By Kevin Liptak

(CNN) — On Friday afternoon, around the same time a delegation of senior Canadian officials was preparing to meet with President Donald’s Trump’s border czar in a bid to stave off withering new tariffs, Trump himself essentially told them from afar: Don’t bother.

“No,” he said when asked by a reporter in the Oval Office if there was anything Canada, Mexico or China could do to forestall the new tariffs he’d promised to apply by February 1. “Not right now.”

Twenty-four hours later, he made good.

From his Mar-a-Lago club on Saturday — after a round of golf nearby — Trump signed new 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, along with lower 10% tariffs on China, setting the stage for a continental trade war among the United States’ top trading partners. Included in his order is a retaliation clause — all but guaranteeing the tariff rates could rise, given both Mexico and Canada have vowed reprisals.

After threatening for months to impose steep tariffs on the United States’ neighbors, Trump’s decision to impose the stiff new duties should hardly come as a surprise. Still, until the final hours before Trump’s start-of-month deadline, many on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill – not to mention in Ottawa and Mexico City – held out hope he might back off.

The delegation of senior Canadian officials had been in Washington for several days, meeting with various administration officials – including border czar Tom Homan – to try to avert the imposition of 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods that Trump had promised for February 1.

Traveling across Washington armed with videos and documents showing a reinforced US-Canada border, Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly hoped to demonstrate the steps her country had taken to fulfill Trump’s demands that more be done to stop flows of illegal immigration.

Yet it has never been particularly clear what Canada and Mexico could do specifically to avoid the new tariffs – least of all to those country’s negotiators, who spent most of January working to ascertain what, if anything, they could do to appease Trump’s demands.

By the time Trump signed the tariffs Saturday afternoon, a top aide suggested nothing less than a complete stop in illegal immigration and an end to US fentanyl deaths would satisfy Trump’s demands.

“There’s going to be a wide range of metrics. In Donald Trump’s golden age, we will have only legal immigration, and we will have zero Americans dying from Chinese slash Mexican slash Canadian fentanyl,” the White House official said.

And at the end of a week that saw the first major retreat of Trump’s second administration – on a budget office order to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, which was rescinded after widespread confusion and chaos – there was little question in the minds of many Trump allies that he would follow through on his tariff pledge in some capacity.

“We’re not looking for a concession,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “We’ll just see what happens.”

Trump’s declaration he wasn’t looking for concessions hardly seemed like the final word on the matter. When he first warned in November of his plans to levy tariffs, he said they would “remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

Fulfilling a MAGA campaign pledge

Saturday’s moves are likely to thrust open a new trade battle, one being waged on issues that have little to do with trade itself. Instead, Trump appears intent on using tariffs as a weapon to enact his domestic policies: curbing flows of undocumented migrants and drugs into the United States.

Few inside the White House ever believed Trump would let his own February 1 deadline come and go without doing anything.

Tariffs, after all, are one of the few policies Trump has consistently supported for decades, a rare through-line from his days as a New York developer to his time in public office (another is immigration). As a candidate, he swore he’d use tariffs – “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” – to wield US leverage abroad.

Well before he was officially sworn in, Trump offered little indication he would back away from his threats. Business executives hoping to talk him out of his plans got little traction, and Trump advisers bluntly said the president was unlikely to alter course.

A 12-hour episode last weekend also proved illustrative for the president and his team. After the president imposed crushing tariffs on Colombia following its president’s refusal to accept repatriation flights of deportees on military planes, the country retreated almost immediately. The quick back-down demonstrated the effectiveness of tariffs as a negotiating tool, officials said.

Saturday’s tariffs amount to a starting gun on what could escalate into a global trade war, with the potential for higher costs, disrupted supply chains and a loss of jobs. The duties he approved Saturday have a lower 10% rate on Canadian energy, a tacit acknowledgement that the tariffs could lead to higher gas prices. Even Trump acknowledged the potential for adverse consequences on American consumers.

“There could be some temporary, short-term disruption, and people will understand that,” Trump said Friday when pressed by reporters on the cost of tariffs being passed on to importers, and, by extension, consumers. “But the tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong – and we’re going to treat other countries very fairly.”

Saturday’s tariffs are unlikely to be Trump’s last. The president said himself said in the Oval Office that additional tariffs could come by mid-February on chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports – along with tariffs on the European Union – all threats that few would discount given his willingness to follow through on the North American and China tariffs on Saturday.

Trump himself said in the Oval Office that additional tariffs could come by mid-February on chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports – along with tariffs on the European Union – all threats that few would discount given his willingness to follow through on the North American and China tariffs on Saturday.

Internal disagreement about tariff strategy

Inside the White House, key advisers had advocated for a tough approach in an early demonstration of Trump’s willingness to follow through on one of his top campaign pledges: to use tariffs as a cudgel in order to extract concessions, even from top US allies.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s incoming commerce secretary and former top executive at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, had been a key supporter of the maximalist tariff approach, according to people familiar with the matter. Stephen Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff with a broad policy remit, had been another top advocate within the West Wing for a muscular opening salvo in Trump’s tariff policy.

Still, even Lutnick acknowledged during his Senate confirmation hearings this week that offramps existed for Canada and Mexico to avoid the harsh duties Trump had promised.

“If we are your biggest trading partner, show us the respect. Shut your border and end fentanyl coming into this country. So it is not a tariff per se; it is an action of domestic policy,” Lutnick said.

“If they execute it, there will be no tariff,” he said.

Not all of Trump’s economic advisers appeared quite as hawkish. Market-minded officials like Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, have advocated for a softer approach. Specifically, Bessent advocated for starting tariffs at 2.5% and gradually increasing them, according to the Financial Times – a plan Trump quickly said he would reject.

“No, that would not be acceptable to me,” Trump told reporters. Trump added that he would want it to be “much, much bigger.”

This story and headline have been updated with new reporting.

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