One sentence of actual news: on Monday, Trump promised to raise tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts and steel to 50% starting January 1, 2027 — on top of the 50% tariffs that already hit Canadian goods at 12:01am Saturday. Day three of the trade war. That's the event. * Here's NBC News on that event: 'Trump hits back at Carney, threatens to hike auto, truck, metals tariffs to 50%.' Hits back. Two words, and suddenly the man announcing his second round of tariffs in seventy-two hours is playing defense. * 'Hitting back' requires a first hit, and NBC's grammar hands it to Carney. The article's very first line: Trump 'hit back at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who on Friday had announced he would retaliate against any new U.S. tariffs.' Retaliate. Against tariffs. You cannot hit back at someone's retaliation — retaliation is already the hitting back. That's just called hitting. * And NBC knows, because NBC's own article keeps the receipts. A few paragraphs down: the 50% duties 'came into effect at 12:01 a.m. ET Saturday.' Further down, Carney noting Canada had 'waited to retaliate until the United States decided to actually implement' the tariffs. And there's the quote we already met this weekend: 'You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.' Body: the US swung first. Headline: Trump, guard up, bravely swinging back. * It's the bar-fight write-up that starts at the exact frame where the other guy raised his arms to block. Technically footage. Just not the beginning of the movie. * For calibration, Al Jazeera covered the identical Truth Social post: 'Trump slams Canada with new 50 percent auto tariffs for 2027.' Subject, verb, object, done. Whatever you think of Al Jazeera's other habits, this week its trade-war grammar keeps parsing cleanly — we said the same thing on Saturday when its headline was 'US imposes 50 percent tariffs.' * And this isn't NBC's first thermostat adjustment of the weekend. Yesterday we flagged its headline calling Carney's press conference a 'miscalculation' while the 'we were attacked' quote sat fourteen paragraphs deep, filed under miscellaneous. Today the same desk starts the clock at Carney's Friday retaliation pledge. Once is an editing choice. Two mornings in a row is a reflex. * Fair's fair: Trump's Monday post really was a response to Carney's retaliation announcement — chronology is a chain, and NBC grabbed a real link of it. But when you start the movie at frame three, the guy who threw the first punch walks into the story looking like a boxer with his guard up. Readers don't see the edit. They just see who the headline says started it.