Transcript: Trump Fury at Canada Takes Dark Turn as GOPers Sound Alarm

As Trump’s trade war against Canada grows more unhinged, the author of a piece on GOP midterm woes explains how his anti-Canada derangement could alienate working class voters.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 30 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.

This week, Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada escalated, as an import ban on some Canadian products went into effect. Trump has been raging at Canada for months, but he just said almost in passing that the U.S. gets along with China better than it gets along with Canada. And we think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed how casually Trump just tosses away a major longtime ally.

Trump also unleashed his trade advisor to make truly vicious and sneering comments about Canada, to boot. Meanwhile, Republicans themselves are admitting that the trade war with Canada is a big problem for them in the midterms, and getting worse.

So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of Trump-GOP midterm woes. Virginia, always great to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: So good to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So a quick recap. Last month Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian imports, and Canada hit back with retaliatory tariffs. Now Trump just banned several other imports—dairy, motorcycles, alcohol. The Times calls this a vicious trade war and says much of our relationship with Canada has unraveled.

Virginia, I’m not a trade expert, but I know enough to understand that Trump completely pulled this whole thing out of his ass to assuage his feelings of impotence and failure. Your thoughts about that?

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, we’ve come to the part in the Trump proceedings where, to quote South Park, we blame Canada. And when that song—I was just looking it up—came out in 1999, it was considered a punchline, because it would be so outlandish for Americans, however arrogant and absurd we were in the nineties, to blame our trading partner and close ally to the north, who are famous for their mild-manneredness, to blame them really for anything. But here we are.

And this is not playing well with Americans who already are beginning to hold Trump in not just disapproval, but outright contempt. You may have seen that he’s gotten under 30 percent. So one poll showed him at 29 percent. Nate Silver, it seems not long ago, said there was a floor of 40. Now we’ve crashed through, potentially, the floor of 30, which is just amazing.

And it’s what you hear from what I’ve been thinking of as the diesel class. This particular demographic that I just wrote about, who know their way around that big nozzle at the gas station, the lower-down one. They’re truck drivers, they drive the Ford F-class or the Silverado. This thing that diesel is skyrocketing faster than gas.

I mean, when you go to the pump, you see the normal gas prices, and then at the bottom, usually an eye-popping number now for diesel. It’s broken through all records. It’s doubled since Biden was in office. And that group immediately puts the blame on Trump. They put the blame on the trade war with Canada, and they especially put the blame on his war with Iran.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. There is a certain class of voter out there who’s quite MAGA-adjacent, who understands on a really instinctual level that trade with Canada is good for our country. And these are voters who are concentrated in places like the Midwest and in Maine, and a lot of places where these Senate races are playing out.

Heffernan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we’ve been doing import and export with Canada, because we are connected by land—who do........

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