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. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is David Frum and what is the focus of this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: What are the realities of the Trump administration's trade policies?
The Trump people, when they're trying to justify the economic policy that has sent world financial markets into such chaos over the past weeks, 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. And 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 is not been paused.
Of all 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. 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 said that about Vladimir 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 worthy of respect. But there's another implication too, which is that the United States and the Trump administration have 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.
Supposing, 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 supposing 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 would 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.
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Chapter 3: Why does David Frum believe Trump 'doesn't have the cards' in trade policy?
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 become 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 you are going to need, even 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 territorial aggression against neighbors and allies. You wouldn't say, we're going to annex Greenland from Denmark and we're going to try to conquer Canada and make it a 51st state.
You wouldn't do any of those things. You would also understand the relationship between your financial program and your economic program. This is a little technical, but it's really important to grasp. The reason the United States has such a big trade deficit is exactly and precisely because the United States imports so much capital from other countries.
The current account and the capital account, to give them their technical names, have to move together. So one reason the United States has had such an expansion of its trade deficit in recent years is, first, that the United States is importing so much capital in the form of private investment. People are buying into American companies, which is a good thing.
But it's also because the United States has run huge budget deficits. So foreigners buy a lot of American debt because there's a lot of American debt to buy. A first step and an indispensable step towards shrinking your trade deficit is to shrink your budget deficit.
So you would have a fiscal plan that worked in parallel to your trade plan, your economic plan, whereas instead of, as Donald Trump has done, exactly the opposite. His plan is to make the deficit bigger on a fantasy that with enough tariffs, he can make the trade deficit smaller, and that's not going to work. You would level with people. You would not promise people quick and easy success.
The hardships that have come and are to come are going to arrive and are arriving as a total surprise to Americans. They were promised that this was going to be quick and easy. People in the Trump administration are still promising that the stock market will go up any day soon. Not understanding, you know what? Reshoring all this manufacturing, it's going to dislocate a lot of arrangements.
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Chapter 4: How do Trump's trade policies affect US allies and global relationships?
It is an act of state control, of state assertion, of central planning. Someone has grimly joked, of central planning without a plan. But there's a notion, there's a concept that the people at the top, the people with authority, think that a certain way of organizing the economy would be better than other ways. And they are going to use the power of the state to enforce their vision.
So you have to drop all this talk about economic freedom, because that's not what we're doing. Economic freedom belongs to those who are free traders. With the reorientation of the economy toward manufacturing, you're committing to the tariff regime, which is highly intrusive.
committing to probably with various kinds of retraining programs you're committing to state subsidies to at a minimum to buy off the farmers but state subsidies and other industries too and ultimately if you're not going to have a shrunken budget deficit and you're going to do the tariffs and you're going to try to restore manufacturing sooner or later you're going to discover yourself needing some kind of capital or exchange control to control the flow of money in and out of your country
So this is a big, old-fashioned, wartime economy project, not at all a free market one. And you'd better acknowledge that to yourself. Instead, what has happened is that Trump has presented this in a way that is so false, so deceptive, that the story is going to unravel faster than he can deliver any conceivable benefit, nevermind net benefit, but any benefit at all.
And so what he's gonna discover is he's doing this all with bluff. He doesn't have the cards. His promise of easy, cheap success Well, it comes naturally to him because he's kind of a flim flam artist and all his life he has built people who have trusted him. In this case, he is trying to build a whole nation.
But I really I don't worry about this because, as I said, I don't wish any of this project. Well, I think the whole project is ill conceived, even if it were an honest project and it's not honest. But I think he has begun this project by lying even to himself about how easy it's going to be, how fast it's going to be, how remunerative it's going to be.
And I think what we all smell coming from this administration in the light of the unraveling of self-deception is the smell of panic. And this is the whole thing. This is the thing I think that the whole world, and especially the Chinese who are supposedly the targets of the Trump program, are smelling. They're smelling panic. They're smelling fear. They're smelling imminent defeat.
The United States was sold this project as a way of reaffirming American power and greatness. In fact, we are witnessing not just a crisis of the American economy, but a crisis of American power. All kinds of other resources of the American state, the good name, the credibility, the alliance system, all these things are also in danger right now.
And we are going to find ourselves at the end of this Trump program, which may be coming faster than anyone believes. This whole thing may collapse quite quickly. But when it does collapse, it's going to be hard to put together a second plan.
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Chapter 5: What is Ontario Premier Doug Ford's perspective on US-Canada relations under Trump?
Authoritarian states like Vietnam have a lot of policy continuity. Once they settle on something, it comes out of a big bureaucratic process of decision. But once they settle on it, that becomes the new plan.
And if they've become convinced that the United States, under Donald Trump, but the United States generally, is not a reliable partner, that's not something they're going to change their mind about when the United States say, oops, sorry, it didn't work out. We didn't hit the Dow 50,000 target that Peter Navarro promised. We're rethinking this. We're going to try something else.
We've got to pause. We've got to unpause. Then we're pausing again, then unpausing again. Through all of this, the United States is going to find itself in worse and worse shape. And now my interview with Ontario Premier Doug Ford. After that, I'll be answering questions from viewers and listeners. Please remember to like and subscribe to The David Frum Show. But first, a quick break.
