Our Brave President Goes to War with [Checks Notes] Ontario
What is the point of any of this?
Poor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You can tell he’s under orders to say something nice about vaccines every now and then. But it’s hard work keeping that up, and he’s plainly struggling to maintain the façade. Here he was last night in Fox News primetime:
It used to be, when I was a kid, that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes. . . .
There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause, like encephalitis and blindness, etc.
Hard to imagine why his top spokesman quit. Happy Wednesday.
Our Cheeto Tariff Warrior
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday was another day on the tariff hamster wheel, with a morning frenzy of threats and counter-threats between the United States and Canada suddenly giving way to an afternoon of more conciliatory talk, ultimately dumping us more or less back where we started 24 hours prior.
After pledging not to back down on a planned 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to the United States, Ontario Premier Doug Ford changed his tune after what he described as a “productive conversation” with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in which Lutnick agreed to further trade talks this week. “We have both agreed,” Ford said, “let cooler heads prevail.” The White House stood down too, backing off Trump’s latest threat to double his planned tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent.
That was a big-time win, to hear the administration tell it: “President Trump has once again used the leverage of the American economy, which is the best and biggest in the world, to deliver a win for the American people,” spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. America really showed that single Canadian province who’s boss!
But it seemed plain that Trump had been rattled by the ferocity of Ford’s threats. His own counterthreats had come in an unusually plaintive tone: “Ontario just announced a 25 percent surcharge on ‘electricity,’ of all things, and your [sic] not even allowed to do that,” Trump wrote Monday night. Yesterday morning he added this:
Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?
Hitting us where it hurts in a trade war we started? Hey, come on, no fair!
After Ford called off the dogs, Trump sounded downright relieved. “There’s a very strong man in Canada who said he was going to charge a surcharge, or a tariff, on electricity coming into our country,” he told reporters. “It would have been a very bad thing if he did. And he’s not going to do that. And I respect that.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum may have demonstrated how to best defang Trump’s tariff threats with a bit of flattery and performative diplomacy. But you could argue that Ford has shown another way to take on Trump: matching his alpha-dog stare, making him deliberate on the possibility of real political pain, then pausing to give him a chance to deescalate without having to admit weakness.
But the bigger point, of course, is that this reality-TV psychodrama remains a ludicrous way to run a continental economy. After all this noise, what are we left with? A business community that’s starting to develop a serious eye twitch, waiting around to discover which world leaders Trump respects enough to allow them to do some productive business with.
Meanwhile, the actual trade barriers keep clunking into place. Our 25 percent global tariff on steel and aluminum went into effect overnight. Europe immediately retaliated, announcing $28 billion in counter-tariffs on U.S. goods.
It bears reflecting for a minute on the hand Trump currently holds. His sheer capricious scorn and malice have forged, out of practically nowhere, a political coalition of anti-American zealotry in Canada, our heretofore friendly neighbor in the north. He belittled them as unworthy of nation status, rolled his eyes at our historic ties, and threatened them with the “friendly” possibility of absorption as our 51st state. And then he instigated a game of economic chicken with them.
Americans have no animus toward Canadians; they are not signing on to suffer economically provided they can make Canada suffer more. Trump cannot even sell them on a real vision of what this economic suffering would be for, offering only vague gestures toward cracking down on fentanyl (which comes over the Canadian border in objectively small amounts), trust-me-guys promises that untold wealth lies just over the tariff horizon, and shitposting rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st state.
Most of the pain hasn’t even arrived yet, and already American voters are showing signs of fatigue. Trump’s economic approval rating has taken a severe dip since his inauguration, from +6 to -10 in the latest Reuters polling. CNN’s numbers this morning tell the same story—a bit more on that below.
Trump started this joyride on a lark. You can’t help but wonder if he’s starting to wish he could find a way off.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Another boatload of fresh content on the site for you all to consume:
Keep your politics out of our archives (except the politics we’re archiving, of course)! ANTHONY CLARK writes: “Trump’s clumsy partisan takeover of the National Archives and Records Administration recalls two consequential and troubling episodes from its history.”
