True North, Strong and Forsaken.

The American president throws another tariff tantrum, inadvertently reminding everyone that there once was a time when America was a shining city upon a hill.

Just who’s been overdosing on crazy pills here?

The newsletter I’d been preparing for this weekend was preempted by this effort to provide subscribers with some insight, or background, or resources, to help sort out what the hell just happened in U.S. president Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to disassemble several decades worth of effort by Canadians and Americans to build an integrated continental economy.

I was going to dive quite deeply into the bizarre eruption of performative hysterics emanating from British Columbia that I was on about in The National Post on Friday. Which would have been instructive, if only to make the point that our own politicians can be every bit as impetuous and truth-averse as U.S. President Donald Trump is. Don’t even start with me.

Very briefly: In my Post piece Friday I didn’t even bother getting into B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad’s many petty purgings and rampagings through his own party. My focus was instead on the latest farrago of alarmist imbecilities about Aboriginal title making the rounds, which ironically mirrors the national psychodrama about imaginary mass graves at Indian residential schools, which also happens to have originated in British Columbia. See my earlier newsletter if you like: Try not to misplace your marbles.

Back to business.

Whatever you do, be careful what you say about Ronald Reagan

Despite some worthy efforts, neither the American or Canadian news media have managed to shed much light on the real-world implications of President Donald Trump’s various outbursts since last Friday. The vanguard of the White House press corps has been literally up in the air over the weekend, aboard Air Force One, on the way to the Asian summit in Kuala Lumpur. So let’s be fair.

Bear in mind that all of this may or may not be about an Ontario government advertisement on American television networks that contrasts the upside-down world of difference between former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s deep antipathy towards trade barriers against the Trump’s signature and wholly contrariwise mania for trade restrictions, import taxes and so on.

At the heel of the hunt, this may be the best way to understand the broader outlines of what’s really going on: To compare Donald Trump unfavorably with Ronald Reagan is to speak fighting words to the MAGA crowd. Drawing any such comparison has been a Republican Party taboo ever since the early days of Trump’s first administration. It’s kriptonite to these people.

Do keep that in mind if you’re mystified by the gasket-blowing that has been set off by Ontario premier Doug Ford’s $75 million cross-border advertising campaign, which has now been paused.

Before everything went crazy, Ford was clear that his advertising blitz, pointedly contrasting Trump with Reagan, was to be aimed at “every Republican district there is right across the entire country.” It would also run during the weekend World Series opener (the Toronto Blue Jays won the first round, the Los Angeles Dodgers tied it up with their second-round win, just so you know).

“And we’re just going to speak the truth,” Ford said. “It’s not a nasty ad. It’s actually just very factual. And coming from a person like Ronald Reagan, every Republican is going to identify that voice. . . he was just the best president the country has ever seen, in my opinion.”

You’d never know it if you were unacquainted with the kremlinology required of a clear grasp of the MAGA phenomenon, but Ford’s intervention was the rhetorical equivalent over throwing a molotov cocktail at the White House.

Trumpism is not playing nearly as well with most Americans as you might think, and next year isn’t just the deadline year for revisiting the Canada-U.S. Mexico Agreement. In the middle of all that noise, midterm elections for the House of Representatives will also be front and centre, and MAGA politicians are almost certain to lose their House majority.

This is why taboo-breaking about Reagan’s legacy right about now will be understood by Trumpist influencers as an outrageous affront to Dear Leader and an unpardonable foreign impertinence all round. The kriptonite:

“Trumpist efforts to save U.S. jobs through higher tariffs, bilateral trade deals, and lower trade deficits can find no ‘conservative’ justification in Reagan-era trade actions. In fact, it’s just the opposite.”

You’ll find those words in this essay published by the Cato Institute, which is about as far from Democratic Party manners as you can get. It appeared during Trump’s first rodeo, and it was simultaneously published in the arch-conservative National Review, in November, 2017.

