By Daniel Béland

March 5, 2025

On the evening of March 4th, the same day the United States imposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump gave the first major speech of his second term, the conventional first-year, post-inaugural adaptation of the State of the Union address, the presidential speech to a joint session of Congress. In the House chamber Tuesday night, he delivered a long and rambling performance that featured a mix of lies, bragging, and partisan attacks.

Or, as The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser put it in a column titled, Trump’s Golden Age of Bunk, “In a Castro-length speech to Congress, the President claimed victory, while proving that even the most unhinged address can be boring if it goes on long enough.”

Focused mainly on domestic issues, the speech celebrated the controversial spending cuts engineered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while spreading fear about “illegal aliens” and transgender people. As Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris suggested on social media, his speech sounded “like a rehashed tired campaign rally. Mostly bashing migrants. Trying to fire up culture wars. Praising import taxes. Lies on DOGE and ‘fraud’”.

As for foreign policy, President Trump repeated his now-familiar expansionist lines about Greenland and Mexico, and he spent relatively little time talking about Ukraine or even tariffs, barely mentioning Canada and not repeating his now infamous line about our country becoming the 51st state.

Perhaps the most telling thing about President Trump’s speech was his defiant and frankly divisive tone and the loud negative reactions of many of the Democrats sitting in the House chamber, some of whom walked out while he was speaking. The most dramatic moment of the evening occurred early on, when Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the House Sergeant at Arms to escort out of the chamber Democratic Representative Al Green of Texas, an older Black man who had shouted at the President while pointing his cane at him from his seat.

This episode, the tension and contentious atmosphere in the House chamber during the speech as well as the tone and content of the address illustrated perfectly the deep partisan divide that is ever-present in today’s U.S. society. Although President Trump did win the popular vote by a small margin (less than two percentage points), he remains a polarizing figure in a highly divided polity, his unprecedented, erratic behaviour in the first six weeks of his second term has only accentuated that role, and this reality was on full display in the House.

Earlier on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also gave a major speech, perhaps one of the most meaningful of his political career, less than a week before the next Liberal leader is to be chosen. While Trump’s speech reflected both his narcissism and the strong divisions that characterize the United States, the Prime Minister spoke on the behalf of a country united against U.S. tariffs and talk of Canada’s becoming the 51st state.

Trudeau’s sense of unity in the face of immediate danger coming from our powerful southern neighbour contrasted with the partisan and divisive speech that Trump delivered in the House chamber later on that day.

In his speech, Trudeau expressed a collective sense of puzzlement and anger at the Trump administration for its imposition of tariffs that pose an existential threat to our economy but also at the broader approach of the president, who seems to have aligned himself with the aspiring, anti-democracy world order, most notably the regime of Vladimir Putin, while turning traditional allies into adversaries.

On the day the Republican administration waged a direct attack against our economy and less than a week after President Trump and Vice-President JD Vance publicly bullied President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office while repeating Kremlin’s talking points, the outgoing Prime Minister did not mince words, beginning his speech with these sentences, which were widely shared on social media, played on radio and on television, and quoted in many Canadian and foreign newspapers: “Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia. Appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.” These sentences encapsulate the sentiments shared by many Canadians but also other people around the world who worry about a misguided and dangerous shift in U.S. foreign policy.

Beyond these initial sentences, in his powerful and well-crafted speech, Prime Minister Trudeau expressed the frustration but also the resolve of Canadians to fight back against the Trump administration’s attack on both our country’s economy and sovereignty. After his speech, answering a question from a journalist, Trudeau suggested that fentanyl was a “bogus” excuse used by Trump to justify the tariffs imposed on Canada. Because this rationale for the tariffs does not make sense, the Prime Minister said, “we actually have to fold back on the one thing he has said repeatedly, that what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us, is the second half of his thought.”

In his speech as well as in his answers to questions from journalists immediately afterwards, Trudeau emphasized the need for national solidarity in the face of these direct threats against Canada’s economy and territorial and political integrity: “I won’t sugarcoat it. This is going to be tough, even though we’re all going to pull together because that’s what we do.” Trudeau’s sense of unity in the face of immediate danger coming from our powerful southern neighbour contrasted with the partisan and divisive speech that Trump delivered in the House chamber later on that day. Trudeau’s call for unity was clearly echoed in powerful statements made on the same day in reaction to the imposition of the tariffs by conservative premiers such as Doug Ford and Danielle Smith, long-time adversary of the federal Liberals.

In this context of national solidarity, only Pierre Poilievre seemed to focus on partisan attacks, in a speech in gave in response to the tariffs during which, after saying the right things and showing resolve to fight back against the Trump administration, he rapidly fell back to his usual stump speech style and partisan talking points. According to what is becoming common wisdom in today’s Canadian politics, if Poilievre really wants to make a strong claim at the country’s top political office, he has to act like a prime minister-in-waiting rather than simply playing his traditional role of opposition attack dog, which worked very well for him during normal times but is simply not appropriate in a time of crisis in which national solidarity in the face of danger is the prevailing sentiment.

As Brian Lee Crowley wrote in the National Post: “Pierre Poilievre can no longer rag the puck. He has to be bold and show what he is made of and why he is still worthy of Canadians’ votes. The road to victory for him lies, in part, through Washington.” Failure to adjust more dramatically to both the national mood and the ongoing and unprecedented crisis in Canada-U.S. relations is the best political gift Poilievre can offer the Liberals in the turbulent and dangerous Trump 2.0 era.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.