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The Felon and Canada: America's largest trade partners

The Felon has launched another trade war with Canada, one of  America largest trade partners and the largest supplier of aluminum to America.  Why and why now? Frankly who knows, it could be to take the lost Iran war out of the news, it could be the actions of a delusional old man, or perhaps more of the Felon bullying once long time allies. Whatever the motivation, the result will be still higher prices for American consumers and still alienation of Canadians, many of whom are already boycotting American goods and canceling travel to the USA - some Canadian snow birds are selling their Florida vacation/winter properties.  Worse yet, as a piece at The Atlantic lays out, the likely result may be yet another loss for the Felon as Canadian retaliation and resistance further solidify. On every front, the Felon is making America more diminished, isolated and distrusted by almost every nation in the world.  And this doesn't even begin to assess the lost military strength due to depleted munitions and the incompetent leadership at the Pentagon.  All thanks to an unfit president who seemingly never plans one step ahead or grasps that his targets have ways to fight back.  Here are highlights from The Atlantic:

U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed last night. Punitive Trump tariffs will now go into effect. Canada will reciprocate with retaliatory tariffs of its own.

The story may not be over. Donald Trump is notorious for issuing threats, then reversing them. Wars are on, off, on again, off again, then on a third time—but only as a “little detour.” This is not an administration that thinks even one move ahead. But without a supersized Trump TACO, the U.S.-Canada impasse likely won’t resolve soon.

The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

The Canadian economy has definitely suffered because of Trump’s hostility. Exports were down last year, and growth slowed. But this year, Canada got an unexpected bailout: Trump’s Iran war and Trump’s inflation have boosted prices for Canadian oil, gas, minerals, and food products. Canadian incomes are rising again. Meanwhile, Canada’s low levels of public debt have kept inflation low.

By contrast, Trump is facing an omnishamble. “Trump’s Economic Challenge: $40tn Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel.” That’s a headline in today’s Financial Times. The paper could have added one more: 33 percent job approval, and falling fast.

Trump’s tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Although teasing out Canada-specific costs is tricky, one indicator is the price of aluminum. In 2024, about one-fourth of the aluminum consumed by Americans came from Canada, the U.S.’s single largest source of imported aluminum. Result: Whereas European and Japanese consumers now pay about $3,000 a ton for aluminum, Americans pay almost $5,000, driving up the cost of everything from a can of beer to the construction of a new hospital.

Although Canada’s economy is much smaller than the U.S.’s, Canada’s government has a more rational and intelligent leadership—and can therefore target its retaliation in ways that better serve national ends. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada have collapsed by 80 percent as Canadian provincial liquor stores ban U.S. wine and spirits. Canada’s booze boycott hurts more than one might expect given the comparatively small size of the Canadian market ….. More than 1 million bottles of wine intended for Canadian markets now slumber in U.S. warehouses, unsellable anywhere else without costly repackaging.

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. With these states, may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.

Against Trump, Canadians are fighting a trade war that the great majority support, under leadership that commands broad assent, to defend their independence and self-respect. That’s a war that even the weaker side can win, especially if it needs to hold on only a few months longer to survive.

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The Felon/GOP Are Running Out of People to Blame

A year and a half into the Felon's second regime - after campaign promises to lower consumer prices and no foreign wars - prices and interest rates remain high, oil prices are surging again, and economic growth has slowed.  Meanwhile, America finds itself trapped in the Felon's war of choice with Iran with no exit strategy other than surrender. The other alternative is an endless war. In the face of their own disastrous policies, the Felon and his bootlickers in the GOP accept no responsibility for what they have wrought and seemingly can only blame Joe Biden and/or claim Democrats are communists. Insanely, one cabinet member this week expressed surprise at gasoline prices, ignoring his boss' war of choice as the obvious cause and leaving one to conclude that the individual is either stupid or a liar.  In addition, the Felon has just levied more tariffs against Canada (which will retaliate) that will only serve to drive prices even higher.  Given the Felon's abysmal poll numbers, sane Republicans - admittedly a rare species nowadays - are flailing in the blame game and are simply running out of others to blame for way the economy has been damaged.  A piece in Salon looks at the desperate position of many in the GOP:

Now that Donald Trump no longer has a White House press secretary with a ready cherubic smile and a ton of snark, we can all see that the paint is peeling off his delusional presidency.  I’m not just talking about the Reflecting Pool.

