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By Kevin Nealer

March 8, 2025

The last thing Canadians need right now is instructions in policy management from the U.S. side of the border. But, in the spirit of bilateral collaboration and commiseration, here’s some advice from Washington on dealing with Donald Trump.

Prof. Lori Turnbull’s recent Policy column, Mystery Solved: Trump’s Tariffs are All About Trump, offered a best-in-class treatment of the real motives for Trump’s inconstant and confusing tariff threats. Turnbull’s essay exposed the simple truth that the tariffs are not about trade policy demands but are merely down-market political theatre.

For backup, there are several items intelligence experts would characterize as “ground truths” about the motives behind Trump’s trade tantrum and the likely direction of carry on these policies.

Discard the idea of Trump as deal maker

That notion is a self-invention and a distraction when trying to craft useful coping strategies. Rather, understand Trump as he exists in his current context, and not through the prism of his own mythology – he’s a game-show host of nearly two decades with a pathological need to control the media narrative.

His March 4th address to Congress ratified this view as he parroted an “Oprah” episode, handing out gifts to the audience. No one with 11 bankruptcies and 34 felony convictions can be understood as a deal maker. In legislative terms, the only meaningful bill passed in his first term was a $1.7 trillion deficit-ballooning tax bill. On the trade front, he rebranded NAFTA and managed to be snookered by Beijing into a failed trade deal that fell $200B short of success, opening the US to record trade deficits with China.

‘Deals’ require goals; few are achievable 

More recently, Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese negotiators have all discovered, as they’ve explored potential deal space to pre-empt tariffs under deadline duress, that their US interlocutors 1) lacked authority to conclude any bargain and 2) were comically uninformed on what would constitute their own bottom lines. Prof. Turnbull elegantly exposed this failure point.

The idea that illegal Canadian immigration and drugs were the casus bellis for Trump’s tariffs is simply risible. The truth is, Trump wanted to press all three countries to sell less to America than they buy and — in the interim — collect the rents from tariffs to pay down the cost of his budget shortfalls and pay for tax cuts.

Trump’s fixation with mercantilism is one of his few ideological constants. He has changed political parties five times since the 1980s and flip-flopped on “values” issues such as abortion and gun control. But he has been steadfast in his commitment to beggar-thy-neighbor trade unmoored from market realities or US national interests.

The bad news? There may be no price anyone can pay that will stop Trump’s tariff activism. To imagine that economic penalties and market judgments will deter him is to misunderstand his incentive structure.

A liquor store in Ontario, where U.S.product has been pulled, March 6, 2025/Clovermoss

Most important, he evidently believes he is rewiring America’s competitive posture (true that, but not as advertised) and – worse still for any bargain – he needs the money tariffs bring. The revenue feature of tariffs is not Ottawa’s problem to solve. If every country in the world imposed tariffs as a cash cow, the global trading system would collapse.

The USMCA exercise taught the lesson that appeasement alone is never enough. In one of his more bizarre recent outbursts, Trump questioned how anyone (he) could have signed off on such a “bad deal.” If Canada cuts off several of its digits to feed Trump’s vanity, he will only return that weakness with more demands. A Canadian election season is an ideal time to demur on placating Trump and reinvent policy.

When US domestic pressure inevitably forces a faux bargain, Canadians should avoid repeating the USMCA playbook and celebrating a shared success. Call any deal what it really will be — the end to a manufactured crisis that served no American interest; a diversion that diminished trust in America with its closest partner and generated bilateral resentment, to no good purpose.

Do not pretend to negotiate what cannot be traded away or ignored

Trump’s return represents an unparalleled challenge for the American polity. When the other Five Eyes intelligence partners first modeled the risks of a Trump 2.0 last year, they identified damage below the water line to U.S. institutions and rule of law as the first-order challenge to process integrity in the U.S. That has proved powerfully true as a GOP-dominated Congress has engaged in a breathtaking abdication of its responsibility to provide oversight in a U.S. system of checks and balances where courts are also broadly underperforming.

Among the ahistorical and simply ignorant antics of Trump II have been gratuitous and just plain silly insults to Canada’s sovereignty and the dignity of its people. The notional head of American border security, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, flouting Canada’s border during a trolling visit to a longstanding symbol of bilateral harmony, the Haskell Free Library, which straddles Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead Quebec, is a sad testament to the crude and disrespectful nature of US politics today. Do not normalize it. Do not give it a pass. Do not ignore it.

As Americans find their way, focus the conversation on them at a wholesale level and at state governments. Remind American interlocutors about shared sacrifices and Canadian heroism in defense of shared values.

Ambassador Ken Taylor/Government of Canada

I made my first visit to the White House as a young foreign service officer for an event to welcome back our colleagues who had been hostages in Tehran and to thank Ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife, Pat, for their physical and moral courage in sheltering six of them. When the event was over, I called my father and asked if he’d seen it on television. Yes, he said, but he thought it was unremarkable that Ken had taken the risks he had.

During the Second World War, my dad spent several weeks trapped shoulder to shoulder with Canadians in the Hürtgen Forest salient of the Battle of the Bulge, and he said the bravest thing he ever saw was those Canadians fighting in that terrible enterprise, which cost 55,000 Canadian and American casualties. He knew all about Canadian courage.

From Canada’s generosity after 9/11 to the sacrifice of its soldiers in Afghanistan to the Canadian and OSS agents who trained together at Camp X and died together in Europe; keep reminding us of what we’ve lived through and died for together. Cite those examples and demand the agency they give Canada in any conversation with Americans.

If Americans have forgotten who and what Canadians are, it is because we’ve forgotten who we ourselves are as a nation. Remind us.

Kevin Nealer is a Principal of The Scowcroft Group, a Washington based geopolitical risk consultancy.