A commercial fisherman collects sockeye salmon from his net in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Luis Sinco/Getty Images

"I can tell you point-blank who I’m voting for: Donald Trump," a scallop fisherman last fall told The New Bedford Light, which reported the proliferation of Trump flags on fishing vessels in the coastal Massachusetts town. "The Democratic Party is not the fisherman’s friend," he said. 

The fishing industry has generally been pro-Trump because he’s anti-regulation and opposed to offshore wind farms. Many are also hoping Trump might reopen commercial fishing in protected federal waters, as he did during his first administration. But if Trump continues on his current course, he could jeopardize some of these supporters’ livelihoods. After all, he just started a trade war with America’s two top seafood trade partners.

The United States imports much more seafood than it exports—to the tune of a roughly $25 billion trade deficit, according to government data from 2022. But it does export quite a bit of its catch to Canada, serving as Canada’s top supplier for both salmon and lobster. And it exports even more to China. In fact, the Agriculture Department reported last year that seafood exports to China were actually increasing, unlike many other commodities. Both countries quickly retaliated against Trump’s tariffs on Tuesday. Canada’s two-phase tariff announcement included only a very limited list of seafood products in the first, immediate round of tariffs; almost all U.S. seafood seems to be in the firing line for a second round of tariffs scheduled for later this month. China, meanwhile, simply matched Trump’s extra 10 percent tariff increase with its own 10 percent increase, effectively immediately—seafood included.

It’s possible that Trump, despite the support of New Bedford residents, may not be all that concerned about alienating voters in Maine and Massachusetts—states that account for 99 percent of Canada’s lobster imports. (He is, after all, unusually explicit in his punitive and vengeful attitude toward blue states.) But you’d think he’d be a little more concerned about Alaska, where he bested Kamala Harris by 13 points last year. Alaska is America’s top producer of Pacific salmon, and China is the top export destination for it. (China’s imports of U.S. salmon nearly tripled between 2020 and 2023, according to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.)

China processes and reexports some of that salmon, which complicates things further. When Trump started a trade war with China in 2017, Alaska’s two senators and one congressman—all Republicans—lobbied the administration to exempt seafood harvested in Alaska and processed in China from the tariffs, since a lot of American seafood gets deboned in China and then returned to the U.S. These products were included anyway. The lawmakers wrote a letter expressing their displeasure. But the damage from China’s retaliation to Trump’s trade war persisted into the Biden administration, with Alaskan pollock affected as well.

There are other ways Trump’s policies could wreak havoc on the industry. In theory, the tariffs could help some businesses by encouraging Americans to eat more domestic seafood, as it becomes more affordable relative to seafood impacted by the tariffs. On the other hand, it’s always a little tricky to predict how consumers are going to respond, and given the likelihood that tariffs will spike prices throughout the supply chain, it’s possible consumers will just decrease their seafood consumption. The tariffs on steel and aluminum are inevitably going to affect the cost of fishing equipment, for example. And Trump’s targeting of immigrant workers could also cause problems, given that a majority of the seafood-processing workforce is foreign-born.

Then there are the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While many in the seafood industry resent what they see as heavy-handed regulation—another fisherman told The New Bedford Light that NOAA Fisheries "is the first one that should be cut"—NOAA also provides a lot of direct and indirect support to the industry via training and grants, ecosystem restoration, and climate monitoring. This last one is a huge deal in an industry that is already being hit by climate change. (Read more in Audrey Gray’s report for TNR several years ago on global warming in the Gulf of Maine and The New York Times’ report this week on how climate change is affecting plankton and the entire oceanic ecosystem with it.) 

TNR’s Kate Aronoff also writes, this week, about NOAA’s monitoring program for toxic algal blooms, which is being jeopardized by DOGE cuts, potentially threatening both municipal water quality and fishing. It’s not hard to imagine that Trump’s and Elon Musk’s indiscriminate slashing of government programs will harm the fishing industry more than it helps.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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Lawyer Norm Eisen talks with TNR editor Michael Tomasky about the dozens of anti-Trump lawsuits he’s involved with—and how he’s winning.

That’s the estimated annual cost in the U.S. of toxic algal blooms, the monitoring and science of which is now threatened due to the Trump administration’s cuts to NOAA.

The U.S. maple syrup industry is already dealing with the upheaval of climate change, given that its business depends on "a single product harvested in a window of just a few weeks every spring," with that window depending "on a freeze-thaw cycle." Tariffs are now making the business harder. As a result, reports Callie Radke Stevens, some are now turning to Indigenous practices of tapping birch and other trees:

A stiff tariff from the Trump administration on Canadian goods, including the equipment used to make syrup, has unsettled the industry and could drive up the price of U.S. syrup. This has coincided with a slow syrup run in February. Such short-term woes are combining with longer-term concerns, as a changing climate alters both production and the business model.

So the Wheelers and other sugarmakers are expanding into other tree syrups, to fortify their businesses in the face of changing weather (political and actual) and in hopes of keeping forests healthy. Researchers and farmers alike are investigating species like beech, sycamore, walnut, and even other species of maple.

On March 25, TNR contributors Kim Kelly and Brian Goldstone introduce us to Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. By telling the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the "working homeless" in cities across America.

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