him
As it ran on the front
Call it leverage. The United States imposes 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian imports, Canada does not fold, Canada answers with its own tariffs, and somewhere in the space between those two numbers is the moment leverage becomes a word that cuts in both directions.
The strategy was never complicated: squeeze Ottawa, Ottawa squeezes back, both sides sit down, the trade deficit narrows, the president gets to say he did something nobody else would try. That's the pitch, and it survives right up until Canada answers the tariffs with a 25 percent tariff of its own, on lobster, and the Maine Lobstermen's Association puts out a statement saying the industry is becoming — their word, not mine — "collateral damage" in a fight it did not start. I want to be careful here. That is the association's own language. It is not something I am inserting to make a point. It is the point.…
…(cont) Fine. One coastal industry, one state. The leverage still works everywhere it isn't lobster.
Except it isn't just lobster. NPR spent time this week with grain farmers along the Montana-Canada border who describe the tariffs and the retaliation costing them buyers, contracts, margin — a landlocked state with no lobster industry to blame it on. NPR's own headline put it plainly: geopolitics and grain don't mix. The wire's word for the arrangement, not the farmers', was that none of it counts as neighborly.
So it is not one industry absorbing a strategic cost. It is Maine and it is Montana, a coast and a wheat field, both on the losing side of a trade war sold to them as leverage over somebody else.
This is the part that is hard to spin: the Washington Examiner — not a left-leaning outlet, not a Canadian one — ran its own verdict calling the 50 percent tariff on Canada "a serious strategic mistake." That ran roughly a week after the Maine Lobstermen's Association had already called itself collateral damage, which means the friendliest newsroom in this fight arrived at the bad news after the fight's own casualties did, not before.
The Hill has since done the math: several red states, this trade war, on the ballot. I was going to say the leverage is working. I am not going to say that. The leverage is working on the states that elected him.
“They sold you "leverage" like a card trick where they win and Canada loses — nobody mentioned the guy holding the losing hand is a lobsterman in Maine and a wheat farmer in Montana. Read the receipts: the tariff bill doesn't land in Ottawa, it lands on the docks and the grain elevators back home, in the reddest counties they've got. When the collateral damage is wearing a red hat, that's not an accident, that's the plan working exactly as badly as it looks.”
“Look, tariffs are leverage, that's basic economics — you eat a short-term hit for a long-term win, sure the lobstermen took a hit, the farmers took a hit, but that's not — okay, that's basically the entire plan taking a hit. The point is Canada eventually blinks. They haven't blinked yet. Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Farmers in states bordering Canada say they are reeling from President Trump's trade wars and resulting retaliatory tariffs. And it's just not neighborly.
· "Most Stupid Trade Fight in History": U.S. & Canadian Workers Stand to Lose in Trump's New Tariff War from the morgue, 24 Aug 2026
· How Trump kneecapped his own China policy with a 50% tariff on Canada from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Maine Lobstermen's Association fears becoming 'collateral damage' in Canada tariff war from the morgue, 26 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.