Russians keep trying to kill us. ALEX FINLEY argues “The ‘gray zone’ war on America and its allies isn’t going to stop.”
JVL joins MONA CHAREN on Just Between Us 🔐 to talk about the stock market slide, our foreign policy reversal, and whether Dems need to focus on good government.
Across the MAGA-Verse . . . Meet our new colleague WILL SOMMER as he joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod for an introduction and a whirlwind tour of the conspiracies and conspiracy theorists that run our government.
Quick Hits
IF THE SHOE FITS: The German sportswear company Puma saw its shares tumble this morning amid word that it had begun seeing weak demand in the American and Chinese markets. But it’s not just the stick price that’s hurting. Puma is now set to eliminate 500 jobs, too—though it’s not clear yet how many of those jobs will be in the United States. While the company has framed its setback as part of macroeconomic trends, internal communications obtained by The Bulwark show that they believe Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies have played a role.
One slide we obtained noted that the company sales had “stumbled badly into 2025” due to both trade disputes and “immigration fears.” It noted that Puma sales had been hit disproportionately by “Hispanic Hibernation,” a term “coined to reflect the real impact of fear across the country that is keeping people in their homes, affecting consumption that is not being made up online.” That same slide deck included a CNN article noting that the Dow had fallen by almost 900 points after Trump declined to rule out a recession.
As for the headcount reduction, Puma officials said they planned “to move swiftly with any headcount reductions by mid-April.” So things do indeed appear likely to get worse in the short term.
MARCO BEAR-HUGS ZELENSKY: Some real good news for a change: After weeks spent behaving like an enthusiastic partner to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Trump administration is suddenly inching back toward Ukraine. U.S. and Ukrainian leaders emerged from peace talks in Saudi Arabia yesterday to say they had agreed to a 30-day ceasefire proposal. The administration subsequently announced it would “immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.”
“We hope that they’ll say yes, that they’ll say yes to peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of the Russians. “The ball is now in their court.”
We won’t know how reflective this is of Trump’s own mindset, of course, until the president gets around to posting about it. At a business roundtable event last night, he couldn’t resist another quick dig at the country he just agreed to a ceasefire with: “I’ve been saying Russia is easier to deal with than Ukraine, which is not supposed to be the way it is, but it is.”
THE GOLDEN AGE: Americans are unimpressed by Trump’s economic stewardship, a new CNN poll finds. The poll, conducted by SSRS, has 56 percent of the public disapproving of his handling of the economy and 44 percent approving. Those are basically inverted from the perceptions that existed at the end of Trump’s first term. Trump’s job approval rating is at 45 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove, which is also not particularly great but actually somewhat in line with where he was in March 2017. The thing to remember is that Trump is, ostensibly, still in a bit of a honeymoon period here. Yes, the stock market has tanked, and if it turns around that could certainly improve his numbers. But he is also benefiting from his diehard voters giving him the benefit of the doubt. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has a piece today squarely on the Trump voters who are downplaying the hits he has delivered to their 401(k)s.
—Sam Stein
PLEASE COMMIT A CRIME: It’s Cousin Greg hours over at USAID this week, per the New York Times:
A senior official at the main U.S. aid agency, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff.
The email sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safe and personnel document files on Tuesday. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly called reports of the shredding “fake news hysteria.” But it’s not. The Bulwark also obtained a copy of Carr’s email. It’s real. The American Federation of Government Employees and American Foreign Service Association quickly filed a motion to get USAID to stop before the documents were done away with.
All in all, you’ve got to admire the cartoon-villain chutzpah here. There’s ordering employees to destroy records that must by law be maintained, and then there’s ordering employees to destroy records so fast they risk damaging the shredder.
Cheap Shots
"Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?"
The innocent people of Ukraine would like a word . . . .
This whole latest exercise speaks to both the incompetence and the weakness of the Trump administration.
If the "best and biggest in the world" economy is being brought to the negotiating table by a single Canadian province, you might not be good at your job and/or doing it right.