Updated: Date

Published: JANUARY 2025

Trump will face backlash if he bullies Canada with tariffs

Analysis by STAN CROCK
Writing from Washington, D.C.

I recently saw a new musical called ‘Hanukah Carol’, a hilarious Jewish version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ with a Scrooge character named Chava Kanipshin. I was reminded of this when I saw a headline in the December 30, 2024 Washington Post: ‘Turmoil as Ottawa prepares for Trump’.

With the Canadian government in disarray after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent resignation announcement, I understand why the specter of a Trump presidency is unnerving when the president-elect threatens high tariffs on Canadian exports and muses about Canada as a new state (and invading Greenland and Panama).

But let me provide a little perspective from someone who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area for nearly 50 years. While the Trump era (error?) is different from what Washington was like when I arrived in 1977, I know what has changed and what hasn’t.

Some things to note:

• Trump is not 12 feet tall.
• Trump made 30,000 false statements in his first term. So, while the probability that he will follow up on his ruinous ruminations about Canada (ruinous for both countries, I might add) isn’t zero, it’s not 100%.
• A business and political backlash against his more preposterous positions is likely.
• Institutional prerogatives remain entrenched and don’t always favor Trump.
• Follow the money.

Let’s take these in order.

Trump is not 12 feet tall

He has had a remarkable string of setbacks even before he takes office. For starters, despite his claim of an "unprecedented and powerful mandate," he didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote. Of the last 50 presidential elections, his 1.5% popular vote margin ranks 43^rd, and his Electoral College margin ranks 35^th. A few days after the election, his choice of Rick Scott of Florida for Senate majority leader got a measly 13 votes in the Republican Senate caucus. John Thune of South Dakota, an institutionalist, won the post. Yes, his pick for House Speaker, Mike Johnson, won, but that was only because there was no other choice.

Trump thought the attorney general position was the most important one – to protect him and attack his opponents. What happened to his prize choice, the execrable Matt Gaetz? He withdrew. Seems like a prerequisite for a nomination from Trump is a sex scandal. Trump couldn’t even prevent the House Committee on Ethics from releasing a damning report about Gaetz that shows how monstrous a pick he was.

Other nominees – Pete Hegseth at Department of Defense, Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence, and Robert Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services – will not skate through either. Trump’s daughter-in-law – Lara Trump – his pick to succeed Marco Rubio as a Florida senator when Rubio becomes secretary of state, withdrew after Florida Gov. Ron Desantis told Trump to take a hike. Trump’s pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chad Chronister, bowed out.

All of these problems forced Trump to do the last thing he ever wanted to do: ask the agency he detests most – the FBI – to vet nominees, as it normally does. Truly humiliating. All the media coverage saying Trump and his acolytes learned lessons from the first term and would be more effective and efficient this time turns out to be balderdash. If they learned lessons, they were the wrong ones.

Then there’s legislation. Anyone who thought Republicans would uniformly stand up and salute whatever Trump wanted – a perfectly reasonable assumption – was wrong. On the first bill out of the box, a resolution to fund the government, 38 Republicans who wanted deep budget cuts defected despite Trump’s endorsement of the measure. On the second attempt, when Trump demanded an increase in – or elimination of – a ceiling on the government’s debt, 170 Republicans opposed him and voted for a bill that didn’t include the debt ceiling measure. Trump can’t line up primary opponents against all of them, and a bunch of them won their election by more than 20 points so their seats are safe. Even in competitive races, Trump-backed candidates lost 42% of the time in 2022. There’s a reason the GOP doesn’t seem to fear him as much as is generally believed.

Of course, Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2022. That should make a difference in GOP turnout. But in 2024, it didn’t. He didn’t have coattails. Democrats actually added a seat in the House of Representatives. The Republicans slender four-vote margin means they can afford to lose only two votes and still have a majority. What’s more, Democratic Senate candidates won in four of the five key swing states Trump won. Republicans gained a pitiful 57 seats out of 6,000 in state legislatures – with 23 of those gains in one state, Vermont. Trump is more albatross than golden goose.

On the economy, the Fed isn’t going to cut rates as quickly, as often, or as much as Trump would like. And after the initial irrational euphoria over Trump’s victory, the markets started to realize the implications of his proposed policies and are starting to tank. When the stock and bond markets aren’t happy, it’s a big worry for Trump. His fear of unsettled markets is why he chose a respectable nominee, Scott Bessent, for Treasury secretary. Remember how Trump regularly boasted about how the stock market rose while he was in office? – using it as a benchmark of his performance until it sank. He desperately would like to do the same thing again.

Trump habitually makes false statements

So, what utterances should you believe? At a January 7, 2025 news conference, Trump said there were no guns at the January 6, 2021 insurrection – a falsehood evidenced by numerous convictions of people for toting guns at the Capitol on that day four years earlier. As well, Trump said at his January 7, 2025 news conference that President Biden wants to eliminate home gas heaters – whereas the reality is that he just wants to increase their efficiency.

Going back to his first term as president between 2017 and 2021, Trump made 30,000 false statements, according to The Washington Post. He didn’t make Mexico pay for a wall. COVID-19 didn’t fade away quickly, as he predicted. Drinking bleach wasn’t a good solution for COVID-19, as he suggested at the time. But he is always capable of doing damage. In his first term, Trump did pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, NAFTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He’s always been a performative blowhard, so the damage isn’t likely to be as bad in his second term as people fear.

