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On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products. Carney explained in a statement that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
He has a point. From July 1, 2020, until Trump’s second term, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico traded under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Negotiated under the first Trump administration, USMCA replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and was similar to it, creating one of the world’s largest free trade zones.
The trade zone reinforced the close alliance between Canada and the U.S., enabling people in both countries to enjoy the longest demilitarized border in the world stretching more than 5,000 miles (more than 8,000 kilometers) across the entire North American continent. Canada and the U.S. have shared military and defense capabilities, with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operating since 1957 to detect aircraft or missiles, especially those coming over the North Pole, that could prove a threat to the United States (NORAD’s Santa Tracker originally was a way to make Americans aware of what NORAD did).
But as soon as he won reelection in 2024, Trump began to emphasize that he intended to use “economic force,” specifically tariffs, to pressure Canada into joining the U.S. as its 51st state. He began to exercise that threat the day he took office for the second time, saying he would put 25% tariffs on Canada. This violation of his own trade agreement reflected the administration’s abandonment of the principles of free trade and defensive alliances put in place after World War II, replacing that system with one favored by autocrats like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which strong countries imposed spheres of influence in their regions of the world.
Since then, Trump has sought to use the extraordinary economic power of the United States to force Canada and other countries into subordinate relationships. The recent threat against Canada came after Trump’s previous tariffs either were struck down or expired. On July 20, Trump said he would use Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, more commonly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to impose a 50% tariff on certain Canadian products. No president had ever before invoked Section 338, which allows a president to impose tariffs when a country discriminates against U.S. products relative to its comparative treatment of other countries’ goods.
On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Carney would have to back down because tariffs will be “devastating for his country.” Also on Sunday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that Trump “has contrived an array of pretexts—from fentanyl trafficking to trade deficits—to bludgeon Canada with tariffs.” And the editorial board, known for its right-wing slant, called Trump’s tariff war on Canada “the dumbest trade war in history” and said it “makes no economic or political sense.”
Canada is the second largest trading partner of the U.S., and the editors noted that Trump’s “latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials and manufacturing components,” driving prices still higher at a time when consumers are already squeezed.
Trump’s new attack on Canada might not make economic or political sense for the U.S., but it seems to make sense for a decaying president.
Trump is flailing in Iran, and so—as national security scholar Tom Nichols pointed out in The Atlantic after Trump nonsensically attacked South Korea, another longstanding and loyal ally—he is looking to reassert his dominance. Trump doesn’t dare to cross the leaders who actually threaten the U.S., those like Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Instead, Nichols writes, he is trying to make himself feel better by “kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.”
“At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy,” Nichols wrote. “They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power.” But Republicans in charge of Congress appear to be unwilling to cross Trump. Our allies, though, Nichols notes, “have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.”
That moment appears to have arrived.
In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Carney warned the World Economic Forum that the world is “in the midst of a rupture.” He warned that the post–World War II rules-based international order is no longer automatically a route to prosperity and security as the world’s most powerful nations are using the economic integration that system championed as a way to coerce other countries.
He urged “middle countries” to create “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests” as an alternative to a “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence.
On Friday night, after recalling Canada’s negotiators, Carney released a statement saying: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”
Although negotiators had tried to work with the U.S., he wrote, Canada’s core economic strategy has been on building Canada’s economy and diversifying economic partnerships. He noted that Canada is creating jobs at four times the rate of the United States. “Canada has what the world wants,” he wrote, “And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”
In an address to Canadians on Saturday, Carney said: “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.” “Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.”
Carney said Canada will retaliate against the U.S. tariffs, dollar for dollar, beginning on September 8.
This morning, Trump exploded on social media, claiming that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years” and warning that “Canada will be treated like a State no longer!” He said that on “January First, 2027,” he would place tariffs of 50% on “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel.” Canadians “feel entitled,” he wrote, “and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who used to be a Trump fan, told reporters today “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so [Trump] has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”
Today Carney told reporters that Canada will soon “begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership. Now,” he said, “we can build such unparalleled access because we’re trusted, because we’re reliable, and because we have what the world wants.”
