The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 6 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In his speech to Congress this week, President Donald Trump kept on lying about his tariffs and made it clear that in coming weeks he’s only going to ramp up the trade wars further. He kept on falsely claiming Canada is letting huge amounts of fentanyl into our country, and pretended that we’ll reap huge revenues from tariffs when, in fact, they are a tax paid by U.S. consumers.
Then at the White House media briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said very directly that if Canada wants to avoid tariffs in the future, they can merely become the 51st U.S. state. She came right out and said it: Trump’s tariffs are actually about getting Canada to submit to Trump’s will. None of this is OK. It’s not OK for the American president to lie relentlessly about our allies and threaten them with economic Armageddon to force them to submit to his deranged, passing whims. One person who’s been saying this lately a lot is Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political reporter at Rolling Stone, so we’re talking to him about this today. Thanks for coming on, Swin.
Asawin Suebsaeng: Thank you so much for having me. And yes, I concur with you that it is not OK. It sounds very quaint nowadays as if I’m holding up a “This is not normal” placard. But no, it is very much not OK. And Jesus fucking Christ.
Sargent: Pretty much, yeah. During the media briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked why Trump keeps calling Trudeau governor, which is a habit he’s developed. This is what happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): The president continues to call the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, governor of Canada. I’m curious what he means by that and if there are any plans that are moving forward with trying to make Canada the 51st state. I have a follow up on the economy as well.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Sure, well, the president put that in his Truth Social account or his Truth Social post earlier today. He feels strongly that it would be very beneficial for the Canadian people to be the 51st state of the United States. They wouldn’t pay be paying for these tariffs. They’d have much lower taxes if they were part of our great country.
Sargent: Swin, there you have it. Canada can avoid having their exports to the U.S. taxed if they just become the 51st state of the U.S. It’s straight up extortion. They’re saying openly and explicitly at this point that the tariffs are really about getting Canada to submit to Trump. Your thoughts?
Suebsaeng: For anybody, whether on the left or right, who has bought into this idea that Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, is the endless war guy—that has always been a lie ever since 2015, patently so, both in rhetoric and in policy and in actions. But it becomes even more grotesquely and gratuitously and comically a lie when you try to put that up against the reality of this guy who is engineering this revamped Trumpian version of American imperialism in different parts of the world. Since we’re just talking about Canada now, I’ll stick with Canada. He and other senior members of his administration keep threatening our neighbors to the north with essentially violent invasion. Them becoming the 51st state—there was no way that that would happen unless it was a violent annexation as Canada keeps saying over and over and over again [that] they are not for sale and their people do not want that. So the fact that Trump and his lieutenants keep doing that over and over again as a top-tier point of administration propaganda right now with the backdrop, or should I say foreground, of them continuously trying to torpedo the Canadian economy—these are things to be taken both seriously and very literally.
Sargent: Leavitt basically said it straight out there.
Suebsaeng: Yeah. Just to get to a verb you used earlier, it is straight up extortion by the supposed leader of the free world and his administration. And even if Trump never sends a single troop, or even half a troop, into Canada and he wants to play it off now or one day that this is all just one big troll or joke, in my humble opinion, that doesn’t matter. This is the United States government with our tax dollars in our name, in your name, Greg, in my name, doing this to one of our most important allies, a country of many millions of people. And I hesitate to even call it saber-rattling; there has to be a dumber or more violent term for what he’s doing right now. And it is no wonder that Canadian citizens and Canadian politicians are reacting the way they are and not laughing this off as a joke, even if they don’t literally think that the Marines are going to be marching on Quebec next week.
Sargent: Swin, speaking of that, I want to read a tweet of yours in which you did something radical. You imagined how Canadians might be looking at all this. You noted that, from their point of view, “the sitting American president keeps threatening to annex them, keeps blaming them for a fentanyl problem that is his and his party’s justification for potentially invading Mexico, and also keeps trying to destroy their economy.” Now, Swin, that nails it. One of the most disgusting pundit tropes out there right now is that Trump is just cleverly wielding leverage. It’s not that at all. He’s shaking our allies down. He’s extorting Ukraine and Canada. Can you talk about that element of it?