Aging can feel like a weird game. A healthy diet? Two points.
Chapter 6: How do Canadians feel about Trump's economic and rhetorical attacks?
A bad night's sleep? Lose a turn.
I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.
And I'm Yasmin Tayyag, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're going to find out if longevity culture is keeping pace with the science. And what we can learn about taking a different approach to aging. Listen to How to Age Up. New episodes of How to Age Up come out every Monday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Premier Ford, welcome. Well, thanks for having me on, David. I should mention, I was born in Ontario. I have a house in Ontario. I pay property taxes in Ontario, but I don't vote in Ontario. So you get the best of all possible worlds from me.
Well, that's great. I can't stand taxes, so we try to never raise the tax ever.
This is where I want to start. So you've been working very hard on American television, talking about the relationship between Canada and the United States, between Ontario and the neighboring states, the facts, the figures, the enormous size of this relationship.
I want to move away from that meat and potatoes, facts and figures approach to ask a sort of question I think Americans may not understand and would appreciate your insight into. A lot of Americans, even the people who are not sympathetic to what President Trump is doing, treat his comments about Canada as kind of a joke. Annexing 51st State, it's a troll, it's a joke.
I don't think they understand the impact this is having, this kind of talk has on Canadians. So could you, just as someone who comes from a rightist-centered background, not a tax raiser, not a big government guy, someone who comes from the same part of the world, basically, as the Trump voters come from, how all of this lands when Canadians and Ontarians hear it?
Well, what it is, David, we've always thought ourselves part of the family. And it's been that way for generations. I think people were shocked. They were disappointed, if I could say the word hurt, because the Canadians love Americans. They absolutely love them. They spend a lot of time in the U.S. and Americans love Canadians.
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Chapter 7: Why is the integrated US-Canada supply chain critical in trade discussions?
You have to make the omelet larger. And that's the auto sector. But there's so many other sectors that the supply chain is so integrated, you just can't flip on a switch and turn it off.
Well, you mentioned the auto pact. I think a lot of Americans don't understand when they hear President Trump say and his surrogate say, we want Canada to sign some great new trade deal. I don't think they understand that Canadian U.S. trade has been wrapped in deals that go back to the 1950s for defense, to the 1960s for autos, the first Canada-U.S.
free trade agreement to the 80s, NAFTA update in the 90s, the Trump version of NAFTA in the 2010s. And what Trump has been doing is saying all those signatures don't mean anything. We want another set of signatures. And one of the questions I think you must have and Canadians must have is, well, if the last set of signatures don't mean anything, why do you want new signatures?
And that's what people have been saying, David. You know, President Trump made the last deal. I was part of that deal. It was Secretary – Lighthizer. And President Trump said it was the greatest deal ever. I guess it's not the greatest deal ever anymore. So I'm not too sure what he wants to do or where he wants to go. But we're just stronger together with all the threats around the world.
We need to stick together. When China's cutting the U.S. off of critical minerals for their military use, we have all the critical minerals. Ontario has more critical minerals than anywhere in the world. We want to ship them down to our closest friend and ally to support them. For instance, nickel, 50% of the high-grade nickel the U.S. uses comes from Sudbury. And I emphasize high-grade nickel.
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Chapter 8: What are the challenges facing future US trade agreements with Canada?
There's a difference. They use it in their military, use it in their aerospace, in their manufacturing, not to mention the aluminum and the steel and other critical minerals that I could list. And who better to give it to than our closest friends?
I understand you often talk to Secretary of Commerce Letnick. What are those conversations like without asking you to say anything you shouldn't say? Does he place the call? Do you place the call? How do you greet each other? Is it cordial? What happens on those calls?
Well, it's always cordial. He's a very, very bright individual. He understands the markets. And that's why I just is mind boggling to so many people, elected officials, private sector folks. He's a smart guy and the market speaking. And when you see the market tumbling, it's not about Wall Street losing money. It's about Main Street losing money.
The mom and pops that are out there that have money in pension funds. And we have a lot of pension funds. And in Toronto, probably one of the largest group of pension funds, they invest everywhere in the world and they invest heavily into the US. So when their pension fund drops $2 billion or $3 billion over a three-day period, that's concerning.
It's concerning to people that want to invest around the world. They put that on hold. We're going to see inflation when you're targeting tariffs, which I, by the way, I support all the tariffs against China. but there's a way of handling it.
Do you ever tell Secretary Letnick that he could make everybody billions and billions of dollars if he could just keep his yap shut for 48 hours?
Well, I never get personal with the president, never get personal with the secretary, but I'm not too sure if they realize the impact on the entire world when one man speaks, it can shift everything. So they have to be cognitive of every word that comes out of their mouth. It's just so important for the U.S., for the citizens to make sure that we continue thriving and prospering.
And that's what would happen if we made the same canned fortress.
Can you talk a little bit about the 51st State Troll? Because Canada and the United States have a relationship that is so integrated. Everything from migratory birds and the Great Lakes and trucks break down on the bridges and they break down on this part of the bridge. It's an American traffic problem. If they break down on this part of the bridge, it's a Canadian traffic problem.
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