Republicans like Rep. Byron Donalds, now the GOP nominee to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida, has habitually and enthusiastically repeated and amplified Trump’s whims and still claims with a straight face — as he did on Fox News this week — that Democratic policy and the actions of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for the horror under which we currently live. Never mind the fact the Democrats currently hold no power in Washington and can’t implement any policies of any kind.

At least Republicans are finally, if obliquely, admitting that things aren’t so good in the country. Trump, however, isn’t ready to concede that. . . . We hear many in and out of government saying that his [the Felon's] presence ensures the outcome he predicted the Democrats would visit upon us all.  Like I say, the paint is peeling. 

On Wednesday, Trump was seen on the South Lawn praising a brand of fertilizer made by a company that, as he noted, had given him a sizable campaign contribution. Trump says it’s great stuff. Hey, they paid. He played. Very often, he is exactly as transparent as he claims to be. At the end of this live commercial he said that this fertilizer made for “happy grass.” He sounded like he’d been smoking some of that stuff. 

On the one hand, this is incredible corruption, but if you’re a CEO, having the president push your product directly in front of the White House isn’t a bad thing. You can’t blame business for doing what business does. You can blame the rest of us for not stopping it before it got this bad.

To overcome the absence of departed pep secretary Karoline Leavitt, Byron Donalds and the rest of Trump’s puppets have been dancing long and hard lately. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters the economy had taken off and was on its way into the stratosphere until we experienced this little detour “called Iran.” You could say he unwittingly justified every American’s anger over a pointless, useless war that is making all our lives more difficult and more expensive. He was trying to back up his leader, but accidentally threw him to the wolves. But was it really accidental? 

The key point here is that the GOP has been in charge in D.C. for more than a year and a half. Republicans control the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court and the presidency. They vowed they’d fix the economy and have only moved the needle backward. . . . Republicans are screaming about socialism ruining the country while those so-called socialists are pushing free healthcare. Who do you think the American public will listen to? The GOP’s pitch was, roughly speaking, that they could use extreme methods to take care of the cleanup on aisle seven. They have obviously failed. . . . If you got elected to fix the system and nearly two years later everything is much worse, then it’s time to hire a new plumber — and not the Richard Nixon type.

Making a sale to the electorate as a Republican this year is a difficult task indeed. Even the disorganized Democrats might be able to crawl over that low bar. We can’t say a GOP victory is impossible, but it seems conditional on a variety of narrowing possibilities, especially considering the accused criminals, domestic abusers and otherwise morally bankrupt candidates they are offering us. Then there are the Democrats. All the Republicans can do is accuse the party that’s out of power of somehow wielding the power, and doing so as part of a sinister communist conspiracy.

Trump’s gift in the past was the ability to sell an alternate reality. He now does that very poorly, and by asking the proper questions we might be able to clarify this country’s predicament — as if many of us haven’t already come to the conclusion that we’re terminally screwed.  

What could be more symbolic of the depths of depravity we’ve hit than a president literally giving a paid testimonial on the White House lawn for fertilizer? While the punchlines write themselves, I never had that on my bingo card. I never even imagined such a possibility. It’s a criminal act and an empty and meaningless prostitution of the office. It demeans the entire nation, and adds to the instability in the world.

And what can your average White House reporter do? Not much, beyond watching the turgid, disconcerting vomitorium we call politics with a jaundiced eye, careful of the manipulations and machinations of those who are out to feed their own greed while screwing the rest of us into the ground. It helps if we can laugh about it.  As we can clearly see this week, the paint is peeling and we have no way to fix it.  

