
Trump backpedals on Mexico, Canada tariffs
Trump backpedals on Mexico, Canada tariffs | The Excerpt
On Friday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison discusses President Donald Trump's postponement of new tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico that fall under the three nations' free trade deal. President Trump's sweeping freeze on federal funding has been hit with another legal blow. A deadline looms to avoid a government shutdown. SpaceX's Starship rocket broke up during its eighth uncrewed flight test. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses a rapid decline in the U.S. butterfly population.
Have feedback on the show? Please send us an email at podcasts@USATODAY.com.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here
Cody Godwin:
Good morning. I'm Cody Godwin in for Taylor Wilson. Today is Friday, March 7th, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, Trump postponed the newly imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, plus the US has one week to pass legislation to prevent a government shutdown, and why scientists are concerned about the population of butterflies in the US.
♦
There's a new twist to the tariff saga, as President Donald Trump yesterday took executive action, postponing new tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico that fall under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement for one month. Taylor Wilson spoke with USA TODAY White House correspondent Joey Garrison for the latest, with Joey joining us directly from the White House.
Taylor Wilson:
Hello, Joey.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for hopping on, Joey. So we have another tariff reversal here, Joey. What is the latest?
Joey Garrison:
On Wednesday, President Trump announced that he would be exempting auto imports from Canada and Mexico from these newly imposed 25% tariffs. And then on Thursday, that went further, by exempting all products that are part of the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. That was an agreement that was orchestrated by Trump during his first administration.
So what that effectively does is it shields, carves out about half of the imports from Mexico from being tariffed, and about 38% of the imports from Canada. So, when you couple that with what we've seen already with the automobiles, he has sort of scaled back what was originally these widespread blanket 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canadian goods.
Taylor Wilson:
And Joey, did Trump outline any reasons for this latest switch? I know we've seen the markets kind of freak out this week, especially. Did he mention that, and how else did he argue for this latest chapter turn?
Joey Garrison:
Yeah, so President Trump signed these. And he actually signed both of them together, both the auto exemptions, as well as the ones on the US-Mexico-Canadian Agreement, but he didn't really explain exactly why. He just kept reiterating the April 2nd date, and that is what he keeps circling over and over when these so-called reciprocal tariffs go to effect. That's whereby the US imposes the exact tariff rate on any country's goods in which they tariff US exports.
So that's essentially, "If you tariff us, we're going to tariff you back." It's impossible to ignore the fact that this kind of step back here, this walk back comes after the stock market has really been rattled by Trump's actions on these tariffs earlier this week. And there's been widespread anxiety among consumers about higher prices. Of course, Trump got elected in part because of a promise to lower their prices, and these tariffs, typically, are passed down to the consumer. So, I think you do have to look at the context in which he has backpedaled on these tariffs.
Taylor Wilson:
It sounds like he had a pretty productive call, Joey, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, but he also went after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. How so? What happened there? And I know this isn't the first time.
Joey Garrison:
Yeah, they kind of have an increasingly hostile relationship with each other. Trudeau, of course, announced it earlier this year that he was going to step down once his party finds a new leader. That's not happened yet. But earlier this week, Trudeau had a defiant speech, remarks after Trump's initial tariff announcement, said, "Hey, we're going to hit you back." He imposed their own tariffs, really starting to trade war here. And he also took a hit at Trump over Trump's recent public blow up with Zelensky, and accused Trump of siding, of course, with Putin. And so there's a lot going on there.
And so, Trump continues to call Trudeau the governor of Canada, which is a slap at him of course, and this idea that Canada could be brought on as the 51st state. And Trump has accused Trudeau of jumping all over this tariff issue in order to stay in power. As you noted, Trump had very high praise actually for the Mexican president, and said that they created really working together on efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl, as well as migrants coming into the US illegally, but he's not had that same praise for Trudeau and continues to go after him.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so I guess April 2nd is now the date to circle on the calendar. What are you keeping an eye out for, Joey, between now and then?
