Reality TV Cabinet Secretary Has No Grasp of Reality
Welcome to the real world, Sean Duffy.
Killer AI-powered robots with no human in the loop have been a hypothetical sticking point between the Trump administration and AI companies. But in Ukraine, they’re already a reality. The New York Times reports on what may be the first known fatalities from an autonomous drone weapons system—a Russian drone that killed three civilians in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia last month. It’s a grisly new world we’re walking into. Happy Monday.
Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein for MAGA Mondays today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.
True North, Strong and Free
by William Kristol
What do you do if you’re a second-tier official in Trump’s cabinet, basically a laughingstock, but very eager to curry favor from the boss? Well, the boss loves TV and has been desperate to find some kind of political win in the series of embarrassments and travesties with which he has marked America’s semiquincentennial. But the stunt you contributed—a televised Great American Road Trip for your family sponsored by companies regulated by your department—hasn’t worked out very well.
So Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, hurried over to the Fox booth at the IndyCar race in D.C. yesterday. He was asked about Trump’s feud with Canada—and as we’ve come to expect from a Trump administration official, he entered the fracas in a particularly stupid and offensive way.
The fight Duffy was so giddy to join began on Friday, when Trump renewed his trade war with Canada, our second-largest trading partner and the single largest purchaser of U.S. exports. On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful and well-received speech to his countrymen explaining that the Trump administration had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Carney stated emphatically that “We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked.”
This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page—normally happy enough to excuse Trump—put the blame squarely on the president in an editorial titled “The Dumbest Trade War Revisited,” with the subhed, “Trump’s decision to escalate a tariff brawl with Canada makes no economic or political sense.”
On TV yesterday, Duffy didn’t even try to defend Trump’s tariff war. Nor did he address Carney’s broader point about America under Trump: “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”
But Duffy vaguely knows that the Trump administration pretends to be pro-military and pro-social conservatism. So he launched a drive-by attack on Canada on those fronts.
Canada, Duffy claimed, is “a country that doesn’t have a military. . . . We provide their security for them, and they take advantage of us.”
As our friends in Quebec would say, c’est faux. Canada has fought alongside us in wars for over a century. In World War II, Canada suffered about 44,000 war deaths, about 0.4 percent of its population, a slightly higher per capita casualty rate than the United States. (They also joined the war in 1939, two years before the United States.) And of course a few miles down from Omaha Beach and the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was Juno Beach, where, as Ronald Reagan said in his speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the world saw “the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred.”
Half a century later, after the attacks on the United States on 9/11, Canada provided generous shelter to thousands of stranded Americans when our airspace was closed, led the effort to invoke NATO’s Article 5 on behalf of the United States, and then fought side by side with us in Afghanistan, losing 158 soldiers.
I suppose it would be too much to expect a Trump cabinet member to know any of this. Or if he knows it, to acknowledge it.
But Duffy wasn’t finished aping the higher-profile members of the cabinet. Turning from mimicking macho Pete Hegseth to imitating sanctimonious JD Vance, Duffy also attacked Canada for its “record high euthanasia rates.” He was presumably referring to Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program, a more liberal assisted suicide policy than we have in the United States. Whatever the merits or demerits of that policy, one might point out that Canada in fact has a lower overall suicide rate than the United States, and for that matter a higher average life expectancy.
But it’s the culture war that matters to Duffy and to his audience—not Trump’s trade war, not any real wars, and not the actual well-being of Americans.
Meanwhile, it’s our neighbors to the north who see the situation clearly. As Canadian journalist Stephen Marche wrote this morning:
For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.
This description of the United States under Trump is sad but true. And while Duffy can insult Canada in his effort to suck up to Trump, his claim that “you’re gonna see Mark Carney come to the table very very quickly” is unlikely to be any more accurate than other claims this administration has made about victory in war.
Duffy’s comments yesterday are a useful reminder of the bottomless vulgarity and mendacity of Trumpism. Carney, on the other hand, has spoken truth to power. He has reminded us how free men and women should stand up to attempts at autocratic domination.
