What did Donald Trump do today?

He made a new kind of empty tariff threat against the United States' largest trading partner.

Wildfires in Canada are causing smoke and other forms of particulate air pollution to drift into the United States. This is a serious health issue for anyone, Canadian or American, in the path of the smoke. Fire season is getting longer and more intense across North America due to the rapidly changing climate, and Canadian and American firefighting organizations have been working together to coordinate their efforts to control the most dangerous fires across borders.

A Canadian CL-415 "Super Scooper" firefighting plane prepares to drop water on last year's Los Angeles wildfires

Trump responded to the news by calling the smoke an "invasion" and threatening to increase taxes on Americans who buy Canadian goods or raw materials.

Trump, who calls climate change a "hoax," has made a long habit of using natural disasters, and in particular forest fires, to play political games. He famously insisted that the Prime Minister of Finland—a country with a cool, wet climate and thin alpine forests—had told him they no forest fires because they "raked" the forest floor. 

Trump has also shown genuine confusion that water from northern California can't flow "down" onto the tops of mountains in the Los Angeles area, apparently in the childish belief that north always means "up." That's not just an embarrassing misunderstanding of how maps work: he dug in and wasted billions of gallons of water emptying California reservoirs during an active drought and fire emergency.

Trump's tariff threat to Canada is empty, or at least it's empty where Canada is concerned, which is rapidly reorienting its trade networks in favor of other countries. American consumers and manufacturers can still be hurt by higher prices or the loss of more Canadian business. 

But at home, Trump is openly playing favorites with which Americans he's willing to allow to benefit from government help in disasters. He's approved 89% of requests for disaster declarations from states governed by Republicans, and only 23% from states governed by Democrats. 

 

Why does this matter?

• Rewarding "loyal" subjects with good government while punishing the opposition with ineffective government is what dictators do. 

• A president who can't understand third-grade geography or middle-school meteorology isn't competent to do the basics of his job. 

• Making American houses more expensive because there was a tax increase on the Canadian gypsum in the drywall won't put out any fires.