Transcript: Trump Fury at Canada Gets So Unhinged Even GOPers Rattled

As Trump’s anti-Canada lunacy starts spooking Republicans, the author of a piece on Trump’s trade-warring explains how badly divorced from reality this whole crusade has truly become.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s rage at Canada appears to be getting worse. After Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect a few days ago, Trump spiraled on social media, ridiculing Canada’s leader and exploding in a long, unhinged rant that signals no end in sight for this battle. In fact, Republicans are now publicly admitting that this is a serious problem for them in the midterms in all kinds of ways. And they appear baffled as to the source of Trump’s fury. And some striking new polling shows why Republicans are so panicked.

We’re talking about all of it with Zack Beauchamp of Vox, who recently reported deeply on the roots of Trump’s trade warring. Zack, good to have you on again.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Always happy to do your show.

Sargent: So to recap, after trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last month, U.S. tariffs went into effect on Canadian goods. And a few days ago, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs went into effect. Trump has since amplified the claim that Canada is ripping off the U.S. So, Zack, can you just set the record straight on that? Is Canada ripping us off through trade or not?

Beauchamp: No. Look, to understand the situation, at least as it existed prior to Trump, you’ve got to understand that there are normal trade disputes that almost all countries have with each other, at least to a certain extent.

There’s a view that, well, this policy that you’re doing disadvantages our farmers and advantages yours, or maybe your labor practices and regulations are a little bit different from ours, and that hurts us in this particular exchange, costs us some jobs. That is basically the most normal of possible disagreements any countries could have about trade relations.

Ripping a country off looks a lot like what China’s doing. Canada’s in the first slot. The U.S. runs a very small trade deficit with Canada. It’s like 36 billion or something around there. And there’s disputes about everything from dairy to lumber to steel. But they really fall in the minor-disagreement category. What the U.S. and Canada have is an extremely beneficial trading relationship.

And the U.S. benefits from trade with China too, to be clear. It’s just that China has done things that make the benefits far more one-sided than they should be. But when it comes to Canada, there’s no argument by any serious or credible economist that having an open trade relationship with Canada has been net harmful to the United States. Quite to the contrary.

Sargent: That’s a good place to get into what Trump exploded over on Truth Social. He erupted on Canada in a long, unhinged rant. He said this: “The only reason Canada makes autos is because of previous disastrous trade agreements while other presidents were in office. Canada has been ripping us off for years.”

So I think he’s referring to the fact that we’ve had free trade agreements with Canada in autos going back many decades. And to your point, the real story here is that the auto industry in America and Canada is kind of like one thing. It’s so integrated that it’s actually become kind of a transnational entity, in a sense. And that’s actually been good. It’s allowed a lot of specialization.

But the key here is, to Trump—and you can see this in his crazy tweet—to Trump, the mere fact that we’re trading with Canada is itself an inherently disastrous and bad thing. Your thoughts on that?

Beauchamp: Yeah, I mean, it’s very confusing when you hear Trump talk about trade, because he seems to misunderstand some very, very basic elements of what global trade is. Like he thinks that when you’re importing from a country, you’re giving them money. You’re just giving them money. And then that money doesn’t come back to you in any way, it doesn’t benefit the people in your country from getting those goods. They aren’t helping anything.

It’s a little bit like saying when I go to the grocery store, I always leave, and I’ve given $200 of my money to Whole Foods. Well, I mean, the thing is, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or Giant, or whatever, right—they are giving you stuff too. You’re getting things out of this interaction. Whereas Trump sees it as a form of extraction. He seems to think that trade deficits mean you’re losing, which is also not how it works.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, it’s like when I go to the grocery store, I want to give them my money so that I don’t have to farm, right? In order to grow my own food. That’s sort of the essence. So then I can do other stuff, right Zack? If I get my food from Whole Foods, that frees me up to do stuff with my time. That’s basically how this works in a nutshell.

Beauchamp: I mean, trade is just a domestic economy on a global scale, right? On a really basic level. A domestic economy is people exchanging goods and services to allow for mutual economic growth........

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