The Trump administration’s flailing, and at just the wrong time.
With a little over two months until the mid-terms, The White House finds itself embroiled in a multi-front war against everyone from Ahmad Vahidi to Mark Carney to long bond traders.
All of Donald Trump’s current battles constitute wars of choice, and tentative signs of stabilization in the long-end of the Treasury curve aside, he’s losing every one of them.
Trump’s “economic D-Day” for Iran was anticlimactic even as a ballyhooed Trump unveils go (Bloomberg called the new sanctions push “less Normandy and more Grenada”) and in addition to being transparently asinine, the Canada tariffs are a cautionary tale vis-à-vis the peril of attaching ruinous consequences to self-imposed deadlines.
There was nothing special about August 21 — no reason why that had to be the day for a comprehensive trade deal with Canada (and I’ll set aside the fact that there already was such a deal, and one negotiated by Trump himself no less). The statute Trump invoked in applying the new levies simply states that duties can’t take effect earlier than 30 days following the statute’s invocation, which is to say The White House wittingly put itself on the shortest possible clock.
In giving nations with financial ties to Iran a deadline for severing any and all economic links with the IRGC, Trump’s doing the same thing with his “economic asphyxiation” campaign against Iran. The risk is that “some” countries (read: China) tell him to kick rocks, thereby forcing Bessent to go ahead with secondary sanctions that no one really wants to apply.
Bessent didn’t do himself any favors by describing the potential impact of those measures in apocalyptic terms. “We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior,” he said, when asked why Trump didn’t pull the trigger Monday on new measures targeting transactions with the regime. “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
That was a very silly thing to say: The implication is that Bessent will wittingly bring about a financial crisis if China doesn’t comply. There’s precedent for noncompliance. Last year, Beijing famously won a staring contest with Trump when The White House tried to strong-arm China on trade the same way Trump’s attempting to muscle Canada.
Hilariously, China lauded Carney for matching Trump’s 50% tariffs with ruinously high levies on $20 billion of US goods. The Global Times on Tuesday called Canada’s retaliatory measures a “Chinese-style counter-attack.” “More countries,” the propaganda tabloid declared, “are realizing that making concessions won’t necessarily result in stability.”
Flummoxed, Trump’s resorting to absurdist threats that even the basest of his supporters will surely recognize as floundering. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America,” he said Tuesday. “[W]e don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”
That’s where we are, or I should say it’s where Trump and the GOP are with just 10 weeks to go before Americans pass judgment on an exceedingly unpopular president via down-ballot elections.
This should go without saying, but the Canada tariff war’s totally unsustainable. It’s not just the levies themselves, it’s the terrible optics and the impossibility of explaining to the American public why these levies are necessary.
Anyone over the age of 30 in America knows “blame Canada” was a standing joke pre-Trump. The idea of a war — any kind of war — with the Canadians was a meme before memification was a trend.
There’s no way to sell an extortion campaign against Canada to the US electorate. It’s not a serious proposal. Even the narrow subset of Americans with a reason to be aggrieved at Canada over trade is unlikely to accept the idea that diplomacy has run its course — that the US has no choice but to bully, threaten and otherwise lean on its famously congenial northern neighbor.
As to Iran, Trump should’ve pulled up stakes and declared victory months ago. I said it over and over again. There weren’t any boots on the ground. Everything that could’ve been accomplished from the air was accomplished — and then some.
By perpetuating the conflict beyond what was necessary to prove a point about this president’s willingness to avail himself of options that no other US president was prepared to entertain, Trump’s created the very thing he promised to avoid: An open-ended Mideast entanglement.
For now, there are still no American boots on Iranian soil. But the longer this goes on with the Guards appearing implacable and China unlikely to make anything resembling a clean break with Iran economically, the more tempting the ground option will seem. Trump’s not going to get from Iran what he’s after with secondary sanctions. And that assumes he can even articulate what it is he wants from Tehran.
That latter point underscores the real problem for this administration 19 months in: It’s not obvious, at all, what Trump’s trying to achieve by turning US trade and foreign policy into an around-the-clock, seven-days-a-week soap opera.
Blaming immigrants may be a winner on the campaign trail, even when you can’t say precisely what it is you’re blaming them for, or offer any evidence to support your xenophobic domestic policies. But “blame Canada” is a joke, figuratively and, as noted above, literally. And I dare say not one in 1,000 Americans can tell you what the point is in Iran. The fact that Trump most assuredly isn’t that one in 1,000 is a serious problem.
I image most GOPers in Washington see in all of this a hopeless muddle, and I have to say: I’m not “impressed” (with the scare quotes to denote that there are probably better word choices) so far with Trump’s efforts to create an unlevel playing field for the mid-terms.
