(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock, Getty)
IN HIS OTHERWISE INEXPLICABLE trade war with Canada, U.S. dairy was supposed to be the one industry President Donald Trump was actually helping.
He frequently namechecks the sector in his social media posts and interviews about Canada, citing it as evidence that our polite northern neighbors are really a bunch of dirty cheats. Sometimes, Trump complains that Canadian dairy tariffs on the United States are 250 percent; sometimes, according to Trump, they’re 400 percent.
And look, it’s true that dairy trade has been a source of friction between the two countries over the years. Trump’s response to that friction, however, has been to tariff, bully, and ban his way to prosperity. To which American dairy farmers are now saying: Please, stop helping.
“I can’t figure out who’s winning here,” Mateo Kehler, CEO of Jasper Hill Farm, a cheese company in northern Vermont, told me. “Everybody I know is losing.”
Jasper Hill Farm makes mouth-watering, high-end, award-winning cheeses, the kinds served at Michelin-starred restaurants and stocked at your local cut-to-order cheesemonger counter. In fact its rich, bark-wrapped, “spoonably soft” Winnimere cheese just won the American Cheese Society’s Best of Show prize. Yet in the Trump era, the company’s export business has imploded. Jasper Hill Farm’s once-booming Canadian customer base evaporated almost overnight last year, due to a combination of tariffs, counter-tariffs, and pissed-off Canadian customers boycotting American goods.
And you know what? Kehler says he doesn’t blame them.
“Honestly, if I was a Canadian consumer, I would not be buying anything from the U.S. either,” he acknowledged. “This is a time for resistance, and I applaud Canadians for voting with their dollars.”
Let’s talk about how we got here. This is gonna get gouda.