The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s rage at Canada appears to be getting worse. After Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect a few days ago, Trump spiraled on social media, ridiculing Canada’s leader and exploding in a long, unhinged rant that signals no end in sight for this battle. In fact, Republicans are now publicly admitting that this is a serious problem for them in the midterms in all kinds of ways. And they appear baffled as to the source of Trump’s fury. And some striking new polling shows why Republicans are so panicked.
We’re talking about all of it with Zack Beauchamp of Vox, who recently reported deeply on the roots of Trump’s trade warring. Zack, good to have you on again.
Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Always happy to do your show.
Sargent: So to recap, after trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last month, U.S. tariffs went into effect on Canadian goods. And a few days ago, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs went into effect. Trump has since amplified the claim that Canada is ripping off the U.S. So, Zack, can you just set the record straight on that? Is Canada ripping us off through trade or not?
Beauchamp: No. Look, to understand the situation, at least as it existed prior to Trump, you’ve got to understand that there are normal trade disputes that almost all countries have with each other, at least to a certain extent.
There’s a view that, well, this policy that you’re doing disadvantages our farmers and advantages yours, or maybe your labor practices and regulations are a little bit different from ours, and that hurts us in this particular exchange, costs us some jobs. That is basically the most normal of possible disagreements any countries could have about trade relations.
Ripping a country off looks a lot like what China’s doing. Canada’s in the first slot. The U.S. runs a very small trade deficit with Canada. It’s like 36 billion or something around there. And there’s disputes about everything from dairy to lumber to steel. But they really fall in the minor-disagreement category. What the U.S. and Canada have is an extremely beneficial trading relationship.
And the U.S. benefits from trade with China too, to be clear. It’s just that China has done things that make the benefits far more one-sided than they should be. But when it comes to Canada, there’s no argument by any serious or credible economist that having an open trade relationship with Canada has been net harmful to the United States. Quite to the contrary.
Sargent: That’s a good place to get into what Trump exploded over on Truth Social. He erupted on Canada in a long, unhinged rant. He said this: “The only reason Canada makes autos is because of previous disastrous trade agreements while other presidents were in office. Canada has been ripping us off for years.”
So I think he’s referring to the fact that we’ve had free trade agreements with Canada in autos going back many decades. And to your point, the real story here is that the auto industry in America and Canada is kind of like one thing. It’s so integrated that it’s actually become kind of a transnational entity, in a sense. And that’s actually been good. It’s allowed a lot of specialization.
But the key here is, to Trump—and you can see this in his crazy tweet—to Trump, the mere fact that we’re trading with Canada is itself an inherently disastrous and bad thing. Your thoughts on that?
Beauchamp: Yeah, I mean, it’s very confusing when you hear Trump talk about trade, because he seems to misunderstand some very, very basic elements of what global trade is. Like he thinks that when you’re importing from a country, you’re giving them money. You’re just giving them money. And then that money doesn’t come back to you in any way, it doesn’t benefit the people in your country from getting those goods. They aren’t helping anything.
It’s a little bit like saying when I go to the grocery store, I always leave, and I’ve given $200 of my money to Whole Foods. Well, I mean, the thing is, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or Giant, or whatever, right—they are giving you stuff too. You’re getting things out of this interaction. Whereas Trump sees it as a form of extraction. He seems to think that trade deficits mean you’re losing, which is also not how it works.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, it’s like when I go to the grocery store, I want to give them my money so that I don’t have to farm, right? In order to grow my own food. That’s sort of the essence. So then I can do other stuff, right Zack? If I get my food from Whole Foods, that frees me up to do stuff with my time. That’s basically how this works in a nutshell.
Beauchamp: I mean, trade is just a domestic economy on a global scale, right? On a really basic level. A domestic economy is people exchanging goods and services to allow for mutual economic growth through increasing productivity. That’s what a domestic economy is. Trade allows you to do that on a global scale.
