SWING STATE, MAINE (The Daily Whatever Press) — 11 days before Election Day, the President of the United States discovered that his sacred, nonnegotiable, 51st-state-or-bust 50% tariff on Canada comes with a dimmer switch, and he’s using it to light Susan Collins’s way back to the Senate.
Buckle the fuck up. The receipts are made of cardboard. Literally.
On Friday, October 23 — before the White House had said one damn word — Collins’ office announced that nine categories of Canadian imports “crucial for Maine’s agricultural industries” would be exempted from the tariffs. Then they provided a list: 1) cardboard boxes; 2) plastic boxes and crates; 3) plastic packing bags; 4) cooling equipment; 5) the cleaning, sorting, and grading machinery Maine’s blueberry and potato farms run on; 6) packaging machinery; 7) non-adhesive plates, foil, and strip; and 8) seaweed and algae.
That’s eight. Collins’s own office cannot count to nine.
Somewhere in the Maine woods, the ninth category of tariff relief is wandering around like a lost hiker in a cotton hoodie, and honestly, it’s the most relatable character in this whole goddamn story.
Then came the White House fact sheet, and with it a detail that should make you feel stabby, eh? The administration is moving these tariffs, not ending them. Out go the blueberry boxes; in come new duties on certain valves, carpets, and — I swear to Christ — waste products, set so the overall tariff impact stays exactly the same.
This is Let’s Make a Deal, if Monty Hall worked for the RNC and every door opened onto the same bill. Anyone who has raised a small child has seen the move: broccoli shoved to the edge of the plate, hidden under a dinner roll, and the plate declared finished. Overall vegetable impact: unchanged. The difference is that a five-year-old who pulls this gets sent back to the table, and a president who pulls it may get a Senate seat.
And I cannot fucking deal with equivocating piece of patriarchal-enabling shitbag Susan Collins for another goddamn term, I swear to fucking god I cannot.
Susan Collins voted alongside Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, and Rand Paul to end Trump’s Canada tariffs. She called the new ones a mistake. She has said, on the record, that there’s nothing good to say about them. She was right every single time.
And then she did what Collins has done for nearly 30 years: she stopped trying to take the matches away from the man and started asking very nicely for him to burn a little less of her house. In September, after her exchanges with Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, road salt and cement got waived. Now it’s cardboard and seaweed.
Women in politics get handed a specific job: the responsible one, the grown-up in the room, the one who tidies up after the men set the kitchen on fire and is then expected to be grateful for the dish towel. Collins has worked that shift for three decades. This week the dish towel came with a campaign ad and some tariffs to make her look effective to her constituents.
Her opponent, Democrat Troy Jackson, nailed it on Twitter: Collins “wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put out the fire.” Back when she took a bow for road salt, he reminded her that Mainers can’t eat it.
The White House swears this is about policy. Spokesperson Matthew Middleton said the president acted in response to “Canada’s continued discrimination against and additional retaliation targeting U.S. commerce.”
Sure it is, Matty.
So the 50% tariff is a principled stand against Canadian discrimination, except for the parts that touch potato-sorting machines in a state where a Fox News poll has Collins and Jackson tied at 49% apiece. Those parts get shipped off to valves and carpets. And waste products. The principle survived; it just moved into the garbage.
You don’t get to call this a righteous trade war, you tariff-twiddling coward, and then hand-pick the exemptions off a Senate polling memo.
Before this clusterfuck, Maine did about $6 billion a year in trade with Canada. The new exemptions take effect October 30. Election Day is November 3. Notoriously liberal rag The Wall Street Journal reported the maneuver was designed to help Collins and other Republicans in tight races, which means the administration’s official story and its actual story live on two different floors of the same building.
This is three-card monte on a folding table outside Port Authority, circa 1987, except the dealer has a Sharpie and a presidential seal and the marks are potato farmers in Aroostook County.
For two months, Maine growers paid 50% more on the boxes their blueberries ship in and the machines that sort them. Nobody in Washington D.C. felt it. And now we know the relief was always available, one proclamation and one tight poll away.
That means the pain was never necessary. Of course it wasn’t.
It was a choice, made by a man who keeps calling Canada the 51st state, and it got unmade only when a Republican senator’s re-election odds got scary. Then he billed it to the carpets. Somewhere, whoever imports Canadian valves just inherited Maine’s blueberry bill, and nobody is writing that person a press release.
The ninth tariff-relief category is still out wandering the woods, somewhere. I hope it’s registered to vote.
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