Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Brian Beutler: It’s always great to be with you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sargent: Brian Beutler, really well said. We always love talking to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
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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