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In this episode of The David Frum Show, David discusses how the Trump administration is in for a stark reality check due to its trade policies. David also debunks the claims of a painless economic transition promised by President Donald Trump and makes the point that the administration is not only bluffing and mismanaging fiscal and trade policies, but also misleading the public with promises of easy success.
Then, David is joined by the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, to discuss Canadian reactions to the sudden economic and rhetorical attacks from their once-trusted American neighbors.
After the interview, David answers listener questions about the Trump base, the media techniques of fascists, and the hidden gift of Trumpism.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and I’m grateful that you would join us again this second week of the program.
This week, my guest will be Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Now, I should make clear, if anyone doesn’t know it: I, too, am a Canadian and an Ontarian by birth, and I still spend a lot of time there.
I’m going to be speaking to the premier about the sense of shock and dismay that Canadians have felt about Donald Trump’s threats, not only to the trade arrangement between Canada and the United States, but his demands that Canada be annexed to the United States.
You know, the Trump people, when they’re trying to justify the economic policy that sent world financial markets into such chaos over the past weeks, they try to present this as some kind of confrontation with China alone, because they don’t like to admit to Americans that they are waging a trade war against the entire planet. This is not an anti-China campaign; this is an anti-everybody campaign. And it’s a campaign in which America has almost literally no allies, except maybe El Salvador.
The trade war began with attacks on Canada, supposedly and historically America’s closest neighbor and ally. You would think if you were trying to build an anti-China coalition, you would start by consolidating the North American heartland, especially the U.S.-Canada relationship. That’s exactly the opposite of what has happened.
I’ll be talking to the premier about that, how Canadians feel about it—not so much the facts and figures of the relationship, enormous as it is, but what it has been like for Canadians to be on the receiving end of threats of annexation, threats of violence, and this unrelenting campaign of tariffs and harassment, which has not been paused. The tariffs against China paused and unpaused. But those against Canada have remained consistently in place from the very beginning of the Trump administration. It’s bizarre. It’s shocking. It’s upsetting. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this week on The David Frum Show.
After the interview, I will be discussing and answering some reader questions. But first, some opening thoughts on the events of the past week.
[Music]
Frum: When Donald Trump and those around him want to demean or dismiss some opponent, some critic, they sometimes use the phrase, He doesn’t have the cards. They’ve said that about Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people’s resistance to Russian aggression. They’ve said it about Canada and other trading partners.
The implication is that the other person is too weak, too insignificant to be bothered to be worthy of respect. But there’s another implication, too, which is that the United States and the Trump administration does have the cards, is so mighty and fearsome that others must give way.
Now, the United States is obviously a very powerful nation with a lot of sources of command and control. But it is important to understand that, in fact, Donald Trump doesn’t have the cards that he thinks he does, and that’s one of the reasons that this campaign of economic aggression he’s launched—not against China but against the whole planet, every country just about, almost every trading nation—is coming amiss and will likely end in failure, and even disaster.
Let’s just take Donald Trump seriously for a moment. He doesn’t deserve it, but let’s just, for our own sakes, do it: supposing a president of the United States came to office and said, You know what? My top priority is going to be reshoring manufacturing in the United States. I personally don’t agree that this should be anybody’s top priority, but let’s suppose it were a president’s top priority: reshoring manufacturing. That’s what Donald Trump says he wants to do. How would you go about it?
Well, first you admit to yourself, if to no one else, that you are proposing a very ambitious and expensive task, one that will involve a lot of dislocation. So you’d face up to that. You would try to build some kind of political consensus in favor of the bumpy, difficult path you were proposing for the nation. You would maximize your friends at home. You would reach out to other parties. You would not behave in an arrogant way that had a lot of people hoping for your failure, and you would not start committing all kinds of other offenses—and even crimes—that put you in all kinds of precarious positions, where anything went wrong, and your whole program would come a cropper.
You would understand you were doing something that was not easy, was not going to be fast, was going to be costly, was going to impose significant hardship on many people. You’d work with allies. You’d build a large coalition because even if as you’re shrinking your supply chains to move things away from China, you’re still going to need various kinds of inputs from other countries—raw materials, if nothing else. And you’d want to make sure that as many countries as possible were sympathetic to what you were doing, rather than wishing that you would fail and fearing your aggression. You certainly wouldn’t open campaigns of ...
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