Could Donald Trump’s destructive and ham-handed tariff wars paradoxically end up reminding Americans what’s good about trade and economic interdependence with other countries? A bizarre turn in Trump’s deranged hostilities with Canada shows what this might look like—and how it might lead to a deeper repudiation of Trump and the MAGA movement’s most cherished ideological fantasies.
On Monday, Trump exploded in a Truth Social rant over Canada, which as of Tuesday morning has imposed reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. in response to the tariffs Trump unleashed last month. His post targeted a Canadian company, Bombardier Aerospace, which manufactures jet planes and does a lot of business with American companies and customers.
“NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” Trump raged. “BUY AMERICAN. FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA. AMERICA FIRST!”
Yet it turns out that with this broadside, Trump unintentionally directed friendly fire at GOP Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from a Democrat in the deep-red state.
That’s because Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters is in Wichita, where it employs over 1,000 workers. What’s more, as the company said in a statement, its operations employ American workers in at least 10 U.S. states, and its supply chains include around 2,800 different American companies across the country.
You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Listen to the other Republican Senator senator in Kansas, Jerry Moran, who quickly put out a statement reiterating Bombardier’s centrality to the local economy. Marshall was silent on Monday, but he eventually followed suit on Tuesday morning, noting that he will “fight” to defend Wichita’s jobs while insisting that he’d expressed his “concern” to the White House without once mentioning the word “Trump.”
What’s funny is that both these GOP responses are carefully calibrated to sound as if they’re defending American jobs, but without faulting Trump in any way. Its comical premise is that empirically reminding Trump of the facts of the situation will get him to see the error of his ways and drop this crusade. Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton, quickly denounced his delay, ripping him for “standing by while the president is attacking Kansas jobs.”
And Trump’s broadside is already producing brutal local headlines. “Wichita is home to Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters. Trump wants to block plane sales,” blared the Kansas City Star. A columnist for the Wichita Eagle pointed out that Bombardier’s operations are “deeply intertwined with this community” and pilloried Marshall for failing to stand up to Trump while he “turned on Wichita.”
Admittedly, it’s hard to know exactly what Trump is threatening here, because his broadside is so convoluted. But if somehow Trump succeeded in halting all Bombardier sales in the U.S.—or vastly slowing them down—it would surely do untold damage at home. What’s critical here, however, is that this is due to things Trump does not like to acknowledge: the interwoven nature of the aerospace industry and how it crisscrosses our northern border in such complex ways.
“Banning the sales of Bombardier aircraft would hurt tens of thousands of American workers in the company’s supply chain,” economist Chad Bown, co-author of How to Win a Trade War, told me. In sum: A lot of American parts and labor go into products that this Canadian company sells in the United States, and as a result, those sales benefit a lot of Americans.
That last point is the critical one. Note that Trump’s broadside excoriates Bombardier by claiming “they live off American Buyers” and “American Companies,” adding: “If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank.’” Trump is only able to see the relationship as a zero-sum one, as one in which a foreign company’s sales in the U.S. are intrinsically an act of ripping us off.
The same goes for Trump’s broader trade war with Canada. Trump’s escalation—which is raising tariffs on both sides—has forced other Republicans to gingerly condemn his actions, because here again, a lot of American products and industries will be hurt. This goes in both directions, harming Americans who will now find it harder to export to Canada and hurting Americans who will now face higher prices on imports.
Could all this matter in the midterms? Yes. The trade war with Canada will hit hard in a number of states with big Senate races and could impact some competitive House districts as well. Republicans like Maine Senator Susan Collins would not be calling for a halt if it weren’t a big problem for them.
True, the Senate race in Kansas is still a very tough challenge for Democrats. But if there’s any way to win such a contest, it would be in a situation like this one, where Trump is so overwhelmingly destructive towards voters’ interests—and the GOP incumbent so obviously unwilling to act as a check on him—that it allows Democrats to reach voters usually off limits to them.
“This is another Trump bomb dropped on a Republican in a potentially difficult race,” election forecaster Larry Sabato, who’s been bearish about Democratic chances in Kansas, told me. “It’s a long-shot race, but if the Democrat has any chance, it’s because of Trump incoming like this.”
All this could backfire in a deeper sense. One rare civic success story of the Trump era has been the broad public rejection of across-the-board tariffs. This was not preordained. After Trump took office last year—amid widespread suggestions that his right-wing nationalism had tapped into deep, widespread, and enduring national sentiments—it was plausible to fear that the tariffs would code as “pro-worker,” as aggressive government action to protect working people against unseen global forces wreaking havoc on their lives.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, all indications are that voters broadly understood how tariffs actually work—that they’re a tax on working- and middle-class consumers. As it’s become clear that Trump’s 2024 victory was largely driven by a much shallower rebellion against prices, the chaos and inflation caused by the tariffs—and their failure to cause a renaissance in manufacturing jobs—are a big reason his approval on the economy has utterly crashed.
A hallmark of MAGA politics is that “we” are “winning” when “they” are “losing.” In this schema, the “we” means Trump-MAGA America and the “they” means whoever is the target of the MAGA Two-Minute Hate of the Moment. Right now that’s Canada:
But maybe—just maybe—Trump’s trade war with Canada will badly undermine this worldview. Maybe it’s reminding a whole lot of voters why trade and economic interdependence can be good things for them and their country.
The zero-sum MAGA worldview is getting repudiated all over the place: The removal of immigrants hasn’t boosted employment for native-born young men. Showing our “strength” in the rush to war with Iran by shrugging off our international alliances hasn’t magically spooked Iran to capitulate. And now the trade war with Canada is only blowing back on American workers. It would be quite the outcome indeed if the true long-term impact of Trumpism’s world-historical failures is to get untold numbers of Americans to give the idea of positive-sum relationships a second look.