AROUND THE BULWARK
John Roberts Gives Trump a License to Bulldoze the Law... The chief justice’s order turns the president’s illegal ballroom construction project into a fait accompli, argues KIM WEHLE.
Roy Cooper’s Radical Strategy: Act Normal… His message is simple, his persona is unglamorous, and his old-school North Carolina Senate bid is working. LAUREN EGAN reports from the road in the Tar Heel state.
Shield of the Republic Says Farewell… In their final Bulwark show, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss Trump’s threat to bomb Oman, his curtailing of joint exercises with South Korea, and the Pentagon shuttering access to the Defense Technical Information Center.
Trump’s War Has Left America Weaker… On The Bulwark on Sunday, MICHAEL WOOD joins BILL KRISTOL to assess the failed Iran war, the damage to America’s military, and what it reveals about the limits of U.S. power.
Quick Hits
BREAKING: MMR VACCINE NOT LETHAL: Some of our nation’s top health officials, it turns out, will say obviously true things about vaccines. All you have to do is put them on the spot and refuse to let them change the subject until they do.
To wit: Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, admitted yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation that “the MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.” This directly contradicted Donald Trump’s comment earlier this month that there is a “possibility” that the measles, mumps, and rubella shots are “quite lethal” when administered in combination—as they have been routinely administered across the world for more than forty years. But it took some doing to get Oz to say so.
“The president twice said the shot may be lethal,” Margaret Brennan asked. “Do you want to clarify that?”
“We want patients to get the treatments that their doctors are recommending to them,” Oz replied, “but we also want patients to have autonomy to decide what their kids receive.”
“But he said it was the MMR vaccine and he used the term ‘lethal,’” Brennan said. “That’s what I’m asking you to clarify.”
“The president wants Americans—and he’s said this many times—to get vaccinated as their doctors recommend. As long as they have a choice in the matter,” Oz said. “The challenge we’re running into is that many states have not clarified that, and actually it’s harder for parents to ask these difficult questions.”
“The MMR vaccine is not offered in three separate shots,” Brennan said. “Merck, which produces it, said they couldn’t offer that for another ten years. Currently it is only offered as a single shot. The president called that single shot lethal. Do you want to clarify that?”
“The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine,” Oz finally said. Thanks, Doc! Clear communication from our top health officials is so important.
A BLUE MIRAGE?: Polling and conventional wisdom have been predicting monster midterm results for Democrats. But could that be a mirage? Last week, the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini made that case in a Substack post, arguing that “Senate polling is always worse in the summer” and that Democratic candidates tend to lose their apparent summer leads by Election Day.
And when looking at the last few cycles, he’s got a point: “3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern,” Ruffini wrote. “In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result.”
So should Democrats be worried? No, responds progressive pollster G. Elliott Morris. “Bias in polls tends to change randomly from year to year,” Morris writes, citing polling data dating back to 1998. “Like taking the under on low-probability bets, predicting polling error from previous cycles’ misses works until it doesn’t.”
Morris offers a few more thoughts on why this cycle might be different in the data:
Early polls tend to sample adults or registered voters instead of likely voters. But as Election Day approaches, pollsters tend to make the switch to the more accurate voter screen.
In the past few cycles, Democrats were doing better in [polls of adults and registered voters] than in polls of likely voters. So the LV switch produced a natural curve to the right that made it look like Democrats were losing ground—when in reality, their support in early polls was inflating because they sampled the wrong populations.
But, as Ruffini’s own polls have shown, this is not the case for 2026. Democrats are doing about a point better in LV polls vs adult and RV samples this year. So one could even argue we should naturally see the opposite drift this year as pollsters switch to LV screening.
Read the whole thing—and keep taking every poll with a grain of salt.
Cheap Shots
The Darline Graham show continues:
Trump tried biting off all he could chew, and found out Canada's all elbows.
No shortage of headlines from this admin but the Canada one is extra special crazy. What kind of trade deal reaches into issues of national sovereignty (French language, who's allowed to trade with them, etc.?) It almost feels like an open attempt at annexation via "trade deal."