Canada’s counter-tariffs take effect today. Steel, aluminum, and a list of other American goods, all of it aimed back at us, all of it starting this morning.

This is the part everybody warned about. It arrived on schedule.

Back up a step. Trade talks with Ottawa collapsed at the end of August. The President answered by putting a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian products, using a provision of the Tariff Act of 1930 that no President had ever pulled off the shelf.

Mark Carney answered that. Now we are here.

A poll taken in the middle of this month asked MAGA voters what they made of it. Among them, 38 percent said he was right to do it even knowing what it would cost politically. Another 40 percent said the move was justified, but that he should have waited until after the midterms.

Look hard at that second number, because it is the whole story. A full 40 percent of his own base did not say he was wrong. They said he was right and the timing was bad.

That is not a policy disagreement. That is an argument about the calendar.

I understand the instinct. Nobody wants to walk into an election with prices moving the wrong way and an ally throwing punches back across the border. Politically it would have been easier to sit on this until December.

Here is why he did not, and this is the part worth defending.

Leverage does not keep. It is not canned goods. A threat everyone knows you are holding until after an election is not a threat at all, it is a schedule, and the other government simply waits you out. Every hour Ottawa believed this was posturing was an hour they had no reason to move an inch.

The only way a tariff means anything at a table is if the people across it believe you will eat the cost of using it. Doing it now, before the midterms, at the moment it can hurt him most, is the most expensive possible way to prove he is not bluffing. That is precisely why it works.

It will cost something. It is costing something already. I am not going to stand here and tell you a trade fight is free. More than half the country has already told a pollster they think he was wrong, and some of them will feel this in a paycheck before they feel it anywhere else.

But the people telling him to wait until after November are telling him to want the win without paying for it. That is not a strategy. That is a wish.

He paid for it in the only currency that buys anything in a negotiation. His own numbers.