The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 30 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.
This week, Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada escalated, as an import ban on some Canadian products went into effect. Trump has been raging at Canada for months, but he just said almost in passing that the U.S. gets along with China better than it gets along with Canada. And we think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed how casually Trump just tosses away a major longtime ally.
Trump also unleashed his trade advisor to make truly vicious and sneering comments about Canada, to boot. Meanwhile, Republicans themselves are admitting that the trade war with Canada is a big problem for them in the midterms, and getting worse.
So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of Trump-GOP midterm woes. Virginia, always great to have you on.
Virginia Heffernan: So good to see you, Greg.
Sargent: So a quick recap. Last month Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian imports, and Canada hit back with retaliatory tariffs. Now Trump just banned several other imports—dairy, motorcycles, alcohol. The Times calls this a vicious trade war and says much of our relationship with Canada has unraveled.
Virginia, I’m not a trade expert, but I know enough to understand that Trump completely pulled this whole thing out of his ass to assuage his feelings of impotence and failure. Your thoughts about that?
Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, we’ve come to the part in the Trump proceedings where, to quote South Park, we blame Canada. And when that song—I was just looking it up—came out in 1999, it was considered a punchline, because it would be so outlandish for Americans, however arrogant and absurd we were in the nineties, to blame our trading partner and close ally to the north, who are famous for their mild-manneredness, to blame them really for anything. But here we are.
And this is not playing well with Americans who already are beginning to hold Trump in not just disapproval, but outright contempt. You may have seen that he’s gotten under 30 percent. So one poll showed him at 29 percent. Nate Silver, it seems not long ago, said there was a floor of 40. Now we’ve crashed through, potentially, the floor of 30, which is just amazing.
And it’s what you hear from what I’ve been thinking of as the diesel class. This particular demographic that I just wrote about, who know their way around that big nozzle at the gas station, the lower-down one. They’re truck drivers, they drive the Ford F-class or the Silverado. This thing that diesel is skyrocketing faster than gas.
I mean, when you go to the pump, you see the normal gas prices, and then at the bottom, usually an eye-popping number now for diesel. It’s broken through all records. It’s doubled since Biden was in office. And that group immediately puts the blame on Trump. They put the blame on the trade war with Canada, and they especially put the blame on his war with Iran.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. There is a certain class of voter out there who’s quite MAGA-adjacent, who understands on a really instinctual level that trade with Canada is good for our country. And these are voters who are concentrated in places like the Midwest and in Maine, and a lot of places where these Senate races are playing out.
Heffernan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we’ve been doing import and export with Canada, because we are connected by land—who do you think are driving over that border, from Maine, from the states that are adjacent to it, from the Great Lakes states? They are these long-haul truckers that Trump has made a big effort to court.
And they are used to passing through that Canadian border, and they want more trade with Canada. They have relatives in Canada. This is kind of more than an ally. It’s a familial relationship that we don’t have with Europe.
Sargent: Right. And Trump just has contempt for the people who we rely on. So let’s listen to Trump talk about Canada this week. Here he’s asked whether a trade deal with Canada is still possible. Check this out.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, they want to have a deal with us. They call us all the time. The problem is that they’ve treated the United States very unfairly. They have been one of the worst countries in the entire world. You know, we get along with China, and we make good deals, but Canada’s been really very difficult to deal with, actually. And they feel entitled and, you know, they’re not a state. There’s nothing they have that we need. We have more energy than they have. We have all the lumber you could possibly use. We have everything. We don’t need.
Sargent: Virginia, let’s break this up into two pieces. First, note how casually he slips in the idea that we get along with China, suggesting it’s better than with Canada. I mean, I know he’s trying to own the libs, but he really did own me there. I’m sure he owned you as well. I mean, I don’t feel like that should pass by unremarked on, do you? It’s really disgusting conduct from the president.
Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, it’s own the libs, but it’s also owning everyone who is committed to the idea that democracy and free trade move together—which is a kind of fundamental part of the long peace, that we need these relationships. I mean, we’ve said it many times, but the postwar order is sort of, in America, lying in fragments. It makes no sense.
Sargent:And the remark about Canada feeling entitled—that’s not how trade works. Trade is mutually beneficial.
And the crack about them not being a state—is the idea supposed to be that we’d be treating Canada better if we absorbed it into the United States against the will of Canadians through violent conquest? What’s he talking about?
Heffernan: I don’t know if you saw Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron, you know, make their romance Instagram official a few days ago—maybe nine or ten days ago. But they were talking about stuff like shutting Trump out of crude oil imports from Canada. They were also talking about their mutual interests in democracy and the rule of law.
And it’s clear who is not interested in democracy and the rule of law—the elephant in the room, who they are intending to rout with this new romance between the EU and Canada.
Sargent: Yeah, it does seem like this is a big component in the world just kind of moving on without Trump’s America, and just sort of shrugging and saying, well, I guess it’s over, Trump’s destroyed the place, so see you later.
And here’s where it gets really ugly. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who’s a big architect of this catastrophe, this week warned Canada not to interfere in our elections—which I guess is supposed to mean that Canada isn’t allowed to retaliate against our hostile trade acts. And then at an event in Washington, Navarro also sneered at potential Canadians in the audience, saying this: “Please, if you’re on K Street, get the hell out of our country.”
Virginia, this is like the perfect example of how Trump world and MAGA’s malicious nationalism works. Abusing Canada and Canadians is supposed to thrill MAGA in some way, but as you point out, it’s a total misread of where a big chunk of ordinary rank-and-file Republican voters, and even some MAGA voters, really are.
Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, you may remember the Canadian trucker—we’re now back to the pandemic era—but the Canadian trucker, what was it, some kind of caravan, that were anti-mask, they didn’t want to get tested before they went over the American border. They were MAGA-adjacent, they were MAGA-supportive.
I mean, we saw at least the Canadian diesel class was very much on the right, and very much—you know, Trump was very excited about them then. And now he is not.
Sargent: It’s not just MAGA, it’s also swing voters who are going to be deeply alienated by this stuff. The Los Angeles Times had a really good report on this, in fact. They talked to a bunch of Republicans and found that Republicans think it’s a real problem.
One former chair of the Michigan Republican Party said, “it doesn’t make things easier. It’s not helping.” A Maine Republican media strategist said that the trade war with Canada puts, “another log on the fire of the affordability issue.”
And here’s a real telling one that I think will get you going with your diesel class stuff. There was a focus group held of Michigan swing voters in early September, and eleven of the 13 participants said the trade war was bad for the state, bad for the state of Michigan. One Michigan swing voter said this: “The more we put tariffs on stuff, the more they put tariffs on stuff. Prices are just ultimately going to go up for all of us.”
So swing voters are seeing that Trump’s zero-sum economics is a dead end, and that trade is positive-sum and good for everybody. And I think that’s good.
Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, there’s no history of Americans in, like, the industrial Midwest worried about jobs going to Canada. This is not—right? It’s not like in the NAFTA days, he had locked in on that jobs were going to Mexico, right? Before we sort of realized that the danger was more from automation and maybe China. But there is no history of making Canada a kind of bugbear that is either stealing from us or whatever.
Even in the early days where he was so critical of NATO for not paying their dues—you can usually get some Americans to get mad at Europe, think that they’re so fancy, think that they’re kind of weak and they depend on us and we saved their bacon in World War II. There’s a history of that discourse with France in particular.
But with Canada, there is a big blue-collar population. I know I just said it before, but they have their own diesel class, and they send us crude oil, which is also the source of diesel, the same way it’s the source of gasoline for non-diesel cars. And so this just feels wrong from all sides.
Sargent: I was talking to the Democratic candidate in the House district in Macomb County a while ago, and she was basically telling me that people in that part of Michigan just see themselves as being part of a network that includes Canada, which of course is right across the river in Detroit.
