U.S. President Donald Trump will pay more attention to his administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico once his re-election campaign draws nearer, according to another former presidential candidate.

“I don’t think the president’s paying all that much attention to [tariffs on Canada and Mexico], but he will as we get closer to 2020, because this is really hurting his constituency, as it should,” former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Thursday. 

“The farm states are really hurting. The tariffs are particularly damaging to a lot of manufacturers, but they’re really damaging to farmers who are now paying US$6,000 to US$8,000 more for tractors because of the steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump has put on Canada,” he added.

“This is a lose-lose for everybody, but Trump kinda likes losing, I guess.”

Trump’s 2016 election victory was largely propelled by the Rust Belt and several farming states in the U.S. Midwest, which gave him the necessary electoral college support despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost three million votes.

Since taking office, however, Dean says Trump has significantly damaged his trading relationship with the U.S.’s closest allies, leaving many to worry about reparations.

“The Trump administration has, shall we say, wreaked some amount of havoc on our trading relationships with these partners,” said Dean, who is currently in Washington D.C. participating in an industry event called, “Prospects for USMCA Ratification”.

“We are trying to figure out how to put it back together again, because these are incredibly important economic and defence alliances for us.”

Dean wouldn’t comment on when the tariffs would get dropped but expressed doubt that Canada or Mexico would sign off on the re-worked NAFTA accord without that happening.

“It’s not clear at all that the Canadians or the Mexicans will ratify this without taking off the tariffs first,” he said. “To put national defence tariffs on two of our most important trading and economic partners is just stupidity and it’s dishonest.”

Dean did, however, make one bold prediction when asked later about whether he saw the U.S. legalizing recreational marijuana.

“We can be backwards in terms of our social views, but we’re going to catch up with the rest of the world,” said Dean, who also sits on Tilray Inc.’s international advisory committee.  “I think that will happen in 2021 when we have a new president.”