The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 17 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.
President Donald Trump’s angry, deranged threats to annex Canada may seem like a joke to some Americans, or like a leverage play to savvy reporters, but it’s being taken very seriously up in Canada. The Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly just told a group of G7 foreign ministers that, “This is not a joke, Canadians are anxious.” All this comes as new polls are showing something surprising: Americans actually disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy. We keep hearing that Americans don’t care about things like Trump’s threats at Canada. What if that’s wrong? What if they do care? If so, what should Democrats do about that? Today, we’re talking about all this with Brian Beutler, who argues relentlessly on his Substack, Off Message, that Democrats are missing all kinds of openings to explain to the country just how degenerate Trump and his GOP have truly become. Great to have you back on, Brian.
Brian Beutler: It’s always great to be with you.
Sargent: I want to start by reading a quote from the Canadian foreign minister. Here goes: “I think many of my colleagues coming here thought that this issue was still a joke, and that this had to be taken in a humorous way. But I said to them, ‘This is not a joke. Canadians are anxious. Canadians are proud people. And you are here in a sovereign country.’” This is at the G7 in Canada. She also said, “Nobody is safe.” Brian, I’m sorry. This is infuriating. Our president is scaring the shit out of tens of millions of people who peacefully live north of us, our ally. What do you think?
Beutler: The most disturbing thing about the report you just cited is that it happened after the recent Canadian elections. There had been reporting, or maybe it happened in public before the election, that the outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had told people that he thought that Trump was serious, that his goal was to enter a trade war with Canada that would crush the Canadian economy and make it ripe to annex as the fifty-first state. Trudeau’s belief was that what Trump is threatening was the real plan. In the context of an election, you can maybe write that off as him being a little cute, right? Like vote for the team that opposes Trump because we’re the only people who can keep you safe from his devious plan to annex us and make us the fifty-first state of the United States against our will. But the fact that they continue to say that they are alarmed by this and they take it as a serious threat to their sovereignty makes me think that there’s more to it, that that’s not just something that they were saying for the Canadian public to rally voters back to liberal politicians, that it’s a real risk.
Sargent: Just underscoring your point, Trump continues to say this after we heard that stuff from Trudeau about how it’s being taken seriously, which I think really says a lot. I want to play one of Trump’s rambling claims about Canada. It was just a couple days ago. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): The United States can’t subsidize a country for $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need anything that they give. We do it because we want to be helpful, but it comes a point when you just can’t do that. You have to run your own country. And to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state. We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anyway. This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S.. Just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago.
Sargent: Brian, the stuff about them subsidizing us is a dimwitted lie. That aside, he says Canada only works as a state, and they drew a line artificially on the map. This is the way Putin talks, the they’re not a real country, you know? Brian, are Democrats pushing back on this sufficiently? And if they don’t, is there a danger here that voters could get weirdly seduced by it or come to see it as normal, or is it just too crazy and too beyond the pale for them?
Beutler: Democrats seem to put everything in one of two buckets: things that are relevant and things that are distractions. The distraction bucket is basically everything, right? And then the things that they really care about are the months away fight over Medicaid and taxes. So when Trump says something about annexing Canada, they don’t want to engage in political combat over that. We can get into whether that’s because they genuinely think it’s a waste of time, or that they don’t want to be in conflict with Trump unless they’re certain they’re on the right side of public opinion.
How the way Democrats deal with these things affects how our media deals with these things and thus how Canadians perceive them. I do fairly regular interactive chats with my subscribers. Recently in a live chat, one of my Canadian readers asked why Americans—and I assume she means the American she sees on news broadcasts and on social media—treat this as some kind of joke. It’s not a joke in Canada, and she was curious about the disconnect. I tried to assure her, because I think it’s true that most Americans don’t actually think this is funny; they’re horrified by it, but they also think, Let’s brush it off. He’s bluffing. He’s full of shit. We are mostly mocking him for pretending this is something real, because [we] don’t think anything’s ever going to come of it. And since we have to compartmentalize and pick our battles because the front is so broad with Trump, we all just lump it into the shit-we-don’t-have-to-focus-on bucket just like the Democrats do. So when Canadians look at us, they see a bunch of people who don’t recognize that they’re under threat or don’t care.
There is a harm, I think, to the relationship, if not between the governments, between the citizens of Canada and the citizens of America when our opposition party, the mainstream media, social media, Trump’s critics [say], There he goes again. There’s something important about saying what he’s doing is wrong and we’re not going to let him do it.