And so—this is Macomb County, which is the home of the Reagan Democrat and so forth, really industrial, central auto manufacturing. And the auto industry for many decades as well has been kind of viewed as this kind of unified thing between Canada and America. It’s not like there’s a U.S. auto industry and a Canada auto industry. They’re one thing.
And so I really do think that something kind of profound is happening here, where, positive-sum relationships with Canadians are getting a second look, in a way, from people who have been told that they should be nationalists, MAGA nationalists.
And so I’m hopeful that there’s actually the possibility here that some of these voters could just understand just how deeply Trump and MAGA and right-wing populist nationalists have been scamming them. Is that too much to hope for?
Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s sort of what Canada’s Mark Carney has said, which is that once Trump started threatening to colonize Canada, he said something like, you can’t unsee it. So he said, basically, once that happened, it was like you’re in a partnership, even a marriage, and suddenly someone flexes that they’ve got all the money, the house belongs to them, they could, beat you up at any time.
And you just don’t come back from that, right? Like, you start socking away your resources and forming other alliances outside the marriage, and you plan to leave. And Carney said, even if we get an ex-president, the jig’s up with this. We’re not doing this.
And I think that that is a way that the voters are feeling, which is like, this thing that we thought was so stable can come apart with the wrong president. It can come apart. And this threat that prices may never go back down, and that they’re expected to jump more—this thing can be destroyed if someone’s determined to do it. And I think Carney’s right. We all can’t unsee that.
Sargent: It’s really almost unbelievable. If you were trying to destroy what’s good about the United States, you would basically do what Donald Trump is doing, pretty much across the board, right?
Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, are you missing—do you ever miss the old World Cup days? That was just last summer, that we had that romance where even Canadians said, these people are so friendly. And the French said everyone’s so friendly, and we love your Buc-ee’s and your Big Gulps.
Well, we still have our Buc-ee’s and our Big Gulps, but it seems like we are perilously low on democracy and rule of law. And that seems to be alienating people even more than bottomless Olive Garden bowls of pasta made them briefly like us.
Sargent: Well, and also we seem perilously low on respect for our longtime allies and friends. And we seem perilously low on, you know, decency.
Heffernan: Yeah, the decency, exactly. I mean, the other thing that Macron cited, in addition to democracy and the rule of law, was free trade, which you’ve brought up, but it’s worth bringing up again.
To imagine that America would become protectionist like this, to this extent, with tariffs of all things, predicated on—you brought up Peter Navarro—just the harebrained craziness. Do you remember, like, when they rolled out the tariffs and they’d been made by ChatGPT, and there was no rhyme or reason to it? It’s just some kind of caprice with these guys.
They have some idea that tariffs are going to be good for us. Then we have the TACO period, of Trump chickening out on really doing tariffs. And now here we are, with rising prices. And no truck driver, no matter how made-in-the-USA he is, is going to say that we need to shut out this trading partner of Canada. We just have a sentimental attachment to Canada that can’t be broken.
Sargent: Well, let me ask you this, Virginia, just to close this out. Is it possible that a decisive victory for Democrats in the midterms sends a renewed message to the rest of the world that we’re trying to get onto the right side of decency and really trying to shrug off this catastrophe that Trump has become for us? I’m not sure if the rest of the world is ready to give us a pass next time.
Heffernan: I worry about that. And certainly at the midterms, I mean, I’m sure they will cheer on any impeachment efforts, or any efforts to undo, you know, Trump’s disastrous policies toward other countries.
And if people are—their emotions—to get out of the war, or at least stop supplying Trump with endless weapons to prosecute that war, they will applaud those efforts. But I don’t know they’re going to trust us again anytime soon.
Sargent: God, that’s dark. Virginia Heffernan, that’s why we have you on. Thank you so much for coming on.
Heffernan: Thank you so much, Greg.