GOP cooking up 'distraction' to justify increasingly unpopular Trump policy: CNN panelists

A pair of CNN commentators agreed that Donald Trump's tariffs are quickly becoming a political liability.

Administration officials and allies flooded the airwaves over the weekend to defend tariffs against Canada, China and Mexico as necessary to prevent the flow of fentanyl across the border, and Republican strategist Doug Heye examined their messaging.

"It tells you there's been pushback and they're trying to find new ways to talk about it," Heye said. "It's legal, it's also political. That's why we saw the three cabinet members all saying the exact not sort of things, the exact same words. We're going to hear [about] fentanyl more and more, regardless of what those numbers are. Clearly, fentanyl is coming in in massive numbers from the Mexican border. I just crossed the border, did the land crossing over the summer, and you can see just when you're just 10 feet over on the Mexico side or 100 yards on the Mexico side, you can see these kinds of products being sold. That's just not true in Canada, but the political argument is going to remain because they have to make the political argument to make the legal argument."

Former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to talk about the border in ways that connected with voters, but CNN's Ashley Allison, a former staffer for their 2020 Democratic campaign, urged Democrats to tread lightly on this issue.

"Consider the Canadian border and the Mexican border, those I just feel like [are] two different stories to be told," Allison said. "The reason why Republicans right now are using fentanyl as a distraction, almost to what is happening with the tariffs on, is because you seem insensitive if you say fentanyl is not an issue, when we know that people die from drug overdoses in this country. So we're smart enough as Americans to bifurcate the issue of tariffs and the need to have policies in place and protect people from overdosing from fentanyl, so I would encourage the Democrats not to take the bait here."

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