It concludes in a way that directly addresses the windbaggery of the past couple of days to the effect that Ford’s advertisement misrepresents Reagan’s legacy:

“Trumpist intellectuals’ frequent invocations of Reagan to defend President Trump’s protectionism ignore ample historical context, actual policy results, and the evolution of the modern global trading system. Seen in the proper light, Reagan’s legacy argues strongly in favor of free trade and multilateral engagement, rather than a return to a bygone era of trade-policy failure.

“Protectionism is destructionism, after all.”

Whether that still stands up, and whatever one might make of Premier Ford’s ad campaign, is almost beside the point. Ford is understandably displeased by the betrayal and sudden tariff-prompted shift in what could be 5,000 auto-sector jobs from Ontario to Illinois and elsewhere, as of a couple of weeks ago. So cut him some slack, at least.

For his part, Prime Minister Mark Carney - after having gone from “elbows up” election campaigning to an elbows down retreat from almost all of Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports - prefers a strategy that relies on ingratiating himself with Trump.

It’s got to the point of slobbering on Trump’s slippers and having the president pat him on the head in reward. Only three weeks ago, refraining from his incendiary provocations about Canada’s destiny as America’s 51st state, Trump praised Carney during a get-together at the White House, calling him a “world-class leader.”

Be careful about the received wisdom

The consensus setting in among much of the Canadian punditocracy is that Ford’s approach is reckless and Carney is the stateman in the room.

For what it’s worth, I have no firm opinion on which coping strategy is the wiser one. All I know is that everything here is unprecedented, and it’s become exceedingly difficult to discern what’s real from what’s just propaganda and manipulation.

Meanwhile, the consensus that seems to be forming in American polite society is that Trump’s conduct is driving Canada into China’s arms, in the same way that the South East Asian Nations are being forced to choose between Beijing and Washington.

There’s some truth to that, except Carney has been itching to replicate his Brookfield intimacies with Beijing ever since he was elected, and by then the Liberal Party had long established itself as more or less the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. Besides, Foreign Minister Anita Anand was already in Beijing celebrating Canada’s “strategic partnership” with China before the Trump-Reagan heresiology became a thing owing to Ford’s advertisement.

Oh look, here’s Foreign Minister Anand with Being’s foreign minister, the insufferable Wang Yi of “wolf warrior diplomacy” fame.

When Liberal-left postmodernism meets post-truth Trumpism

This newsletter has tried to avoid the habit of contrasting Canada’s professed virtues against American vices and I hope to maintain that decorum in today’s Real Story. We have a lot less to boast about nowadays than we like to imagine, after all, but the consequential events of these past few days may invite certain unpleasant comparisons.

I’m not sure there’s any way around it, so here we go.

Yes, I know, all politicians lie, or at least it’s become acceptable to cynically assume this to be so. The sturdiest defence against the preponderance of evidence that President Trump is a dangerously pathological liar is that his habitual traffic in falsehoods involves some sort of postliterate performance art that transcends boring distinctions between the truth and lies.

I’m willing to consider that as a plausible defence, but I’ve never understood how it absolves him of his terpitude. I am also well aware that the president’s vulgarity does tend to bring out the worst in Canadians. Every time he opens his mouth he offers a pretext for Canadian indulgence in extremes of anti-American self-righteousness.

At the same time, holy cow, when it’s in your face like this, with a stream of brazenly outrageous untruths offered as the rationale for a Friday night declaration that he was terminating all trade talks with Canada, what can one say?

That’s five weird lies right there, in 15 seconds. A few hours later, on Air Force One en route to the Asian summit in Kuala Lumpur, Trump announced that he’d be hiking his taxes on Canadian imports by a further ten percent, and nobody at the White House could explain what this might mean, exactly.

Here’s Trump, on his social media platform Truth Social: “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD.” Also: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”

For all anyone can definitively say, this might not even happen, and nobody in Trump’s administration has been able to explain to reporters what’s going on.

On the face of it, the baseline tariffs on Canadian imports to the United States already stand at 25 percent, although most trade regulated under the Canada-U.S-Mexico Agreement has been unaffected. Then there’s additional tariffs Trump has imposed on steel, aluminum and auto parts, which disproportionately effect Canada.

Then there’s the partially-exempted tariffs on imports of Canadian oil, offset by augmented duties on Canadian lumber that are now nearing 50 percent - triple the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on Russia.

