When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called President Trump this week to discuss the imposition of stiff U.S. tariffs, Trump linked the decision to deadly fentanyl and undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. along its northern border.
Trump said he blamed Trudeau for “weak border policies” allowing “tremendous amounts” of fentanyl and migrants to “pour into” the U.S.
“I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, ‘That’s not good enough.’”
The framing was on brand for Trump in that it cast him as a tough negotiator on two of his favorite political issues: illegal immigration and synthetic opioid deaths. But it also was on brand as another 1% policy war for the president, stoking fear around a proportionally tiny issue.
Seizures of fentanyl at the northern border represented less than 1% of all recent U.S. seizures of the drug nationwide, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Most fentanyl seizures occur along the southern border with Mexico.
Apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the northern border have increased in recent years, but still only represented about 1.5% of apprehensions nationwide in fiscal 2024, according to an analysis by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Again, most apprehensions occur along the southern border.
Trudeau has repeatedly referenced those relatively small stakes in pushing back against Trump in recent months, calling Trump’s focus on such issues a “pretext” for a trade war that will destabilize Canada’s economy and make it easier to annex, a goal Trump has espoused.
Trump has similarly attacked transgender people, who represent about 1.3% of the U.S. population, according to recent Gallup polling, and foreign aid issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which represents less than 1% of the federal budget, according to multiple analyses.
Trump and his supporters say he is pursuing an “America First” agenda that supports “common sense.” They say even small amounts of fentanyl or fraud in government spending are cause for alarm, and that transgender people represent a growing threat to women and children and deserve equal concern.
But Trump’s critics and other experts reject those defenses as alarmist, inaccurate and unduly dismissive of such policies’ downsides.
In an interview on “The View” last month, transgender actress Laverne Cox blasted Trump for spreading “propaganda and lies” about transgender people being a threat. She noted the community has no real power or influence in the lives of average Americans, and contrasted that with the outsize influence of “the other 1%” — a clear reference to the nation’s ultra-wealthy.
“At the end of the day, trans people are less than 1% of the population, and trans people are not the reason you can’t afford eggs. We’re not the reason that you can’t afford healthcare. We’re not the reason that you can’t buy a house or your rent’s too high,” Cox said. “I think they’re focused on the wrong 1%. I think the other 1% is the reason for all those things.”
LGBTQ+ rights organizations and other critics have echoed that argument, in part by highlighting Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been trying to close out USAID.
According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. government spent $71.9 billion on foreign aid in fiscal 2023, which amounted to 1.2% of that year’s overall federal spending of more than $6.1 trillion. Of that $71.9 billion, less than $43.8 billion was distributed by USAID — meaning its budget was well under 1% of federal funding that year.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) recently drew attention by comparing USAID’s budget to much larger expenditures by the Department of Defense, including on its F35 fighter jet program, and to the roughly $40 billion in federal contracts held by Musk and his companies, which Garcia noted could essentially cover USAID’s entire annual budget.
“The [Republican] majority isn’t talking about Elon Musk’s programs or asking him here to testify. They’re attacking USAID, and are supporting a billionaire who gets richer every single day,” Garcia said. “We gotta push back.”
Musk and Trump have largely brushed off such criticisms. Trump’s supporters have said attempts to cast Trump’s favorite targets as small issues miss the point.
They point to the fact that younger generations of Americans are identifying as LGBTQ+ in greater numbers, and suggest that means “woke” activists will “indoctrinate” even more children if they don’t intervene, which is a baseless claim used to suppress LGBTQ+ rights for generations.
They have alleged with little evidence that USAID is awash in waste and corruption and a major drain on U.S. resources, and that such waste — large or small — should be rooted out anywhere it exists. And they have noted that fentanyl is deadly in even tiny amounts like those seized at the northern border.
When recently asked about imposing such serious tariffs on Canada over such small amounts of fentanyl — just 43 pounds were seized at the northern border last year — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt avoided the issue of scale and called the question “disrespectful to the families in this country who have lost loved ones at the hands of this deadly poison.”
She said Trump has spoken to those families, and they are grateful he is imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China for their roles in fentanyl reaching the U.S. “There need to be consequences for that. Period,” Leavitt said.
Republican leaders also have backed the president. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, said fentanyl is a major issue that many Americans expect Trump to address, and Trump is using tariffs to do so.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said Trump’s amplification of relatively small issues into major threats to his constituents — and putting human faces to those issues, as he did at his joint address to Congress this week — is not a new political tactic, but one he uses particularly well.
“President Trump masterfully plays to his base’s fears by exaggerating the extent and significance of problems and their effects in dramatized detail,” she said.
Such plays on fear can be effective politically, but can also carry “costs that are disproportionate to any benefit,” Jamieson said.
Halting every fentanyl package from Canada would hardly make a dent in the U.S. opioid epidemic, but Trump’s tariffs will have a major negative effect on individual consumers, industry and the relationship between the two countries, she said. Cuts to USAID — couched by Trump as a simple crackdown on U.S. handouts abroad — will save relatively small amounts of money, but could have major consequences in the U.S., she said, including if infectious diseases that otherwise could have been contained abroad manage to arrive stateside.
Jamieson said placing Trump’s policies within the proper context — and on the right scale — will be important in turning down the temperature in American politics moving forward, as Americans tend to moderate their opinions when they know the facts.
For example, according to a recent KFF poll, 86% of Americans overestimate the share of federal dollars that go to foreign aid, estimating on average that the U.S. spends about a quarter of its budget on such aid.
After being told the figure is closer to 1%, however, the percentage who believe the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid “drops more than twenty percentage points,” KFF found, to just 34%.
