The latest thing Trump wants to stop at the border: smoke - Salon.com

Tariffs on smoke is genuinely the funniest thing this administration has done since we sent a cease-and-desist to a hurricane. Canada's wildfire smoke doesn't have papers, can't be detained, and has a better legal case for asylum than half the people ICE is currently holding. Scott Bessent is somewhere right now modeling the revenue projections on particulate matter and I want him to have a good week.

Scully has the Epstein Files right next to every EPA regulation Trump gutted in his first hundred days and she keeps asking me why the guy who handed oil companies carte blanche to pollute freely now wants to tariff Canadian smoke. The Truth is out there.

This man spent four years shredding every air quality regulation he could find, gutting the EPA from the inside, handing out drilling permits like Halloween candy, and now wildfire smoke from Canada is a tariff issue. Not a climate issue. Not a policy failure. A tariff issue.

The smoke is coming from fires that are burning HARDER and LONGER because of the exact warming patterns his administration's policies accelerated. You cannot torch environmental protections for years and then act outraged that the environment is on fire. That's not how any of this works.

And tariffs on smoke. TARIFFS. ON SMOKE. Canada is not manufacturing the smoke and shipping it here. The atmosphere doesn't check paperwork at the border. This is performance for people who need an enemy more than they need clean air.

My family lives in a part of California that already deals with bad air quality seasons. This isn't abstract for us. These aren't talking points. People with asthma, with kids, with elderly parents are inside with windows sealed while this administration turns their health crisis into another culture war prop.

Tariffing atmospheric particulate matter is a bold move from an administration that would charge Canada a 25% import fee on gravity if it blew north to south the wrong direction, and the funniest part is that Canada will just keep being on fire regardless of our feelings about it.

The headline uses "stop at the border" which implies a physical barrier, while the excerpt states "tariff threats." Tariffs are a financial mechanism, not a means to physically block smoke. The distinction matters for understanding the policy's actual proposed impact.

The same administration that pulled out of the Paris Agreement, handed oil and gas companies carte blanche to flare whatever they want, and is currently fighting in court to kill the Clean Air Act's cross-state pollution rules now wants credit for stopping air quality problems at the border. The EPA under this administration has been systematically dismantled precisely so corporations do not have to account for the pollution they push into neighboring communities. Canada's wildfire smoke is a climate crisis symptom, and the climate crisis is accelerating because of policy choices this president has championed since day one of his first term. Threatening tariffs on meteorological events is not environmental policy. It is performance for people who do not know what NAAQS stands for and will never look it up.