# Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s tariffs: ‘Can you believe we’re shaking down Canada’ | Late-night TV roundup | The Guardian

## Late-night TV roundup

## Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s tariffs: ‘Can you believe we’re shaking down Canada’
Late-night hosts discuss Trump’s game of chicken with tariffs on Canada and Mexico and more Doge-induced chaos

### Guardian staff
Fri 7 Mar 2025 11.19 EST
Last modified on Fri 7 Mar 2025 13.03 EST

### Jimmy Kimmel

Donald Trump moved ahead with his plan to dismantle the Department of Education this week, as its secretary, Linda McMahon,  her “final mission” to dissolve the agency in a staff email. “WWE co-founder Linda McMahon will supervise the important work of dismantling the Department of Education,”  marveled on Thursday evening. “Another genius tactical move, I’ll tell you why: he keeps getting attacked by all these smart people. What does he do? He outlaws smart. There will be no more smart!

### Seth Meyers

On Late Night,  looked at the negative impacts of Trump’s proposed tariffs on American farmers. “Trump thinks American farmers will make more money selling to American consumers rather than exporting their products, but American farmers already produce more food than the entirety of America can eat,” he explained. “That’s why farmers have been hit so hard by the dismantling of USAid,” which purchases about $2bn in food aid from US farmers to send abroad.

“Now those products may go to waste,” said Meyers. “It makes no sense, and food prices aren’t the only things going up thanks to the back-and-forth over Trump’s tariffs.”

Even truck prices are going up thanks to the tariffs. “So farmers won’t even be able to afford trucks any more. Do you think they’re going to have fun loading up a Prius hatchback with corn?” Meyers joked.

“Trump is hurting his own voters – I have to assume most Dodge Ram drivers are Republicans,” he added.

Trump actually paused the auto tariffs, which caused even more confusion in the market. Trump initially proposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico months ago, then paused them at the beginning of February, then announced more tariffs in March, then paused them on Wednesday, but then announced more tariffs for April. “He has no clue what he’s doing,” Meyers noted. “I think he honestly just likes saying the word ‘tariff’.

“It’s almost as if Trump is trying to plunge the economy into a recession,” he continued. “I mean, if you were trying to crash the economy, I don’t know what you would do differently. Because while he’s jacking up prices, he and his Doge hatchet men are also slashing away tens of thousands of jobs.”

Trump and Musk want to eliminate the Department of Education – which they can’t do – slash social security, privatize the postal service and cut the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Trump is dismantling the government, firing thousands of people while prices continue to rise, thanks to his on-again, off-again trade war,” Meyers summarized. “No one knows what Trump is doing, and that seems to include Trump.”

### Stephen Colbert

And on The Late Show,  reflected on Trump’s address to Congress, in which he claimed that tariffs “are not just about protecting American jobs, they’re about protecting the soul of our country”.

“So tariffs may raise prices and hurt American consumers, but we must have them, for the protect the _soul_ of our country … ,” said Colbert, “until today, when Trump paused all tariffs for Mexican goods and services, and also paused them for Canada.”

The flip-flop caused Colbert to break out his Trump impression: “Frankly, folks, souls are overrated. I sold mine years ago in exchange for the ability to do anything I want with zero repercussions.”

“Of course, no one has caused more chaos than Elon Musk’s Doge and geek-stapo,” Colbert continued. In a matter of days, they fired 35,000 federal employees “so randomly, that now they’re trying to hire many of them back”. A month ago, Doge fired about 1,300 employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on Wednesday, the agency sent an email calling 180 of them to come back to work, with the subject line “read this e-mail immediately”.

“That’s the kind of heart-stopping urgency that’s a strategy known as ‘your mom texting you at 7am’,” Colbert quipped.

The email stated that “after further review and consideration … you should return to duty under your previous work schedule”.

It ended: “We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused.”

Colbert took umbrage with the apology: “No! Disruption is when your cable goes out during a storm. This is your cable guy burning your house to the ground between the hours of noon and 6pm on Thursday.”

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