Trump's tariffs made it too expensive for this paper to publish the Sunday comics

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Mike Theiler-Pool/Getty Images)

A small-town newspaper, The Robesonian of Lumberton, North Carolina, has stopped publishing the Sunday comics because the Trump administration's trade war has made it too expensive.

"One of the targets in Trump's tariffs war has been newsprint from Canada, the cost of which has risen about 30 percent since the beginning of this year," the Robesonian staff explained in an editorial. "The tariffs are protecting a single Washington plant that apparently can't otherwise effectively compete, but is being shielded by the president from the free market — a decidedly un-Republican approach and contrary to the capitalistic fundamentals that have given us the world's No. 1 economy and nourishes it."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.