I used the term “false statements” instead of “lies” intentionally. That’s because while he lies, I suspect that more of the time he’s a bullshitter. What’s the difference? In his essay ‘On Bullshit’, the late Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt explained that a liar knows what he is saying is false and tries to deceive the listener, while a bullshitter doesn’t care whether what he says is true or not because the goal is not to deceive. Rather the goal is to convey an impression of the speaker – the perfect tactic for a narcissist or the loudmouth at a bar. In other words, Trump.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore him. For one thing, words alone have consequences. It made sense for Trudeau to fly to Mar-a-Lago when Trump made threats. It makes sense for European countries to figure out what to do about trade and military support for Ukraine because no one knows what Trump will do – or what Congress will let him do.

He’s a bully. When you push back on a bully, the bully caves. That’s why he was unable to make Mexico pay for the wall. Indeed, it may be that when his effort to bully Congress on the debt ceiling crashed, he had to change the subject and rant about Canada, Greenland, and Panama to make people forget he got trounced on the legislation. It’s not as if these bombs stem from some grand Trump strategic vision. You can accuse Trump of a lot of things, but having a strategic vision isn’t one.

Expect a business and political backlash against his more preposterous positions

Trump can’t play chess, checkers, or even tic-tac-toe. He doesn’t have enough grey matter or knowledge to think through a second order of consequence to what he says. So he doesn’t realize that his threatened tariffs would aggravate inflation for consumers and cripple some U.S. industries by hiking prices on everything from crude oil, clean electricity, and cars to lumber, chemicals, electronics, metals, and industrial machinery. Nor does he understand that mass deportations would devastate the agriculture, construction, hospitality, and healthcare industries.

His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called him a moron. Trump also is ignorant in the literal sense of the word – not knowing. The list of things he doesn’t know is boundless. He really thinks foreign countries pay tariffs. He had four years in office to learn such things, but he simply lacks the capacity to learn. How did he get this far? Instinct, not intellect. He is an effective con man, not a strategic one, who acts on his gut.

In contrast, the affected industries understand the impact of these ideas. They won’t sit idly on the sidelines as Trump mulls disastrous policies. Nor will lawmakers whose constituents would get ravaged. When the affected businesses and their members of Congress push back, Trump will crumble. Of course, it’s not clear that Trump is talking about tariffs, deportation, Canada, Greenland, and Panama for any reason other than the bullshitter-in-chief likes the way it makes him look to say these things. There is no principle behind any of this that he would fight for. If he gets pushback, he’ll move on to something else to reclaim the spotlight.

Institutional prerogatives remain entrenched

Notice there is no more talk of jamming Trump’s grotesquely unqualified nominees through the Senate with recess appointments to avoid a more probing – and for the nominees more problematic – confirmation process. Senators don’t want to abdicate their constitutional authority to provide advice and consent on nominees. Mitch McConnell, no Trump fan, is chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, which sets the rules for debate on bills that come to the Senate floor. He could be a major stumbling block for Trump’s more outlandish notions.

Follow the money

Trump is likely to exempt some businesses from tariffs and deportations. His team already is paring back his grandiose assertions. Who’s likely to get a pass? The Washington Post reported Trump is likely to keep tariffs on key sectors like the defense supply chain, medical supplies, and energy production to foster domestic growth in those areas.

But bear in mind three legal developments. One is the evisceration of the emoluments clause of the Constitution which prohibits federal officials from accepting compensation from a foreign country. The Supreme Court dismissed a case against Trump because he already had left office. Add to that the broad immunity the Supreme Court granted a president when discussing matters with federal officials. And then there is a case in which the Supreme Court said – get ready for this – that if a politician gets paid for taking an action to benefit someone after the action, it’s a gift. But if the payment comes before the action, it’s a bribe. This really happened. So, there’s your roadmap for avoiding a tariff or deportation of workers.

Exhibit No. 1 for this proposition: Trump’s support for H-1B foreign worker visas, which Elon Musk and other tech executives use to hire skilled foreign employees. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ base is apoplectic. But Trump can’t run again, so he doesn’t need the base. He will side with the billionaires every time. Musk ingratiated himself by giving Trump $277 million for the 2024 election campaign before Trump was in office, so it’s not a bribe. Others will give Trump money after he does something to help them. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

On top of all this, for Canada and Trump, there’s an easy out to avert disaster. The tariffs are supposed to be leverage to get Canada to stop illegal immigration and fentanyl. Right now, just 1.5% of illegal immigrants and 0.2% of seized fentanyl cross the Canadian border. So, all a Canadian government needs to do is have one ‘immigrant show trial’ and one ‘drug- smuggling show trial’ and then release the statistics.

Canada can then crow compliance, Trump will declare victory, and the tempest will be over. Another development that could work in Canada’s favor is that with the resignation of Prime Minister Trudeau – whom Trump detests – Trump’s thirst for revenge against him (and by extension Canada) will diminish.

The unhinged megalomaniac in the White House for the next four years may not follow this script, of course, but a catastrophic conflict is far from inevitable. O Canada! As your national anthem goes, it would be wise for you to “stand on guard”, but odds are you’ll continue to be “glorious and free” long after the Trump era is over.