Trump tries and fails to extort Canada
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On Monday, the president took a break from ranting about Bad Bunny’s “affront to the Greatness of America” to warn our northern neighbors that they’re on the brink of cultural annihilation.
“Prime Minister Carney wants to make a deal with China — which will eat Canada alive. We’ll just get the leftovers!” he screeched. “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”
Grandpa Simpson rattled off his usual list of grievances about dairy tariffs and liquor boycotts before announcing a new target: the soon-to-be-opened bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan.
Almost every part of this post is a lie.
Build the bridge
Named for the Canadian hockey legend, the Gordie Howe Bridge was first conceived more than 20 years ago as a bi-national endeavor.
The bridge is jointly owned by Canada and the state of Michigan and has been under construction since 2018. It was built using both Canadian and American steel and labor. The $6 billion construction cost was fronted by the Canadian government, which will pay itself back with toll revenue, after which it will split the proceeds with Michigan. And while Trump rails at Obama, the agreement was inked in 2012 by the state’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated Trump’s lies yesterday, along with the bizarre claim that “Canada will control what crosses the Gordie Howe Bridge,” as if the US will surrender its ability to interdict imports at the northern border.
For decades, the bridge enjoyed broad support by leaders on both sides of the border, who hailed it as an economic boon for both countries. Pretty much the only people opposed were the Moroun family, which owns the competing Ambassador Bridge, as well as the duty-free shops that flank it.
First, Manuel Moroun and then his son Matthew waged a contentious legal battle to preserve their exclusive right to collect tolls on the border crossing which sees the transit of more then 25 percent of US-Canada trade. They also rained down cash on Republican politicians in a doomed attempt to block the deal.
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In 2017, Trump issued a joint statement with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying “we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries.” He also named it a high-priority infrastructure project.
But that was then, and this is Trump 2.0. Now, the president conducts foreign policy via social media posts ordering our trading partners to bow and pay tribute to the great US of A — or tries to anyway. He demands that Canada give America half the bridge it just paid to construct and also that the country make some undefined gesture of “respect.”
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” he babbled on Truth Social.
Eh?
The New York Times reports that Trump’s threats are traceable to Moroun-ic rent seeking.
Matthew Moroun met Monday with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to demand that the Republican president confine cross-border trade to his own aging overpass, whose four lanes struggle to handle the boom in trade since its construction almost a century ago. Lutnick immediately called up Trump to complain, although his message seems to have only partly penetrated. Instead of cancelling the bridge deal, Trump conscripted it for his own extortionate purposes.
But the world has become inured to the ragetweets of a demented old man.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford shrugged off the president’s threat.
“Make no mistake about it, as sure as I’m talking to you, I’m very confident this bridge is gonna open,” he said Tuesday. “I’ll tell you the reason it’s gonna open: Because its in the best interests of the American economy, the Americans, the 13 congresspeople that are going for reelection in the midterms.”
“This is not the time to rollover and let President Trump take advantage of us,” he added.
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens was even more direct.
“It’s just insane,” he huffed to the CBC. “I really can’t believe what I’m reading. The faster we can get to the midterms and hopefully see a change, the better for all of us.”
The president controls the border and could certainly scuttle the deal if he wanted to expend the political capital. But everyone in the US and Canada knows that he won’t do it. Just the way everyone knew that he wouldn’t yank every Canadian-made Bombardier plane out of the sky two weeks ago.
It’s more than the general acknowledgement that TACO Trump will always chicken out. He no longer has the bandwidth — mental or political — to enforce his own edicts. His popularity is in free fall, Democrats are massively over-performing in every off-year race, and, while he can certainly punish Republicans who fail to parrot his increasingly unhinged narratives, he can’t make them commit political suicide.
Trump can’t shut down the bridge because it will blow back on Republican candidates in Michigan. He can’t ground Bombardier planes when the company employs thousand of workers in Dallas, Tucson, Hartford, Wichita, and Opa-locka. And he can’t impose an erratic scheme of tariffs that causes the price of every consumer good in America to go through the roof as they head to the polls.
Trump couldn’t even force Republicans to keep the Epstein files on lockdown!
But even if his constant stream of invective comes to nothing, it still has an enormous cost. A year of shitposts about “the 51st state” led directly to Canada reorienting itself away from its abusive southern neighbor. As Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos three weeks ago, “Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”
Or as Michigan’s Democratic Senator Ellissa Slotkin put it, “The only reason Canada is on the verge of a trade deal with China is because President Trump has kicked them in the teeth for a year.”
Trump clearly thinks that more kicking is the solution to this problem. If he just amps up the threats, doubling down on his double down, he’ll be able to bully the rest of the world into submission.
His Trade Representative Jamieson Greer echoed the bombast on Fox Business, calling the US “the main economy” and insisting on the Trump administration’s right to renegotiate agreements at the eleventh hour, or hold them up as leverage in unrelated trade deals.
“The Mexicans are being quite pragmatic right now,” he sniffed. “With the Canadians it’s more challenging.”
John James, the leading Republican candidate to replace Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, applauded the effort to take the bridge hostage as part of broader trade negotiations: “President Trump is using every means and method at his disposal to secure America’s economy and our national security.”
Meanwhile, Carney seems to have called Trump’s bluff. He rang up the American president, walked him through the facts, and then hung up the phone. He did not “start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY” — or at least, not with the US.
It’s a tacit acknowledgment that the American president is a toothless old tiger, roaring on social media as his real power slips away. He can still extort a secondhand Nobel Prize from a dissident leader, but he’s not taking the Stanley Cup.
Elbows up.
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