President-elect Donald Trump might have a slew of new futurist friends, but he’s already fulfilling his campaign promise to take America back in time — at least to 2019. With a Monday evening promise on Truth Social that his incoming administration will slap 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico — as well as increasing already existing tariffs on China — Trump sent reporters (and investors, and senators) scrambling to figure out what it all really meant. He also immediately created a policy collision — with his own potential policies. The whole idea of tariffs, meant to protect national industries by adding costs and friction to global trade, contrasts sharply with the optimism he’s created in tech and energy quarters that a try-anything administration might open the door to an “abundance agenda,” lowering barriers to growth and boosting American industry, technology and energy production. “It undermines the Trump administration's energy abundance agenda,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of global economics at the Cato Institute, told DFD. He cited potential increased costs for everything from transformers to pipeline materials to fossil fuels themselves. The techno-optimist’s case for a second Trump administration, in part, starts by loosening regulations around industrial capacity and energy generation. That would in theory unleash a pent-up desire to build new sources of solar, nuclear and traditional fossil energy (among many other forms), needed to power the massive new data centers necessary for today’s artificial intelligence tools. But steep tariffs on raw materials from Canada and Mexico would make building all that more expensive. And the impact on the tech world wouldn’t stop there: a harsh tariff regime could thwart futurists’ vision of digital progress by legally threatening the still-new rules around digital trade and intellectual property established under the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement. Under the USMCA, which the first Trump administration approved in 2020, new rules about digital trade attempted to standardize rules and practices around digitally ordered goods and the application of technology in the supply chain. If tariff negotiations break down and the USMCA blows up, it could threaten the free flow of data across North America on which the private sector has come to rely. “The digital trade provisions are actually quite good, quite liberal in the small-’L’ sense, and were one of the things that the business community and the tech sector really liked about the new USMCA,” said Cato’s Lincicome. He added that a trade breakdown could put the “data flows that we've enjoyed for the last few years at risk.” There are, however, a few potential silver linings for the tech world. Trump is determined to get Canada to cancel the Digital Services Tax it enacted this summer, which imposes a 3 percent tax on the largest tech companies. If tough negotiations over tariffs get Canada to drop it, Big Tech will likely rejoice at the death of a fee that had industry groups howling. Then there’s the efficacy, or intent, of the Trump administration itself. Many have speculated that Trump’s aggressive trade promises are mostly bluster, with an author from the progressive American Economic Liberties Project writing in an MSNBC op-ed Sunday that Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary, investment banker Howard Lutnick, has “views about tariffs contrary to Trump’s” and is “highly susceptible to persuasion by every corporate lobbyist he encounters in the private jet hangar.” Cato’s Lincicome argued that ultimately Trump’s tariff threat, as damaging as it could be to the “let’s build” tech agenda, is likely just an example of a Trump characteristic even older than his ability to move the press with a tweet — his maximalist negotiation style, meant to extract as many concessions as possible from the most outlandish starting position. “You can't campaign for two years on a global tariff and just not do it,” Lincicome said. “But there's going to be a lot of carveouts, there's going to be a lot of litigation … it's going to be a giant mess, but it’s not going to be the full Trump.” | 