Sargent: To your point, I want to read some polling numbers because they show, at least when asked by pollsters, people find this stuff very disturbing. The new Quinnipiac survey finds only 42 percent of voters approve of Trump’s handling of foreign policy, 53 percent disapprove. Only 36 percent approve of Trump’s handling of trade with Canada and 58 percent disapprove. Only 31 percent say Trump’s attitude toward Canada is about right. Meanwhile, in the new CNN poll, Trump’s approval on foreign affairs is 42 to 58. So to your point, it’s a constant among savvy reporters and the consultant class: Voters don’t care about any of this, so these numbers don’t matter. But what if they do care, right? Or maybe they need to be made to care, and maybe they can be made to care. Maybe they can be made to treat this as not a joke or a leverage play, to use that reprehensible cliché. How can something that so clearly demonstrates Trump’s unfitness for the presidency not be central in our political discourse?
Beutler: Yeah, it takes focused opposition, right? I sympathize with the instinct not to feed into the perception Trump wants to create of himself as a strong leader that people should fear. There is value in mocking him for taking this position. If Democrats had a consensus leader, a presidential nominee or somebody that was the omniscient party spokesperson, it would be good for them to say both, The way you treat the people who have been best to us in the world is appalling, but also how’s your plan to take them over going? How’s the fifty-first state coming along? Oh, you failed at that too? It’s a duality that I think that the Democratic Party is capable of striking. They’re not doing it for the reasons we just discussed, but I do think that there are scenarios that aren’t too far-fetched that could bring our politics and our political discourse into closer alignment with your view, that this is something that Americans might actually care about or should care about, that we stop blowing it off.
And that’s if Trump starts making more moves that are harder to brush off as just bluster. There is something mad king–like about how he’s behaving, and we know from long experience that he just can’t accept that he’s been outmaneuvered or that people are mocking him or that somebody’s called his bluff. So he’s not going to reason himself out of acting like this; he’s also not surrounded by anyone who is going to try to make him stop, who will say, This has gone too far and we’re going to leave your administration if you don’t drop it. I could imagine things ratcheting in a direction where most Americans and most American elites blow all this stuff off right now to where they start treating it with real seriousness. We’re not there yet, but it could happen.
Sargent: The straddle you’re talking about is a really fascinating one. It makes me think about some of the more skilled communicators among Democrats. If you take someone like Barack Obama or Pete Buttigieg, you can see them doing both those things at the same time really quite effectively—but what’s interesting to me about what you’re saying is that nobody’s really trying. Pete does it from time to time, and Obama’s obviously out of the game now and all that, but wouldn’t there actually be some value in Democrats trying to stretch themselves rhetorically a little? Trying to be a little more nimble and experimenting a little with what one can do rhetorically and in terms of convincing people to see all this as being both appalling and buffoonish—wouldn’t that be something Democrats should do?
Beutler: Absolutely. Yes. I think that there is a big problem with the standard Democrats set for themselves, which, for reasons I articulated already, is a little too convenient. They don’t really want to be fighting with Trump all the time because they’re scared of fighting him, but they characterize it as we don’t want to chase shiny objects; he just spits all these distractions at us in the hope of pulling us off what’s really important, and we’re not going to fall for it this time. They try to dress it up in this language of toughness, but then they throw everything into that bucket, like I said. It’s not just that they don’t want to fight Trump on Canada. They don’t really want to fight him on nominations; we saw just last week, they don’t want to fight him on the budget, the funding of the government that he’s actually not really honoring. So what are they actually fighting him on? What are they husbanding all of their oppositional energy to direct at? And there’s not much, right? So why couldn’t they devote more time to [say] the way Trump behaves even when he’s “trying to distract us” is appalling or it’s an affront to our constitution, or whatever the case may be given the affront?
We ran a piece recently at Off Message by a former Harry Reid aide named Murshed Zaheed who reminded us that when Harry Reid was Senate minority and majority leader under George W. Bush, he started a war room—a communications rapid response room in the Senate leadership to basically respond to everything. Bush would do something controversial or dangerous or make a mistake, and they were quick to get a response out to reporters about how it was bad or embarrassing or a failure: “Another demonstration of George W. Bush’s failed …” You know how these statements read, you’ve been in the business a long time.
There’s no reason why Democrats couldn’t do something like that right now, being willing to respond when Donald Trump does something that’s probably bluster like threaten Canada, or that isn’t bluster like when he orders the arrest and kidnapping of a green card–holding pro-Palestine activist or when he sabotages corporate law firms because they represent Democrats. Democrats choose to duck all of those issues, but it wouldn’t require a ton of effort on their part to respond to all of them. They don’t need to devote the whole party to beating Trump on every one of these fronts, but they could have a position.