Sargent: So Republican strategists are now openly warning that Trump’s trade war with Canada is a big problem in the midterms, especially in states with big Senate races. GOP strategist Brian Darling tells The Hill that this is a bad idea right before the election, saying: “You have a situation where America imports quite a few different goods from Canada.” A second GOP strategist says the Canadian trade war is “unpopular in a lot of states that touch the border.” And here’s the best part. This operative says, “for whatever reason, this is the fight the president has chosen to champion.”
This guy defends Trump, but note the phrase “for whatever reason.” No one knows why he’s doing this, right? Zack, you dug into this. I mean, what do you make of that Republican angst?
Beauchamp: I mean, it’s totally justified, right? Go talk to anyone who is right of center right now, and they will tell you that this is not what they would have chosen to do. This is not the way they would have chosen to go about it, and it doesn’t make any sense.
I mean, they wouldn’t go that far, because they’re still operating within the confines of the Republican Party. But it just is not the policy fight that any constituency in the Republican Party, or even in the MAGA movement, was really gearing up for.
Relevant to this conversation is that I live in Canada now. The Canadians do not perceive it as a joke. Nobody here takes this not seriously, right? I mean, or the handful who do are probably disabused of that notion at this point, right? It is overwhelmingly a dominant concern. And tariffs, and the cost of goods, the relations with the U.S., are a subject of ordinary conversation among Canadians. Whereas for Americans, it’s sort of like a peripherally weird thing that Trump is doing—unless you live in a border state, or are directly affected, your industry is affected, it just seems kind of odd.
But no—so what’s happened is that Trump has managed to infuriate one of America’s, if not America’s, closest allies. Certainly one of its closest allies, but I’d make the case for closest, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries. And its neighbor, one of its closest allies—and has done so for no discernible political or strategic rationale. It’s just not a rational thing to be doing.
Sargent: Well, CNN has new polls that really bear this out. They’re of the Michigan and Maine Senate races, and the numbers are stark on the trade war. In Michigan, 64 percent say the tariffs on Canada are bad for the state. And among working-class voters, that’s 60 percent. In Maine, 70 percent overall say the Canada tariffs are bad for the state, including 63 percent of working-class voters. You’ve got Senator Susan Collins in Maine and Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas and a number of other Republicans also coming out against them.
When I look at numbers like that—you know, Maine and Michigan are not that blue. And you have a huge majority of working-class voters opposing the tariffs in what are functionally swing states. I think that really blows up a whole lot of narratives.
There’s sort of a sense, maybe among certain Democrats, that the word “tariff” and the word “trade” are a bit scary for them, because maybe Trump’s position vaguely codes as pro-worker. But working-class voters see what the tariffs are. And I think that’s a major civic success story, in a way. What do you think, Zack?
Beauchamp: I mean, I think it’s because these things have tangible effects on people’s lives, right? I remember earlier this summer I drove from where I live, in southwestern Ontario, to New York to meet some friends, upstate New York. And I went into a brewery that was local there, and not that far from the Canadian border. And I told them that though I’m American, I’m living in Canada now. And they got sad.
Because what they told me was that they used to have a lot of Canadians who would come in—again, the borders are very close here—and they said, we miss our Canadian friends. And of course, on one level, that’s a business saying, we’ve lost customers as a result of this.
On another level, it’s saying that we have a level of affection and connection to these people because we live so close to each other. There’s a real sense that this is sort of an integrated region, that you just pop over the border if you want to go somewhere for a long weekend quickly, or just to visit something.
I mean, a lot of these cities, like Detroit and Windsor, are literally across the river from each other. They look at each other. And when I was—just, again, two weekends ago—I was in Michigan, right, for another trip. And there, my wife was wearing a shirt that said “Lake Ontario” on it. And I think four separate people came up to her to say how happy they were with her shirt, and how it really is called Lake Ontario, not Lake America.
It’s just, in these border states, there is a commitment to being part of this broader ecosystem. It’s part of people’s identity, it’s part of their daily lives, it’s part of how they make their money, it’s part of how they see themselves. And Trump is disrupting that.
And whether that resonates in the rest of the United States—my sense is it’s not as much of an immediate concern, just from talking to people in other places. But there’s still a generalized sense that, wow, what the hell do you care about Canada? Why are you doing this stuff to aggravate a country that we all think is a friend and has done basically nothing to offend us?
