Thanks to President Donald Trump’s trade war, Kentucky’s alcohol exports to Canada have plummeted, endangering the economy of one of the reddest states in the country. Now, the lone Democrat in Kentucky’s Congressional delegation is sounding the alarm.
In a recent interview with ABC News, Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-Ky.), who represents the commonwealth’s largest city of Louisville, said that Canadian liquor stores have effectively stopped buying bourbon from the Bluegrass State as a result of the Trump administration’s trade policies. And after Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting that his approach to tariffs hasn’t changed, McGarvey said many of his constituents are paying a heavy price for Trump’s decisions.
“With Kentucky, Canada is our largest trading partner,” McGarvey said. “We’re going to lose tens of millions of dollars in bourbon sales in Ontario province alone, not to mention the whole country, because of what Trump’s policies are doing.”
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McGarvey further observed that while the Trump administration has said that the tariffs aren’t going to change, it has also suggested that the president’s import duties are a negotiating tactic toward obtaining future trade deals. The Kentucky Democrat said those two positions were incongruous. And he added that Trump’s haphazard implementation of the new trade taxes has proven chaotic for Louisville’s distilleries (which include mass-distributed brands like Old Forester, Angel’s Envy, Evan Williams and Rabbit Hole, among others).
“If you’re using tariffs as a negotiating tactic, but then you say there’s nothing you can do to get rid of it, that’s going to be problematic,” he said. “There was one week I was working with the bourbon companies in my district where, quite literally, on Monday, the tariffs were on. On Tuesday, they were off. On Wednesday, they were on. On Thursday, they were off again.”
McGarvey isn’t the only Kentucky lawmaker speaking out against Trump’s tariffs. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been an outspoken opponent of the new import taxes specifically because of harm to Kentucky’s bourbon industry, and has proposed legislation to undo the state of emergency Trump declared to impose tariffs without Congress. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also come out against the tariffs, penning an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal outlining the damage they would do to the commonwealth’s distilleries.
“Broad-based tariffs could have long-term consequences right in our backyard,” McConnell wrote in February. “Consider our state’s 75,000 family farms that sell their crops around the globe, or the hardworking Kentuckians who craft 95% of the world’s bourbon, or our auto industry that relies on global supply chains to support the livelihoods of thousands of workers in the commonwealth.”
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Click here to read ABC’s full article.
