Tom Tiffany Already Voted to Keep the Tariffs. Now He Hides While Trump Hammers Wisconsin Again
MILWAUKEE – President Trump yesterday signed a new round of proclamations slapping 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports, and Tom Tiffany, who five months ago voted to keep tariffs on Wisconsin’s largest trading partner in place, has crawled under his desk and said nothing.
This is not a candidate caught off guard by a policy he never had a hand in. On February 11, the U.S. House voted 219 to 211 to terminate Trump’s national emergency and kill the tariffs on Canada. Six Republicans found the backbone to cross the aisle and vote yes.
Tom Tiffany was not one of them. He voted no.
Handed a clean chance to protect the Wisconsin businesses, farmers, and families who depend on trade with Canada, he sided once again with Trump and against his own state.
Now the bill is coming due again, and Tiffany is nowhere to be found.
“Tom Tiffany already had his moment of truth on this, and he blew it,” said Deepak Jonnalagedda, deputy campaign manager for the Crowley for Wisconsin campaign. “When it counted, he looked Wisconsin farmers and manufacturers in the eye and voted to keep the tariffs that are bleeding them dry. Now that Trump is doing it again, Tiffany’s big plan is to hide behind the couch and hope nobody notices. That is not leadership. That is a coward with a voting card.”
Canada is not some distant abstraction to Wisconsin. It is our single largest export market by a wide margin, buying roughly $7.5 billion in Wisconsin goods, more than a quarter of everything the state ships to the world. That trade moves machinery, paper, and manufactured goods across the border every single day and supports jobs in every corner of the state. When Washington picks a fight with Ottawa, it is Wisconsin that gets left standing in the crossfire.
The chaos is not a side effect. It is the whole product. Businesses cannot plan when the rules change by presidential tantrum every few weeks. These new tariffs do not even take effect for another 30 days, which means a solid month of uncertainty dumped on every Wisconsin manufacturer trying to figure out what their supply chain will cost, every farmer trying to price a crop, and every family trying to make a budget survive contact with reality.
Manufacturers who depend on cross-border supply chains get squeezed from both directions, first on the Canadian inputs and materials they rely on, and again when Canada retaliates against the Wisconsin-made goods they sell north.
And make no mistake about who pays. Tariffs are not paid by Canada. They are paid by the American businesses that import the goods, and those costs land squarely on Wisconsin families at the grocery store, the hardware store, and the car lot. Tiffany’s tariffs are a hidden tax on every household in this state, and he voted to keep his hand in your pocket.
“Here is what really tells you everything,” said Jonnalagedda. “The White House is dressing these tariffs up as a favor to dairy farmers. In America’s Dairyland. To the exact people whose exports get torched the second Canada hits back. And Tiffany just nods along like a bobblehead, because two years of licking Donald Trump’s boots has apparently cost him the ability to stand up for a single Wisconsin dairy farmer. He works for Trump. He does not work for us.”
The most damning part of his record is not that he backed tariffs when it was easy. It is that he kept backing them even after the conservative-dominated United States Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that Trump’s sweeping tariffs were flatly illegal.
Tiffany dismissed the ruling outright, calling it “a gift to Communist China and other serial trade cheaters.” He has told Wisconsin voters exactly who he is: a man who will defend this trade war no matter what it costs them, no matter who is paying for it, and no matter whether it is even legal.
“Wisconsin does not need a governor who treats a Supreme Court ruling and a factory floor full of worried workers as background noise,” said Jonnalagedda. “David Crowley will fight for the people who actually make this state run. If he won’t lift a finger for Wisconsin now, why would anyone believe he’d start in January?”
Tom Tiffany had a vote, and he used it to keep the tariffs. He had over 24 hours to say one word about a new round that will jack up prices and choke our manufacturers. He said nothing. Silence is not neutrality. It is a choice, and Wisconsinites deserve to know why the man who wants to be their governor keeps making it at their expense.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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