Suebsaeng: Totally. First of all, I would like to lead off by saying, in terms of he’s just doing clever gambit or negotiating tactic here, you and I both lived through the height of the war on terror era in the United States. Remember how we all as a country lost our collective fucking mind when we heard an Iranian say “death to America” once. How do you think we as a country would feel if a Canadian prime minister kept behaving and doing the things Trump and his administration are doing right now? How do you think this country would react to a regional neighbor behaving in that way? Also, that’s not even a fair analogy because in that situation, Canada would be significantly less powerful than the U.S., but I digress.
To answer your question, one of the many reasons Canadians are justified in feeling, and more importantly thinking and reacting, the way they are right now to what’s going on with the Trump administration is that he and his people keep lying about fentanyl, that the fentanyl crisis is why they’re doing what they’re doing needlessly to Canada right now. Obviously, that’s completely bullshit and that’s pretext, but it’s what they keep putting forth as justification. That’s our northern border.
With regards to our southern border with Mexico, Trump and a variety of elite Republican lawmakers and administration officials have been saying for years—years before he stepped back into office—that the fentanyl crisis is more than ample justification for the U.S. to essentially invade Mexico to take on the drug lords and the drug dealers and the drug cartels. They very much on the record and publicly have said that they want another AUMF to apply the principles of the war on terror that we’ve waged to bombard other countries on the other side of the ocean to Mexico. Trump and other Republicans have talked openly about sending in special forces teams to do a bunch of really high-profile violence on Mexican territory. They talked about drone strikes.
So quite frankly, the administration in Mexico, whether it ends up happening or not over the next four years, is sure to fear an invasion or, as some Trump lieutenants like to describe it to me in my reporting, a “soft invasion” of Mexican territory. They wouldn’t be out of their mind. [It] would be a dereliction of duty to their own constituents if they didn’t prepare for that and take the Republican Party in this country seriously.
Sargent: Right. Swin, basically what you’re saying is we need to take the imperialism of Trump as a real thing.
Suebsaeng: Absolutely. And how are Canadians supposed to process that bullshitty federal justification that you’re using to justify a potential war on Mexican soil, you’re using that against us now while you keep “trolling” about making us the 51st state. It doesn’t scan to any normal person, no matter how much they think Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and people like that are right-wing or far-right trolls. It doesn’t matter how much you think that. It is irresponsible to not take that talk seriously.
Sargent: And Swin, the fact that they’re creating a bullshit pretext should frighten them more. When I was a kid, one of the things that the schoolyard bullies did a lot in my neighborhood was they come up to you and they’d say, “What did you say about my mother?” And then you’d say, “I didn’t say anything about your mother.” And then they’d say, “I think I heard you said something about my mother,” and they’d come in and start pushing you. That’s what Trump is doing. This is the “What did you say about my mother?” school of international diplomacy.
Suebsaeng: What you just described with the schoolyard bully, arguably the country he’s doing that and an ally he’s doing that the most to are the Ukrainians and Zelenskiy. Because oh my fucking God, the more and more you talk to senior administration officials in the Trump administration about what happened with that Zelenskiy-Trump-Vance Oval Office meeting last week, you just get relentlessly ear-fucked with things like, Oh, this was Zelenskiy’s fault. If you actually watched the whole video, Trump and Vance are trying to be nice, and Zelenskiy forces their hand and upsets Donald Trump and pokes the bear and starts being a dick or whatever words they want to use in their off the record or on background—and sometimes on-the-record spin on the matter.
Even if I buy that frame of argument, that is happening against the backdrop of them having this White House show for the media and show for the cameras while trying to bully Zelenskiy, [who’s] deciding this mineral deal, to basically give into Trump’s whim about really precious minerals that he wants from Ukraine—If you give us that, maybe we will consider to continue helping you during this brutal occupation and invasion that you’re currently under.
It’s absolute madness. Too much is happening right now. There are too many scandals, too many outrages, too many abominations that the Trump administration and Prime Minister Elon Musk are trotting out for each individual scandal to sink in. But this goddamn shakedown of Ukraine right now over minerals while they’re dealing with this brutal invasion is uniquely barbaric and monstrous in a way that I don’t think has had time to sink in with the American populace just because there is way too much going on.