If he’s serious about stacking the deck such that Republicans are playing with loaded dice, he needs to get moving. Because the mid-term clock’s ticking down even faster than his poll numbers.
Are we finally here? I naively wished during his first term. And during the second, I, like you, have had no expectations regarding his fall from grace. Still not getting my hopes up, but it’s pretty wild to think about the self inflicted problems he’s created for us all at this point. Cynically, to me at least, the only three d chess move here is to create so much chaos that he is able to rid ourselves of a democracy and assume the dictators throne.
“Lake America” was the most juvenile utterance since “Gulf of America.” It amazes me how far and with how much humiliation the power behind this half-wit stuffed suit will go to make their power permanent. And make no mistake, democracy is very close to failing. Project 2025 is no different than the Taliban, Xi or Erdogan. They use religion as a cover to get the gullible infantry-class on board, so they can continue their pandering and corruption. As Heisenberg has said many many times, it’s democracy and self rule itself on the ballot. And soon, if we keep failing, the ballots themselves will be as trustworthy as in Putin’s Russia.
Let’s not get carried away here. Project 2025, nor AKP’s agenda in Turkey, nor Fidesz in Hungary, nor the CCP is akin to The Taliban. We don’t do ourselves any favors by committing analytical fraud.
I’m with Rex Tillerson and his assessment . Trump was always a a mucking foron
There is a way out of this mess and it is not one our wealthiest or our political system is willing to continence. The worst criticism of the way out is one of re-engineering our industrial base. A path which is anthemic to wall street who’d rather collect money doing NOTHING.
The way out? Abandon fossil fuels and nuclear. We can make our entire society work via wholesale change to primarily a solar powered country. The resultant drop in energy prices would win over even the most ardent rational skeptic.
All the technologies are there and mostly been de-risked. The only thing missing is the political will to make it policy. That political will is must include thumbing our nose at people who profit from the abandoned industries.
You can’t meaningfully/sustainably/realistically solve a political problem in the U.S. with a strategy that the wealthy people are not willing to countenance. In the recent past one could appeal to the old school Republican rich’s morality/values, but these seem to have shifted to a much harsher/punishing/unthinking/primitive set.
To your point about energy…we humans live in a Garden of Eden and yet are greedily consuming natural resources and exploiting others with unthinking and unwise entitlement that if not punished by God will be punished by nature itself.
However an economic boom could drag in enough uber wealthy to tip the scales. It is not as sexy as AI but cheap energy will benefit us all and is likely to happen whether embraced or not.
I think last year 91% of all new electrical capacity was batteries or solar. Seems to me we are at the tipping point where we could see a big change quickly if we chose.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Europe is actively proving your point as we speak. However, the US is too petroleum rich to be forced into this strategy. We’ll keep loving our gas guzzlers and natural gas power plants until they bankrupt us because somebody decided that energy should be a political litmus test instead of an opportunity to create competition.
Well articulated and framed as usual! And this also forgets that we considered invading Greenland for again, no meaningful reason, and did invade and kidnap the leader of Venezuela which I’ve read has enabled Rubio to become the defacto dictator of that nation.
Trump ran on fixing the economy and, unfortunately, xenophobic immigration policies. He delivered one, has abjectly failed at the other and then confusingly gone about the rest of his tenure executing odd power grabs while enriching himself in the most transparently corrupt ways possible. (read EVERY)
And yet, I’m still not convinced that voters will punish him, or the thing that used to be a political party before it decided to make him cult leader in chief.
Nice piece (once again).
If Canada really wanted to inflict some pain, they wouldn’t respond with tariffs of their own, they’d respond with export duties–specifically, export duties on the very things which have thus far been largely exempted from tariffs. Those things–primarily energy and agricultural products–provide a road map to America’s greatest pain points. Best of all, those duties will largely impact large energy and chemical corporations along with a few government owned utiltlies. No one will need to be laid off, and bottom lines will barely be affected. The United States can’t replace the power we buy from Manitoba Hydro or Hydro Quebec. If the price goes up, the price gets paid.
I think this is very much in the cards, but that’s their big gun and I think they are smart for holding onto it. As H has alluded, there may be (are probably?) more Americans favoring Canada in this fight, and blaming Trump for it. But if the lights go out in Michigan, the heat goes off in Vermont, the crackers run dry in Louisiana and the farmers can’t buy fertilizer even if they can afford it, something tells me some of that well-placed blame on Trump is going to leak over the border. Plus we’re coming up on hockey season.
ROW has figured Trump out; that’s been clear to me from essentially day 1 of Trump 2.0…things will get very very interesting when and if the financial powers that be, that returned him back to office, decide that he’s out served his usefulness and now is a detriment to their cause…
Canada is dangerous. Just watch the documentary “Canadian Bacon” if you have any doubts…