Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

Stupid, destructive, and utterly unrealistic: that's our Prez say the economists!

Why are Trump, along with Musk and his Muskrats, breaking government and the institutions that make this country a somewhat livable place? Seems crazy.

A couple of our most significant economic thinkers took up the puzzle in the last few days. Short answer: yes, the Trump regime is crazy -- and vile too.

Adam Tooze is the preeminent English language economic historian of the 20th and 21st century world capitalist system. (I have written about his highly accessible books here, here, here and here.) He does the work to engage what passes for economic theory claimed by Trump's intellectual apologists and wrecking appointees. 

I began to wonder whether this search for a rational wing in Trump’s economic policy is not, in fact, a step towards sane-washing and whether this sane-washing is not driven by some engrained mainstream framings of America’s problems that react in sympathy with the Trump administration’s rhetoric of crisis and victimization even if they are out of sympathy with the Trump administration in general.

Is there a real and important continuity of problems in America’s political economy that at least parts of the new Trump administration are trying to address, thus forming a continuity with the Biden team and Trump 1.0?

Or is the shellshocked commentariat of 2025 in the grip of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which our own inner fears lead us to engage with our captors in a way which denies the actual reality of being hurled into a mad house? Call it Mar-a-Lago (Accord) Syndrome.

... we are all struggling to find some kind of rational purchase on the unhinged situation created by the Trump administration.

Turns out, after serious engagement with some Trump apologists, that he finds "no there there" in Gertrude Stein's memorable formulation. 

The Stockholm syndrome element kicks in when we come to the original framing of the problem: The belief that something must be done. Once you are convinced that “something must be done”, you become vulnerable to someone hawking a big plan to “do things”.

Why do sane people in contemporary America believe that “something must be done”? Ignoring the reflexive element of crisis by which Trump himself is the main reason something must be done, which renders one susceptible to any big idea that might fix Trump (even if elements of that “fix” are shared with analysis offered by the Trump camp itself) etc etc, there are two main schools of thought:

• 1. American deindustrialization and class balance. ...

• 2. American debt....

Both arguments 1. and 2. are well known. Both are also contentious. No reader of Chartbook will be surprised to hear that I find both 1. and 2. unconvincing. But that is not my point here. My point is that if you do believe either 1. or 2. you need to be on your guard against Mar-A-Lago syndrome.

Even if you disapprove of the Trumpites style and lawlessness, you may be tempted to take at their word the more reasonable members of the highjack team who insist that they offer a dramatic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis you also believe in, leading you to lose track of the fact that … they are highjackers and they are holding you hostage!

By buying into the reality of underlying problem that Mar-A-Lago claims to be addressing you run the risk of overemphasizing the rational element in Trump 2.0.

Tooze simply finds no rational element.

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. ...

... To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.

Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

You can read the entire Tooze argument here. 

Paul Krugman, former NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize for economics recipient, comes to similar conclusions, even more pithily expressed. In trying to understand the Trump/Musk vandalism in government, he sees no plan -- just the wounded egos of ignorant men.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

Trump's chief of staff listens to him threaten to annex Canada

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Since then, Musk has replicated his insecure co-president and put Social Security under the gun:

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

... It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?

Krugman read Tooze's screed and agrees. 

Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing. 

But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

... My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?

On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.

We don't have to be overawed because these guys are considered some of the best academia has to offer in their field. They care about being understood and they have given us the goods: Trump's economic antics are stupid and cruel, without any rationality beyond grift and grievance. 

The jealousy of powerful men

Economic wisdom from the streets. Not Prof. DeLong's dish.

J. Bradford DeLong is a powerful man himself, a full professor of economics at UC Berkeley and once a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration. But he struggles to understand the thin skins of other powerful economists when it comes to admitting the contributions of women to the discipline.

In mid- and late-20th century America, the mathematical turn of economics made it much less friendly to women coming in. And then, I think, the thing snowballed—in large part due to the aggressive seminar culture spreading from Chicago, focused on testing ideas in a blast furnace and also establishing an intellectual pecking-order rather than building a harmonious community. But why it then takes the form of aggressive misogyny I do not know ...

[He quotes] Rakesh Bhandari: ‘I don't understand what is it about economics as it is, neoclassical and mainstream macro, that would attract such aggressive misogynists to it. I can't imagine such discussions in sociology or anthropology. Perhaps philosophy and political science?…

On the—admittedly few—occasions when I have talked frankly to people who strike me as in the same sociological space as the toxic posters ... what comes off is absolute rage at affirmative action.

The argument that our ticket-punching indicators of “quality” are very noisy, that women face huge headwinds in our profession, and thus that given those headwinds a woman who is at the 95th [percentile] of “ticket punching” “excellence” is almost surely a better asset to the university than a man who is at the 98th [percentile] —they are neurologically incapable of allowing that or other arguments that we do not want an intellectual monoculture enter their brains.

Hence they are all 100% certain that women as a group are stealing their rightful jobs and keeping them from having the careers they deserve. And every individual woman thus becomes someone to be dissed because she is a participant in this great female conspiracy to do them down.

Or such is my guess.

I read this forming an image of the women so dissed as white. Think what these great men make of Black men and even Black women in economics.

It's enough to make one wish for the Great Replacement. We might learn something about how to make the process of making and organizing all the fruits of land and human ingenuity serve all the planet's beings with a different cast of students of economy. Or perhaps not. This will be a worthwhile experiment.