And so I think the broader American reaction is confusion. The immediate reaction in more affected areas, or places where this feels more real, is, why are you doing this to us? Why are you doing this to our friends?
Sargent: Right. I think that’s exactly right. And I want to get into what that really means. After this, Trump posted this graphic of himself and Canadian leader Mark Carney, both in hockey getup, with Carney sprawled on the ice and Trump looming over him as if he had just knocked him down, saying, “Get up, governor.” I guess that means Canada is the 51st state in Trump’s head or whatever.
I want to try to get at what this might mean in a deeper sense, though. Trump also posted this graphic of all of North America, Canada very prominent in this graphic, all of it being defined as the USA, as if it’s a threat to essentially annex all of Canada.
Beauchamp: I believe that map also included Panama and Iceland, by the way. It was really maximal imperialism. And I think, when they drew them out, they didn’t intend to do that. They’re just that dumb.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. But it definitely, you know, it was a shot at Canada. It was really Canada Derangement Syndrome in the raw. But so, I thought Paul Krugman had an interesting line about some of this stuff, where he said that Canada is probably going to get hurt worse than the United States—although the U.S. will also get hurt in these trade hostilities. But Canada will put up with it. They know why they’re fighting. As Krugman put it, they’re fighting to defend their national identity.
And when you look at graphics like the ones Trump posts, he’s trying to say that he is fighting a nationalist war on behalf of America, but everyone knows it’s not true. There’s no discernible vision of what’s in the national interest behind any of it. Everyone knows that it’s all just personal manic lunacy, essentially. And I find that really interesting.
At the end of the day, MAGA nationalism just melts away when you scrutinize it for a second. And all that’s left is dear leader’s whims and unhinged proclivities, don’t you think?
Beauchamp: In this case, I think there’s not an argument here, right? What’s happening with this Canadian war is two things, right? Trump is a person who has a longstanding obsession with notions of dominance and hierarchy. He wants to be number one, and he wants to be the best. And he sees a place where he can impose his will, because the U.S. is much larger, much richer, and Canada much more dependent on American trade than the U.S. is dependent on Canadian trade.
And so he thinks he can bully them around—especially when you combine that with his, I think, longtime fascination with tariffs, again in a sort of non-rational way. And his view—this is sort of the sense I get from him—that he’s starting to think about his legacy, and he wants it to be a physically larger United States, right?
He’s a real estate developer. And he thinks if you can put the name of Trump on things, and create the Trump expansion, the Trump Purchase, whatever, right, that it’ll really cement his legacy in the history books. Because, again, he was a real estate developer. And that’s what’s motivating this on his part, more than anything else.
You can find some ideological antecedents for the idea of Canada becoming part of the U.S. Interestingly, Pat Buchanan wrote about that at one point—the paleoconservative politician who was really a predecessor of Trump in some ways. But Buchanan and Buchananism wasn’t about Canada. That didn’t make it a major policy priority, inasmuch as it accepted the post-NAFTA order.
It wasn’t really about hostility to Canada qua Canada, right? It was just musing about this stuff. No, all of this—this hyper-focus, this elevation of conflict with Canada to a number one White House priority—is pure Trump in the way that you’re saying, right?
I mean, I think the best way to think of it is like mad-king hours, you know? And the Lake America-Lake Ontario thing is a really good example.
Sargent: A hallmark of MAGA politics, right, is that we are winning when they are losing. “We” is Trump—MAGA America. I don’t think there’s any discernible sense of what the nation actually is in the “we.” It’s not the United States. It’s Trump, and Trump and MAGA—and that’s a bit of a fungible, movable thing—but it’s not the United States of America. And the “they” is right now the target of the MAGA two-minutes-hate of the moment, which is Canada, right?
And I think maybe people that you’re talking about in places like Michigan, who understand themselves as participating in a kind of broader thing across the border, who see themselves as integrated with Canada, look at this kind of talk, and it just sounds like white noise to them.