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The White House Freak-Out Over Natalie Harp

Likely every White House administration has had some share of fluffers and sycophants who lack any true credentials or expertise, but the current regime of the Felon is a whole other matter.  Now, the regime consists of cabinet secretaries and other officials that owe their positions solely to having given large campaign contributions or loyalty to the Felon. Competence and detailed knowledge on a host of issues is lacking, if not viewed as a liability.  Giving flattery to the Felon and playing on his obsessions and prejudices are what truly count.  Which brings up the subject of Natalie Harp - who seeming does not have security clearance - a constant companion of the Felon who carries a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy of poll or news story that will please the Felon.  A Daily Beast piece has the following:

Natalie Harp’s intimate letters to Donald Trump are being revealed in full for the first time—showing her spilling her heart and saying she is “unworthy” of him. “You are all that matters to me,” Harp writes to Trump, “I don’t want to ever let you down.” The Daily Beast is publishing them amid swirling questions over the national security implications of 35-year-old Harp’s status as 80-year-old Trump’s most significant gatekeeper, even being used as a conduit to the president by foreign leaders.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when the Felon abandoned Airforce One in Turkey and left the press pool and a number of senior aids and cabinet secretaries as decoys for a feared Iranian attack, Harp was among the handful of people who snuck away in the catering truck. All of which prompted Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff to mention Harp at a campaign event.  The White House reaction has been borderline unhinged and has only served to make Harp more of a news story.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the new media scrutiny:

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.

I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.

The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.

But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration . . . . Harp largely stayed out of the headlines even as she became the subject of Washington gossip and some West Wing grumbling.

But things changed because of a Turkish catering truck. The Washington Post reported last week that Harp was one of a handful of aides chosen to join Trump when he was furtively whisked off Air Force One at the Ankara airport earlier this summer because of Secret Service concerns about a threat from Iran. The questions were immediate: Why did this young aide, whose official responsibilities remain murky at best, hide with Trump in the truck as the president secretly boarded a different aircraft, even as the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury were left on board what became, in essence, a decoy plane? . . . But it was the White House that pushed the story into the national discourse.

This White House rarely does things subtly—just look at all of the gold in the Oval Office or the maps depicting Canada as the 51st state. And when it comes to pushing back against a story aides don’t like, the two options are usually a) scorched earth or b) total obliteration. But even by that over-the-top standard, the outsize reaction was eyebrow-raising.

Suddenly, the story had life. A few hours later, the press pool was invited into the Oval Office for a photo op as Trump honored a heroic California lifeguard. The president prides himself on his accessibility to the media and took a few questions. Kristen Holmes of CNN asked, “Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp than build the ballroom and do your job as president. What is your response?” Trump responded with his standard, 1980s-vintage insult about Ossoff—he called him “Pee-wee Herman”—and then, well, he proved the senator’s point by launching into a several-hundred-word defense of the ballroom.

Meanwhile, White House aides and Trump allies began an all-out shielding of Harp. One of the president’s sons defended her, as did a Cabinet member and a congresswoman. With some prodding from the White House, a whole bunch of conservative media members and MAGA influencers joined them, I was told by one of the people who’d received a nudge.

If the goal was to shut down talk about Harp, it backfired spectacularly. Suddenly, media outlets that had ignored her felt the need to write about her. Questions about her security clearance came up, along with this one: When was the last time First Lady Melania Trump was seen in public anyway? (July 19, at the World Cup final.) And as more stories were written, West Wing aides got angrier, taking their cues from a furious president, . . . .

That furor, in a way, underlines Harp’s importance in Trump’s world. She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. . . . Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does.

[T]here is no expectation that, despite the whirlwind week, Harp’s role will change; a senior official told me that Harp was “upset by the unfair attention” but would not allow it to deter her from her duties. But those in the West Wing are bracing for more scrutiny. And, it just so happens, Melania Trump chose today to make an appearance in public.

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