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Gustavo Petro, a former teenage Marxist revolutionary who became Colombia's president in 2022, just got beat by the final boss: President Donald J. Trump. And he got beat because Trump's tariff threats, a cornerstone of his America First policy platform, worked.
The story began when Petro refused to repatriate Colombian aliens who have committed crimes in the U.S. and had been released by Democrat district attorneys and blue city police departments. Upon learning about Colombia's refusal to take their own criminals back, Trump posted to social media that he was imposing an immediate 25 percent tariff on Colombia, along with assorted other sanctions—whereupon Petro backed down not 47 minutes later, promising to send his own plane to Washington to pick up the migrants.
What's next? Mexico building the wall? Don't discount it! Mexico and Canada are facing similar threats of tariffs which might go into effect this weekend.
The weekend kerfuffle proved how effective tariffs can be: We give you access to our markets at a cost to our workers, and in exchange, we get to make demands—in the case of Colombia, to repatriate criminals. As a negotiation tool, tariffs might not be permanent. They can be removed quickly when a country strikes a deal with the U.S. To wit, Colombia's 25 percent tariff came and went in 24 hours.
But fariffs as a negotiation tool will be just one of the three ways the Trump administration will use America's economy to its advantage. Other tariffs will be permanent. Scott Bessent, Trump's Treasury Secretary should be confirmed on Monday said using tariffs to replace some tax revenue, and using tariffs to rebalance trade with certain countries or in certain product lines like steel, are all part of the plan.
Trump's already using them as a negotiation tool. You can bet he will use them for the other two purposes.
Poor Gustavo Petro didn't know what hit him. He immediately sent out a long post on X that read like something written by a Post Colonial Literature or Social Justice department head from Amherst College. He was reaching out to the American opposition, and they raced to his defense. Democrats acted outraged and contemptuous at the same time. Some tweeted that by punishing Colombia, Americans would have to pay more for imported coffee beans and roses. By their logic, we should succumb to open borders unless we want to pay $2 more for a bouquet of roses on Valentine's Day, as if they could possibly calculate those price increases. I assure you: They cannot.
Other countries grow coffee. Also, California used to have a big cut flowers market. A lot of it was destroyed when Presidents Bush and Obama finalized a free trade agreement with Colombia in 2011.
Maybe California flower growers want some of that market back.
Trump is acting on behalf of most Americans, including those who voted for Kamala Harris. A NORC Center for Public Affairs poll in January said 82 percent of all respondents want criminal aliens convicted of crimes deported immediately. Another 68 percent said they'd be fine with deporting legal immigrants convicted of crimes.
These people are not part of the American family.
Colombia might not be free of tariffs for long, though. Even if they take back the entirety of the Colombians residing in migrant hotels nationwide, Trump's other tariff proposals are still on the table. He is not going to wait for experts and lawyers to sign off on interagency memos, or an act of Congress, to bring these executive branch policies to bear.
Kenneth Rapoza is a former WSJ reporter in Brazil. He covered the BRICs for Forbes until 2020. He is an analyst with the Coalition for a Prosperous America and a frequent contributor to Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
