No Amount of Heated Rivalry Could Defuse Trump’s Completely Pointless Canada Trade War

Genuinely, how big of an idiot do you have to be—as the chief executive of the United States, heading into midterm elections that are a little more than two months away—to start an all-out trade war with the largest country bordering your own, while your other literal, shooting war in the Middle East is still lingering on in a perpetual fail state?

It’s a quality of Donald Trump that never ceases to amaze: His attention span is so short that even while he’s being pantsed and humiliated by Iran’s resilience on a daily basis, he can’t remain focused on that one task or topic and must instead root around for more deeply unpopular confrontations elsewhere at the same time. I mean seriously, what would compel this man to not just leave the status quo untouched, when it comes to the U.S. trade relationship with Canada, with midterms on the horizon and Iran still existing as a daily question that refuses to be resolved? No amount of failure seems to be able to quell such a narcissistic ego; no number of simultaneous irons in the fire (all ruined) are enough. No matter how badly things are going, our president still somehow believes that he’ll be able to snap his fingers and get another sovereign nation to roll over and accept whatever terms he demands. But Canada clearly isn’t having it, and not even the cultural healing and communal horniness of Heated Rivalry’s return next spring will be able to salve this wound.

Today, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on the United States, striking back with the kind of backbone that always somehow seems to take Trump completely by surprise after the nation rejected what it saw as a deeply lopsided, predatory trade proposal. Prime Minister Mark Carney said that, among other disagreements, Canada had ended the trade talks after the U.S. attempted to wriggle out of complying with Canadian law that product packaging must be labeled in both the English and French languages, while also restricting Canada’s ability to make trade deals with third countries. As Carney stressed over the weekend, “We will not allow any nation to dictate our future.”

As if you need a concrete example of the blatantly disingenuous response from Trump to such concerns, the president posted online this morning about the French-English debate, taking aim at the obviously straw man idea that he was trying to “interfere with Canadians speaking French,” an argument that absolutely no one on Earth was claiming or trying to make. How can you blame the likes of Carney for choosing not to debate with someone making such a profoundly dishonest argument on such a stupid topic?

The Canadian retaliatory tariffs announced on Tuesday, meanwhile, are expected to be targeted and less broad than the random hodgepodge of the U.S. blanket tariffs, to be “concentrated in sectors such as steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics,” according to Carney over the weekend.

Not coincidentally, those are all areas where U.S. companies export heavily to Canada. According to CNN, it ranked last year as the largest or second-largest destination for American exports in all of those industries. The threat implied is obvious: Tariffs increase prices for Canadian consumers, demand for those U.S.-produced goods drop, and employers/producers in the U.S. respond by slashing production and jobs of U.S. workers. More or less everyone loses. But it’s all a necessity, because according to Trump, the nation as a whole has been acting “entitled,” expecting friendly treatment just because they’ve been a formal U.S. ally for … oh, about a century?

Carney is of course correct when he tells the people of his nation that their relationship with the U.S. has changed, perhaps irrevocably. Some U.S. industries have seen their ability to sell in Canada become functionally nonexistent in the course of only a year or two–look at the struggling American wine industry, which saw a stunning decline of almost 80% in Canada over the course of just one year, thanks to incredibly effective “buy Canadian instead” campaigns. Canadian tourism to the U.S. has likewise plummeted, deeply affecting states far, far away from the border such as Florida.

Carney warns that the U.S. is now using “economic integration as a weapon,” but this perhaps understates that this weapon does cut both ways. Canada is obviously the far smaller economy of these two nations, and will be more immediately and deeply affected on a consumer level by the trade war, but it does possess leverage in some very important industries to cause immediate economic pain for Americans. It could choose to restrict the export of materials such as potash, a critically important fertilizer ingredient, or simply cut off the flow of electricity exports to the United States, which would immediately put states like New York, Michigan and Minnesota into a bind. And you know Trump doesn’t mind letting any state he sees as a “blue state” to wither on the vine. An exceptional amount of economic pain is possible, with Carney telling reporters yesterday that “nothing is off the table.”

Meanwhile, as we wait for our leaders to formalize their intents to destroy their respective countries, the trade war soldiers on through grandstanding and performative, symbolic measures, such as more than 250,000 Canadian citizens signing a petition to expel the U.S. ambassador (a Trump stooge, of course) from the country. Both sides are currently using proxies to verbally disparage each other in the media, all the way up to Vice President JD Vance, who just yesterday said the following to reporters, repeating Trump’s provocatory language about Canada as the “51st state.” Said Vance, “We have to remember, Canada is a state. Sorry, Freudian slip. That was actually an accident.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in response, was rather less coy and significantly more direct. “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so (Trump) has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

There are clearly no cooler heads, or “adults” in these rooms, leaving us all at the mercy of a tweaking Trump, deep in his latest bout of Shitposter’s Madness. What else would you call the following trolling on Lake Ontario? Our president can admonish Canada and proclaim on Truth Social that “someone should get these clowns to fall in line,” but good luck projecting any kind of authority while simultaneously engaging in more overt clowning than the people you’re disparaging.

The midterm elections are in 71 days. How many Americans will need to be put out of work before then, to call an end to this madness?