I think Trump’s trade war with Canada will undermine this whole MAGA idea that we win when they lose. I think it may be reminding a lot of voters why trade and economic interdependence can be good things for them and their country. The zero-sum MAGA worldview is kind of falling apart everywhere. Immigrants getting removed—it’s not resulting in employment for native-born young men. Trade war with Canada is only hurting American workers.
So I’m hopeful that there’s kind of an opening here for the failures of Trumpism, the world historical failures, like this ridiculous trade war, to open the way to get lots of Americans to understand interdependence and positive-sum relationships, on immigration and trade, as positive things. Do you think there’s maybe an opening for that?
Beauchamp: I think it’s possible, but people don’t naturally think in categories like that, right? That’s not why people vote. It’s not how ordinary people process political information. To tell that kind of story, you need a storyteller, right? You need somebody who stitches together—that is to say, almost certainly a Democrat, or maybe a very prominent writer, who can tell that story.
Or writer, or, I guess, in this day and age, filmmaker, podcaster, whatever—
Sargent: Or a couple of podcasters who are telling that story right now, Zack. Right.
Beauchamp: Well—OK, all right. But that—it needs to be articulated as such, right? The case needs to be made. And I think, at that level of abstraction, it’ll appeal to some people, to be sure, but it won’t become the way that people understand that. I think there is, as you say, an opening for somebody to use this experience as a deeper examination of what’s gone wrong with Trumpism.
Already you can see in the polling, throughout the second Trump administration, record-high numbers of Americans—maybe not record of all time, but compared to recent years—who believe free trade is good for the country. And I think that that will continue.
Sargent: I agree. Just to underscore why I’m a little bit optimistic, and to return to your point that we need a storyteller to knit all this together—I think that when you’ve got people in a state like Michigan saying, as you put it, Mr. Trump, why are you doing this to our friends?—in their heads, they are intuitively understanding the situation the way we are describing it.
They’re intuitively rejecting the idea of zero-sum politics, intuitively rejecting the idea that we win when they lose, intuitively kind of—I don’t know how to put this exactly—but intuitively standing up for interdependence, and against friend-enemy politics, in a sense.
They’re intuitively in that place that Democrats can speak to, I think, effectively, and say, MAGA right-wing nationalism is a catastrophe. It’s not the way the world works. We can do better.
Beauchamp: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s probably true as a matter of description of the world. And I certainly think that it is a thing that people could come to believe. The question is just, will they? Right? And I think that that’s not a natural fact, right
It’s not just going to come up out of the ether. It will require intellectual entrepreneurship to persuade people that this is the case. That’s the only point that I’m making there.
Sargent: No, absolutely. And I think Democrats should take it upon themselves to be intellectual entrepreneurs and make this case. There’s an opening to make a very big case in favor of liberalism and against MAGA, basically.
Beauchamp: Yeah. I think that’s right. This is part of it. It’s clear, I think, that the American public does not want what Trump is doing with trade policy. What they take from that, right—just sticking with the specific issue of trade, rather than the sort of broader ideological narrative around MAGA—that is a very open question, right?
And I think one thing that would be a huge mistake on the part of the Democratic Party in the future is to conclude from this, as you were suggesting earlier, right, that being opposed to trade in sort of a general sense is what you need to do to win over the American working person, right? That they just are all as hostile to trade as Trump is, and that he’s really tapping into the silent majority of Americans. No, that’s not what the evidence says. It’s not good politics.
Maybe there’s a different way. You don’t have to go full NAFTA, or full, you know, globalization, peak era of the ‘90s. Maybe, politically, that’s not the right thing to move toward after Trump—who’s to say. But the lesson is certainly not that the right thing to do all along was to follow Trump’s impulse on these issues. I think the evidence is weak that this was ever an especially important issue in Trump’s wheelhouse that caused him to win a lot. It’s very weak, I think.
But I’m confident now that, with eight years of him being president, that’s a loser. And the opportunity for a better—not just a better political conversation on this, but for a better policy settlement on trade, right, for a better approach to the issue as a substantive matter—is getting better and better with every Trump blunder here.
Sargent: Very well put. And if Democrats win the midterms, they can grab hold of this. Zack Beauchamp, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Beauchamp: Of course.
