https://archive.ph/rXQMp

General Motors executives are closely tracking President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, but the company is not yet making any major changes to its strategy in North America in response to the threatened tariffs.

The automaker has pulled together an “extensive playbook” of possible options but won’t put them in place “until the world changes dramatically, and we see a permanent level of tariffs going forward,” the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, told reporters in a conference call on Monday evening.

“I won’t go into the details exactly but we’ve been preparing for that and want to make sure that we are prudent and don’t overreact,” he added.

Mr. Trump said last week that he planned to impose tariffs of 25 percent on goods from Canada and Mexico starting on Saturday, Feb. 1. If he followed through on those plans, the tariffs would deal a big blow to G.M. and other automakers that produce vehicles and components in those countries, and probably increase the prices of many vehicles sold in the United States.

G.M. produced nearly 900,000 vehicles in Mexico in 2024, more than any other carmaker, and most of those were shipped to the United States. Among them are the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, as well as the Chevrolet Equinox sport-utility vehicle — all top-sellers and big sources of profit for the company. It also produces some Silverados and electric delivery vans in Canada.

It sounds like GM is saying that they expect that the tariffs may be short-lived.

Trump has, from what I’ve read, stated that the tariffs will be in place until Canada and Mexico address the fentanyl crisis. I have not seen any concrete conditions, or any suggestion that he attempted to negotiate using the threat of tariffs, both of which I would expect if he had policy concessions he wanted.

In the past, Trump has repeatedly made vague and not very accurate assertions that his policies were extremely successful, including those that had little or negative impact. For example, he declared that he got rid of NAFTA, which was a “horrible deal”, when his base didn’t like it, and replaced it with the USMCA, which was essentially the same free trade agreement with some minor tweaks and a new name. The typical voter doesn’t look at the specifics of US FTAs or statistics in general, so Trump was able to give them the impression that he had dramatically altered the situation in ways they wanted, while not doing so.

So if you figure that he declares that his fentanyl policy is a great success, pulls the tariffs after a short period of time, maybe does the “cut a check with his name on it” stunt that he did with the economic stimulus stuff, this time using funds from tariffs, he might manage to convince supporters that he’s done something substantive without needing to do much, score political points. Same as with The Wall that was the centerpiece of his first campaign and never quite happened or the aforementioned NAFTA changes.