On Friday The Economist reviewed polling by YouGov showing that Trump has a positive job approval rating in only three states: West Virginia, Idaho, and Wyoming.
There seems little reason to think those numbers are going to turn around. On Friday, Trump announced he would try to lower beef prices by suspending tariffs on imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef that he said would be sold “at 25 percent below current prices.”
Cattle ranchers and farmers, who have in the past strongly supported Trump, cried foul, saying the imports would drive down prices while making it impossible to distinguish between U.S. and foreign meat just after nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef were recalled after missing a required inspection in the U.S.
Trump has refused to identify from which country or countries he plans to get the ground beef, a reluctance dovetailing unfortunately with a report from Dave Philipps with visuals by Erin Schaff in the New York Times on August 20 that the Bureau of Land Management under Trump has been selling wild horses for slaughter as meat for as little as $25 a head. Wild horses are legally protected from hunting or capture, but the administration appears to be selling them to middlemen who resell them into the food pipeline unquestioned.
In a sign of just how untrustworthy many Americans now consider Trump, anti-Trump social media users were quick to put the two stories together.
Georgi Kantchev, Rebecca Feng, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal today also cast doubt on the administration’s claims that large volumes of oil are moving through the Strait of Hormuz. “The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less,” they write.
On Sunday, Noah Robertson and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s insistence that he needs his new ballroom for security is bunk: the White House already has a secure, hardened facility that can withstand a nuclear blast and house dozens of people for weeks. It was built secretly during the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, the angry opposition to the Trump administration and the wealthy tech bros it serves is taking shape with popular fury over the data centers. These facilities house computers, servers, and data storage infrastructure and have existed for a long time, but to support the extraordinary demands of artificial intelligence they have grown exponentially lately. Tech giants have built huge facilities that are noisy, pollute, and require huge amounts of energy and water.
Technology advocates have pushed their agenda by claiming they will dramatically expand the economy, and the Trump administration has backed their ambitions. Trump even brought billionaire Elon Musk into the administration after he poured almost $200 million into getting Trump elected.
But opposition to the data centers is bipartisan and growing as they appear to symbolize the takeover of our system by a few wealthy men like Musk. Molly Hennessey-Fiske of the Washington Post reported today that in Texas, some Republicans are mobilizing to prevent Republican Greg Abbott from winning a fourth term as governor because of his support for data centers.
Over the weekend, the growing fury over Trump and his administration led to an uproar over a report in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni about a meeting in the past weeks between House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The journalists said the meeting was about “potential areas of common ground,” a vague description that led a clearly nervous House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to warn Kushner: “You better not bet against the House Republicans.”
But even the idea that Jeffries was talking to Kushner was enough to infuriate opponents of the administration, a fact that seems likely to have been behind the leak of the meeting in the first place. For his part, Haberman and Karni note, Jeffries has emphasized that he wants “to get rid of toxic Trump cabinet secretaries,” including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” but it’s clear that demands for even more widespread accountability are growing.
In addition to posting a number of references to the first plane landing “at the newly named President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” claims that the “Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls,” and two photos of himself with Kim Jong Un, Trump posted today that “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!”
And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today announced “Operation Economic Outcast,” an initiative to demand other world leaders join with the U.S. in strangling Iran’s economy. Bessent says Trump is contacting other leaders, but, as Riley Beggin, David J. Lynch, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post note, would neither say who they were nor specify the deadline.
“The United States expects action,” Bessent told reporters. “We do not have infinite patience here.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-iran-korea/688306/
https://thehill.com/business/6045845-duffy-predicts-carney-trade-negotiations/
https://globalnews.ca/news/11620877/carney-davos-wef-speech-transcript/
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement-prime-minister-carney-canada-us-