‘There’s a whipsaw nature to it’: how we’ve covered Donald Trump’s tumultuous trade wars

The erratic escalations and climbdowns by the US president have made covering trade disputes a high-octane affair. We spoke to some of our business reporters and our correspondent in Toronto about how they keep up with it

Reporting on international trade disputes is challenging enough at the best of times. But how do you cover a chaos-riven trade war launched against the whole world by a US president who acts as if he doesn’t understand how trade and tariffs work?

With the recent showdown between the US and Canada, our reporters have been reflecting on how they’ve kept our audience properly informed during the 15 months since Donald Trump dramatically announced a slew of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden.

“We’ve been trying to help people understand the mechanics of how the tariffs work, but there’s also been the whipsaw nature of it all,” says Leyland Cecco, our reporter in Toronto who has been covering the saga. “We’ve had to shelve so many stories because US trade policy has changed within a couple of hours.”

To compound the challenges posed by erratic escalations and climbdowns, each new shift has typically triggered immediate reactions in financial markets while the impact on businesses and livelihoods can take longer to become clear. “You’re operating in a multi-speed world and you have to be as fleet-footed as possible,” says Richard Partington, our senior economics correspondent, based in London.

Reporters have had to deal with this uncertainty and help audiences navigate it. “We never know whether President Trump is going to follow through with these things or not, so we just have to be open to the fact that the story is constantly evolving,” says Dominic Rushe, the Guardian’s US business editor, who is based in New York. “But we’ve also shown readers that they need to pay attention to these things. Some people might have previously thought of economics and business stories as potentially being a bit dry, but they have a material impact on everyone.”

While the mayhem and memes might have grabbed the public’s attention, the consequences for people’s day-to-day lives are the key reason why reporting on the trade wars has been so essential. “We’ve tried to unpack what it all means for people’s mortgages or business borrowing costs, or whether it’s likely to lead to job losses or higher costs of a weekly shop,” says Richard. “We try to ground our reporting in people and places, their lived experiences and how these concepts translate into the real world.”

A great example of this was an article published last weekend by Rachel Leingang about the plight of residents and business owners along the US-Canada border.

Because tariffs are taxes on imported goods, their full impact can depend on, for example, how much of that tax translates into higher prices for consumers or lower profit margins for importers. Likewise, how easily products can be substituted and supply chains reconfigured.

The trade wars are just the latest in a series of shocks to global supply chains in recent years, with events such as Brexit and Covid making readers more attentive to stories about them. “I think we’ve become much more aware of our connectedness and the fragility of our world economy and global trade in recent years,” says Richard. “We’d all grown used to things being instantly available as globalisation had marched ahead after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the supply-chain shocks have shown people the consequences of that.”

“I guess Covid gave people a sense of the vulnerability of supply chains and the trade war has given people a sense of their complexity,” adds Leyland. “People in Canada now have a better appreciation of how intertwined our economies are – for instance, how an auto part for a car produced in Canada or the US will often go back and forth over the border eight times.”

That more widespread appreciation of where the countries are interdependent has also fuelled grassroots Canadian boycotts of American products, adding a fascinating consumer and cultural dimension to the Guardian’s trade war coverage. “The sense of national unity we’ve had here is profound,” says Leyland. “As is the sense of Canadian identity and patriotism. So business stories are intersecting with the political and cultural in ways I’ve never seen before.”

The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has emerged as one of the few global leaders willing to stand up to Trump, while the trade war has altered Canada’s political landscape. “I don’t think there’s ever been such a dramatic shift in the political fortunes of the two main parties in this country’s history in such a short period of time, so it’s been exciting reporting on that aspect too,” says Leyland.

Last month, Trump’s trade war insults and TV stunts further bolstered Canadian patriotism when he signed an order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.

Has all his bullying and name-calling made it difficult for our reporters to keep the story focused on the reality of the tariffs?

“That’s something that we wrestle with constantly,” says Dominic. “The fact of the matter is that he’s the president of the United States, so when he does this name-calling it’s newsworthy and we have to report it. But at the same time it’s obvious that he’s trying to distract us from bigger issues. So we have a very careful balancing act to ensure we’re not losing sight of the impact that these things have on real people’s lives every time they go to the supermarket or every time they fill up at the gas station.”

If our journalists have sometimes had to take a step back from the president’s playground antics, they have also tried to show people the bigger picture when it comes to global trade itself. “There are issues with globalisation as it has developed and there are winners and losers from it,” says Richard. “It has enabled the growth of multinational corporations and the hollowing out of middle-class and blue-collar manufacturing jobs. So we’re alive to those issues, too, and we’ve tried to address the problems of globalisation with a degree of nuance.”

The Guardian’s global perspective has proved crucial in this respect. And our global network of correspondents has also allowed us to cover in real time the fallout from the tariffs and trade wars as they spread across the world. “It speaks to the global breadth of the Guardian and of this story that we can cover ripple effects of the tariffs around the world,” says Richard. “For instance, our colleagues in the US will take the lead writing about an initial announcement from the White House, then our colleagues in Australia and Asia will write about the repercussions for Asian financial markets, which are the first to respond. And then we’ll take over in London when it comes to the repercussions in Europe, and we pass the baton back across the Atlantic again – the story just keeps running.”