Then, two things happened. The wonkish central banker Mark Carney announced his candidacy for leadership of the liberals, to succeed Trudeau. And Trump started talking so incessantly about taking over Canada as a 51st state that his minions like Kristi Noem have used trips to the Canadian border to mock-insult our gentle neighbors to the north.
Failing a war of conquest, it was clear, there would be a protracted trade war, absurdly premised on the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, which has been falling for a year; Peter Navarro, a Trump adviser on trade, recently argued that Canada had been “taken over” by Mexican cartels, though in total just 43 pounds of fentanyl was seized last year at the Canadian border, compared with 21,000 pounds at the Mexican border. Today, not two months later, Carney’s liberals are now neck-and-neck with Poilievre and the conservatives. Carney, who will be the next prime minister, is expected to confidently call a new election soon.
As recently as two months ago, Poilievre was talked about as a Canadian counterpart to Trump, or at least as close as genteel Canada could really get to MAGA-like anti-elitism. (He’d risen to international notoriety thanks to an interview in which he argued with a journalist who’d described him as a “populist,” combatively counterpunching while loudly eating a crunchy apple, like a suaver Ben Shapiro.) Now, he’s desperately attacking the American president, hoping to convince voters that he is actually the potential leader who would fight Trump the hardest. “My message to the president is this: Knock it off,” he declared Friday in a carefully staged news conference, two days before Carney won the vote to lead the liberal party. “Stop the chaos. You are hurting your workers, your consumers and most immediately destroying trillions of dollars of wealth on your own stock market.”
He has a point. In the first Trump term, it seemed like the president would drop almost any policy commitment at the first sign of stock market frustration. This time, he looks much less interested in being an S&P hood ornament than in testing just how far his supporters will follow him, away from the advice of almost everyone on Wall Street, down the path of a throwback William McKinleyism. Will they cheer higher prices, produced by tariffs? A huge spike in business uncertainty, depressing investment and hiring? A genuine recession, should one come? A redefinition of G.D.P., in the face of such a downturn, to preserve the illusion of economic growth?
We are just halfway through the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, and some cracks in his swaggering coalition are already beginning to show. But you can see the tremors pretty clearly abroad, too. In Denmark, Frederiksen might be getting a boost from the fight over Greenland, and in Britain, even the bedraggled Starmer appears to be getting a Trump bump, too.