Since his return to the White House, Trump has imposed tariffs and import duties on more than 90 countries, but he’s singled out Canada for particularly rough treatment. Steel, oil, aluminum and the auto manufacturing sector have been targeted by Trump tariffs that have been variously imposed, lifted, adjusted and re-imposed to 35 percent.

By keeping a running and constantly updated tally on Trump’s trade wars, this tariff tracker is a good resource.

The truth is in here somewhere. . .

In Trump’s own account of just why it is that he’s so damn furious all of a sudden, it’s Canada that’s telling lies. For the record, let’s please recall that the minute-long advertisement that caused the president to fly into a rage wasn’t even commissioned by Canada, but rather by the office of Ontario premier Doug Ford.

There was no “AI” involved. Nobody was “caught cheating.” Ford’s advertisement draws heavily and verbatim from a five-minute, April, 1987 radio address by Ronald Reagan. He’s heard speaking eloquently and at length about what he considered to be the folly of trade protectionism and the damage done over the long term by trade restrictions and trade tariffs. Ford’s advertisement is here.

There is nothing “fraudulent” about it. It omits only Reagan’s discussion about his reluctant imposition of tariffs on Japan - that’s what the “misrepresentation” allegation is about - but it takes Reagan’s most poetic praise for free trade and his condemnation of trade protectionism from that original address, which can be viewed here.

Despite Trump’s topsy-turvy revisionism, irt is not true to say President Reagan “loved tariffs.” The opposite is true. Ronald Reagan devoted much of his political career to breaking barriers between nation states - not least the Berlin Wall. His signature foreign policy and trade legacy was the neoliberal expansion of global free trade, beginning with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which later became NAFTA, and eventually the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.

For good or ill, that was President Reagan’s bold vision, and Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney enthusiastically enlisted Canada in the cause of continental economic integration. This wasn’t a Canadian idea - free trade with the U.S. was hotly opposed by Liberals and New Democrats back then. Still, Reagan ended up being remembered by most Canadians as a rather beloved character. A friend.

It is precisely this Reagan-Mulroney legacy, with all its elaborate architecture and compromises, that Donald Trump, for good or ill, is determined to demolish.

Should we all just be patient and ride this out?

One point that we should grant Prime Minister Carney, whose party is running neck and neck in the polls with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, is that we can’t expect to put humpy dumpty back together again. Where Carney’s standpoint falls apart is in his presumption that some kind of multilateral restoration can be achieved by accommodating the Chinese state-capitalist behemoth. This is folly of the first order, and will be the undoing of us all.

As for our friends in America, we have many. The Democratic Party is a trainwreck, and deservedly so, but that doesn’t ensure clear sailing for the MAGA Republicans.

Next year, the CUSMA deal, which Trump demanded and approved during his first term, is up for renewal, awkwardly coinciding with the American mid-term elections for the House of Representatives. Things aren’t looking especially rosy for the MAGA crowd.

Trump is faring worse at this juncture in his term than Barack Obama or Joe Biden were at the same points in theirs. Trump’s net approval rating is minus-17 percent. Roughly 56 percent of Americans disapprove of what he’s up to. Roughly three in ten Republicans, even, say Trump is using the instruments of the state to persecute his perceived political enemies.

Trump’s weird obsession with putting the boots to Canada never won him big points with the more prominent MAGA influencers, even when Katy Perry’s insufferable boyfriend was our prime minister. As for this latest Canada-U.S. flare-up - if it’s even meaningful to describe the past week’s events in those terms - Premier Ford scored a bigger hit than he could have reasonably expected.

“Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses,” Ford says. “We’ve achieved our goal, having reached U.S. audiences at the highest levels.”

Trump’s tantrum assured that, and it’s all to the good that Americans have been reminded of what it was like to have had a president who fought for American ideals, for good or ill. Back then, not so long ago, America meant something more than an unreliable military ally, a mere market of consumers ruled by a capricious fair-weather bully.

To have us all reminded of the America Ronald Reagan described in his farewell address to the nation in 1989, to recall that shining, windswept city upon a hill, can’t be a bad thing.