Sargent: You’d think. And I think there’s actually really some fertile ground to till here, and also some wedge driving to do. I want to highlight something else in this polling. In the Quinnipiac survey, 75 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of trade with Canada, while 64 percent of independents disapprove. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans say Trump’s treatment of Canada is about right, while 63 percent of independents say it’s too much. So Trump has successfully gotten Republicans and MAGA voters to hate Canada, but the middle of the country despises this kind of shit. Isn’t there also an opportunity to do a little wedging there? Republicans and MAGA voters, their expectations are now very high that Trump is going to grind Canada into submission. So you’d think that there’s a real opening to do that combination of mockery and condemnation here. It really just seems like a pretty fat target.
Beutler: Yeah. I can see the wedge being driven in a number of ways. The way he’s already courted economic warfare against Canada has already harmed Americans, including Trump-voting Americans. There’s a very high risk that that could escalate and become really, really damaging for Republican-voting Americans, particularly along the Northern border. That includes Michigan, a state that, if not Donald Trump because he’s term limited out, Republicans in general will want to win in coming elections. I, just as a rule, think that if a party does something and it’s overwhelmingly opposed by the majority of the other party, by the majority of independents, and only a little more than half of [its] own supporters, [its] own voters think it’s a good idea, [it is] in a really bad position.
A sane political leader would be like, OK, we tread into some rocky territory, and we’re going to figure out a way to retreat—but Trump is broken in his brain, and it’s hard to come up with examples where he recognized that about his own misjudgments and walked himself out of it. It has only really happened when he had people around him willing to talk him off the ledge, and he purged the party of all those people. Now, it’s unclear where the pushback is going to come from.
Sargent: Brian, something you’ve argued a lot on your Substack—and folks should definitely check it out; it’s called Off Message, and it’s all about the Democratic Party and how it can do better—is that Democrats have all kinds of untaken opportunities to let the public know that Trump and the Republican Party are on the wrong side of very big public controversies, things that would really piss off voters if they understood what Trump and Republicans were really doing and saying on these matters. Can you talk a little bit about that idea?
Beutler: Yeah. I write about this mostly through the lens of public corruption, and in Trump’s case private corruption because he is running his public corruption through his private businesses, which he didn’t divest from. And it’s always been my view that Trump’s corruption, if it was a major focal point of U.S. politics, would make him much less popular because people hate corruption. In their workplaces, if people see somebody trying to get ahead through corrupt means, they hate that person. When they catch somebody trying to wet their beak in a community pool, they don’t like that person; they want that person out. Because getting to the bottom of Trump’s corruption requires digging and confrontation and partisan anger, and Trump talks about witch hunts and blah blah blah, Democrats have talked themselves out of making a big deal of Trump’s corruption. I think that’s a mistake for two reasons.
The first one I already mentioned is that things like corruption—also, to the point of this conversation, his treatment of Canada and other allies—are not popular and would be deeply damaging to him if it were the focal point of U.S. politics. But separately, the very act of being angry—a major political party is upset about something—whether it’s corruption or Trump’s treatment of Canada or whatever else is a way to galvanize attention and focus it on one thing. When there’s no sense of crisis or that something is scandalous or outrageous, people retreat to their regular sources of information. They reach into their pocket, they grab their phone, and they look at the social media or the media that they’ve selected for themselves. And if they’re Trump supporters or if they’re Trump agnostic, they’re probably not going to be fed a diet of information about the bad things he does.
So one way to reach them would be to pick those issues where Trump is vulnerable, like corruption or like spoiling our best alliance in the world for no reason at all, and get angry about it. Make people think, Huh, there’s something rotten in the air, I better tune in to figure out what it is, and then they’ll learn, and then it will materialize in his approval rating going down. Maybe not as low as I would like it to go, but even if it were one or two points lower, that’s super important when it comes time to beating him in legislative fights, or beating Republicans in the midterm, or beating the next Republican nominee in the next presidential election.
The Republican Party had this insight when Barack Obama won the presidency: that their best hope at becoming a viable political party again wasn’t to try to find common ground with him. It was to make him unpopular as quickly as possible by creating a lot of strife around what he was trying to do. And it worked. It worked like a charm. For whatever reason, that lesson eluded the Democratic leadership back then. And it’s much the same leadership now, so I don’t see them doing it. But I think that if they started, if they tried, if they threw their whole body at the challenge of making Trump less popular by being loud and angry about the worst things he does, it would bear fruit and we’d all be better off for it.
Sargent: Brian Beutler, really well said. We always love talking to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Beutler: Thanks for having me again. Anytime.
Sargent: 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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