Joey Garrison:
Yeah, April 2nd obviously is booked, but I'm still wondering whether there might even be more changes ahead on these current tariffs. We'll see, I guess when the market's open, whether this has done enough to change things. I thought it was interesting that President Trump, throughout his first term in office, would love to trumpet the market whenever there was a stock market rise. But now, when asked about the tumbling, he said he's barely been paying attention to it, and accused it of corporate globalist companies that are the reason that the stock market has responded negatively. And so, I think that was an interesting change of tune when it comes to the stock market from Trump.
Taylor Wilson:
There's news on this seemingly every day. Joey Garrison covers the White House for USA TODAY. Thank you, Joey.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, thanks, Taylor.
♦
Cody Godwin:
The Trump administration yesterday suffered another legal blow in its efforts to freeze federal funding for programs that do not align with his agenda. A second judge blocked it from implementing a sweeping pause on spending grants, loans and other financial support. US district Judge John McConnell's decision was built on an earlier temporary restraining order he issued in January, and came after another judge in Washington last month issued a preliminary injunction that similarly blocked what she called, "An ill-conceived, abrupt pause on up to $3 trillion in federal funding." The administration is expected to appeal the decision.
♦
We have a week to go until federal funding dries up and the US government shuts down if Congress can't pass legislation by March 14th. A shutdown would force a majority of federal workers to stop working and go without pay. Services deemed as essential, like border protection, air traffic control, and power grid maintenance, as well as payments for social security, Medicare and Medicaid would continue, but other things would be interrupted. Services at the National Parks would be closed, environmental and food inspections would stop, researchers at the National Institutes of Health would not be able to admit new patients, and IRS tax help would possibly be interrupted.
Republican leaders in both chambers say they want to extend current funding, and House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the details of the proposal will be available as soon as today, but absent Democratic support for the proposal, it can only afford to lose one GOP vote in the house, where Republicans currently control the chamber, 218 to 214. Democrats and both the House and Senate have said Republicans cannot count on them to help keep the government open if they aren't given a say in the package.
♦
SpaceX's Starship rocket broke up during its eighth uncrewed flight yesterday. The incident sent debris shooting through the sky and temporarily affected flights at some South Florida airports. It was the second setback of its kind for SpaceX since January. The previous Starship demonstration on January 16th ended in a fiery explosion after the Starship vehicle was lost during its suborbital flight. SpaceX, which conducted an investigation with the FAA, determined that mishap was due to a series of propellant leaks and fires. For more, and if you want to check out the video of yesterday's raining debris, check out the link in today's show notes.
♦
Butterflies in the US are in trouble, with their numbers declining rapidly. Taylor Wilson spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent, Elizabeth Weise, to learn more.
Taylor Wilson:
Beth, always a pleasure. Thanks for hopping on.
Elizabeth Weise:
Oh, always here to bring moments of joy and happiness into people's lives.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, let's try to find some joy out of some, I'd say kind of negative news out of the butterfly world. How severe, Beth, has this butterfly decline got in in recent years, just what are the numbers there?
Elizabeth Weise:
It's down 22% across the board from 2000 to 2020. So 22% is a lot. In some species, it was much higher. Some species, it was much lower. There's only one species that really did a lot better, but it's an odd one up in the northwest that kind of has peaks and valleys, and it happened to hit a peak and then a valley. So yeah, 22% across the country.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So like so much that we talk about, Beth, is climate really at the heart of all this?
Elizabeth Weise:
For butterflies, it's three things. It's lack of habitat. I mean, we're just increasingly building on wildland, we're growing crops on wildland, and there's just less place for butterflies to live. It is climate change, especially in the southwest because they can be pretty sensitive to heat. I mean, not that heat kills them, it's just that their preferred food might not grow as well if it's warmer, or it might be growing at the wrong time for the butterflies when they need it. And then also, increased pesticide use, because when butterflies eat things that have, well, insecticide on them, it can kill them as well.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So beyond just being kind of nice to look at, nice to have in the back garden, why are butterflies such an important part of nature? Why are scientists really so concerned about this?
Elizabeth Weise:
There's two reasons. So first off, butterflies are just important in and of themselves. They're actually, surprisingly, and I did not know this, they're really important in helping to pollinate, for example, the cotton crop in Texas, butterflies and certain types of flies. So, they're pollinators, they're beautiful, of course, but they also exist as a food source for a lot of birds. And so when we have fewer butterflies, we have less food for the birds.