Sargent: Nahal Toosi of Politico had a good piece in which she spoke to diplomats connected to our allies, and they told her that what they took from Trump’s speech to Congress is that it’s basically time to forget about trusting America as an ally from now on. This is the thing—speaking of bullshit narratives, we keep hearing that Trump is transactional, but he’s a cheat and a liar who can’t be trusted to make good on any transaction he promises. What do you make of the reorientation of Europe here? How are our allies going to adapt to this?
Suebsaeng: Not to get too philosophical about this, if that’s the right word, but I long thought that even before Trump was elected president the first time that America is an empire in decline. It’s hard to really grasp it when you’re living through it as a member of the media as opposed to reading about it in a history textbook decades or centuries down the line, but it really does feel, when I’m like sitting in a dark room closing my eyes and really thinking about it, that you and I are living through a reporting on a rotting, decaying global empire.
I very foolishly psyched myself years ago into believing that we could be a declining empire without doing declining empire type things in the most pathetic ways possible. And that is including, and not limited to, electing and then electing again the racist game show host who tried to destroy the American democratic order in 2020 and 2021 while a raging pandemic was killing a bunch of people in our country. So with that as not just context but foreground, it makes perfect sense to me that if Donald Trump were ever to reconquer power—which boy did he fucking do that in 2024—that the world would have to internalize that America has, at best, a massive credibility problem.
As much of an anti-imperialist leftist as I am, what I’m about to say, I’m not saying in the form of celebration: What Trump has shown in the past month is that the liberal rules-based international order can be as much a joke to the U.S. and its close allies as it has been for numerous other nations for decades. Does that make sense?
Sargent: It does, and it really swings us back to Karoline Leavitt and basically her open declaration that everything is on the table when it comes to straight up extortion. That’s declining empire stuff in a way, isn’t it?
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And some people like to say that, Oh, Trump is a different kind of Republican. He’s not George W. Bush. He’s not Dick Cheney. He’s not a neocon. He just staffs his administrations with people like that. But also they’re like, Even if you find his bombastic art of the deal mentality applied to the world stage as gauche or distasteful, he is trying to bring about peace through strength, ending out this war, etc. All that propaganda is effusively stupid. And one of the many reasons why it’s incredibly dumb to think or even see all that for a moment is, to bring it back to Ukraine, what he’s doing is not anti-imperialism. He is carving up the spoils of war with a fellow authoritarian guy, Vladimir Putin, who he considers his friend and and a guy he has a great relationship with on the world stage. Trump and Vladimir Putin, obviously in the form of territory and his own expansionist ambitions there, are just carving up a victim country for their own imperial gains. It’s a jointly imperial and imperialistic project.
Sargent: And Swin, isn’t that exactly what Karoline Leavitt essentially blurted straight out at that press briefing? She basically said, Canada is ours for the taking if we want it, and they’d better figure that out, but quick, right?
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And Trump has been declaring very similar things from the perch of, again, supposed leader of the free world. And the idea that the president of the U.S. is imperialistically applying that principle that he applies to a war zone on the other side of the ocean to our neighbors right on our northern border and also on our southern border is atrocious, pathetically so. It’s morally vacant, it’s depraved. I’m running out of adjectives and adverbs to describe what I think about it right now.
And Trump, during his address to Congress that was televised on Tuesday night, applied very similar principles to Panama and Greenland. These are things that bubbled to the surface during the first Trump term, which was a debauched atrocity in its own right in so many ways. But Trump and his people for whatever reason kept a lid on some of that stuff, including the expanding to Greenland stuff during the first term. But now all of that bananas, bonkers, MAGA, Facebook brain poison stuff, they’re throwing to the forefront and putting the entire weight of federal government behind it.
Like I said during the beginning of our conversation, it is almost at this point immaterial to me if he launches a single weapon or troop into Canadian soil or into Greenland. The fact that this is the operating principle of the U.S. government right now, both domestically and internationally, can only have depraved and horrifying consequences coming downstream from that, both in actions and policies and everything else. I just have nothing polite to say about it anymore. And I don’t have any patience for people who are saying that, Oh, you’re overreacting, so much of this is bluster. You are missing the point if you think that that’s all this is.
Sargent: It certainly is not that. On that cheery note, let’s call it a day, man. Asawin Suebsaeng, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Suebsaeng: Have me back any time to just depress the shit out of me. Any time of day or night. Thank you so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: You got it, man.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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