But it's also true that butterflies are a harbinger of what's happening to insects more broadly. And it was interesting, 'cause when I talked to one of the guys who'd done this research, he said, "We've got really good data on butterflies." And partly, it's 'cause people love butterflies, 'cause who doesn't? But they're also really easy to count, because you can see them and you know what you're looking at and you're like, "Oh, look, there's a monarch. Oh look, there's a tiger."
When you are counting other insects, it's really hard. Like he said, I used to count wasps and you had to capture them and take them back to the laboratory and look at them under a microscope to identify them. So, butterfly decreases are kind of a proxy for other insects. And insects are insanely important. They are the pollinators, right? All these plants that we depend on to eat and survive evolved to be pollinated by insects, and the insects are dying off and that's not good.
Taylor Wilson:
In terms of potential fixes here, Beth, and we're talking about big, broad issues, is there anything that we can do, anything on the horizon to kind of reverse these trends?
Elizabeth Weise:
There are, and the good news for butterflies especially is that they reproduce really fast. So if you give them more habitat, they will often rebound pretty quickly. Simple things like it's possible that you can limit the amount of pesticides that farmers are using perhaps in a certain portion of the butterfly's lifespan, and that could increase things.
The other thing is that it doesn't take a lot of land for butterflies to do well. And so, some researchers at Tufts had good data showing that even just allowing your backyard to be kind of an oasis for these pollinators can be really helpful. And that's as simple as planting a couple of native plants in your garden so that there are things that your local butterfly species like to eat, using less or no insecticides, having a diverse group of plants, and letting some areas get a little wild so they have some place to nest and have a habitat.
And then, and this depends on how your HOA or your neighbors like or don't like this, but if you could leave a little bit of your lawn to grow into like a more meadow-like area, that's the sort of habitat that butterflies really love. And they really can rebound, at least locally, and every little bit helps.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thanks, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
As always, a pleasure.
♦
Cody Godwin:
Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. Were produced by Shannon Rae Green and Kaylee Monahan. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. If you use a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Fox News
17 minutes ago
- Fox News
'You can't serve on Facebook': Military spouse calls Americans to act on Flag Day
All times eastern Special Report with Bret Baier FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Trump attends 'Les Misérables' premiere at Kennedy Center

Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets
An irate Stephen Miller threatened senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials with termination unless their offices upped their game and started detaining at least 3,000 migrants a day. The White House deputy chief of staff also warned that leaders of field offices ranking in the bottom 10 percent for migrant arrests were at risk of being fired, NBC News reports, citing unnamed sources. The outbursts from Miller, viewed as the architect behind many of President Donald Trump's most hardline immigration policies, came during a mid-May meeting with ICE officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also present, though was reportedly in a calmer mood. Soon after Miller issued his threat, ICE began ramping up its efforts to detain undocumented migrants across the U.S. The plan, dubbed 'Operation At Large,' involved thousands of federal law enforcement officers and special forces, many of whom don't typically assist with immigration, being pulled in to help ICE round up migrants accused of being in the country illegally. The operation has also called for the deployment of about 21,000 National Guard troops, as well as 250 IRS agents who could use tax data to track down immigrants. Trump's push to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history is reportedly sparking friction among federal agencies. FBI agents, who normally steer clear of immigration enforcement and administrative removal orders, are increasingly being tasked with helping ICE arrest undocumented migrants. Teams within the Justice Department working on unrelated matters have also been disbanded and reassigned to focus on immigration-related cases. Federal agencies' intense preoccupation with detaining migrants that is now influencing whether a case is prosecuted at all. In one instance, a U.S. attorney's office dropped a potential federal prosecution involving a dangerous suspect simply because there wasn't a clear immigration angle. The office passed the case to state prosecutors instead. 'Immigration status is now question No. 1 in terms of charging decisions,' an assistant U.S. attorney told NBC News. 'Is this person a documented immigrant? Is this person an undocumented immigrant? Is this person a citizen? Are they somehow deportable? What is their immigration status? And the answer to that question is now largely driving our charging decisions.' In response to reports of Miller's outburst, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: 'Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump's and the American people's mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.' The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from the Daily Beast.