Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
William Saletan: Hey Greg, it’s great to be with you.
Laura Ingraham (audio voiceover): But you’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries. Why?
Ingraham (audio voiceover): OK, but we need their territory. They have territorial advantage. We’re not going to let them get close to China, right?
Sargent: He says they are “meant” to be a fifty-first state. Putting aside the obvious derangement here in which he’s clearly still enraged with Trudeau over some imagined slight or something, that is the language of imperialism, isn’t it, Will?
Sargent: And Will, didn’t a lot of people tell us that Trump won on a backlash to American involvement abroad?
Sargent: It’s probably worth noting that [on] Trump’s trade war with Canada, he sometimes says straight out that if they want to avoid tariffs, they should become a state. That’s a direct and explicit declaration that he’s using economic warfare to weaken Canada to force it to submit to his will.
Sargent: And he actually used this type of language in another way too. He recently essentially said that they just drew a line on the map between Canada and the United States as if this was an arbitrary thing. That’s Putinesque language. He’s basically saying, Oh, they’re not a real country.
Also, Greg, bizarrely, something that I had forgotten: Putin talked about how Ukraine was ripping off Russia, and how Russia had given all these subsidies to Ukraine in very similar language to the way Trump fantasizes about how Canada is a beneficiary of the U.S., how they’re leeching off us, and how they’re nothing without us. [It’s the] same language from Putin. And the craziest thing of all is that in his article in 2021, Vladimir Putin said that the relationship between the U.S. and Canada was a lot like the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, that it was the same kind of hate, it’s all really one people, the line is artificial. Very creepy.
Saletan: Right. Remember though, Greg, that all during the fall campaign, Donald Trump said he was going to end the Russia-Ukraine war in his first 24 hours after he got elected. It’s now been two months not since he got elected but since he’s been in office, and he’s not really any closer. So he’s got this fiction out there that he’s going to resolve the war—in fact, the timetable has already lengthened—and he’s not there. He has to pretend. He has to pretend that progress is happening, even though, as you just pointed out, it’s not. And Putin can string this out because Trump is so eager to portray anything Putin says as a concession, as a step toward peace.
Sargent: It’s really interesting you say that. Trump has to demonstrate in some sense that progress is being made, and saying that requires softly interpreting what Putin is saying.
Sargent: There’s this new Gallup poll which is quite striking and heartening, I think. It finds that a majority of 53 percent now want the U.S. to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to reclaim its territory, even if that means staying involved for a long time. That’s a jump from December. And get this: Nearly 80 percent say they fear Russia would violate the terms of a peace agreement, and 7 in 10 fear the settlement will be too favorable to Russia. It seems clear to me, Will, that we may be seeing something like a thermostatic effect here in which Americans are starting to swing against the orientation of the party in power. What do you think?
Let me go back again to February 28: Trump and Vance have Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and they sandbag him. Everybody remembers this scene where they accuse him of being ungrateful. That scene was created by Trump and Vance; they staged this in order to make him look bad. They wanted to change American public opinion to move with them to decide that Ukraine was the bad guys, that they were ingrates, that we should stop supporting them. What this poll tells me is that they failed. This poll began three days after that scene in the Oval Office and went on for a week after that. And what it tells me is Americans didn’t buy it, that they are where they were before, that they think that Donald Trump has gone too far in the direction of undercutting Ukraine and capitulating to Putin.
Saletan: Right. And in fact, if I recall correctly, Greg, Trump sat there, he watched Vance and Zelensky go back and forth, and then he comes in and says, Don’t tell us how to feel. He takes Vance aside and he says out loud, I let this go on, this back and forth between the two of you, because I wanted people to see this. He knows the cameras are running. He’s got the whole media there. He stages this. He wants to make Zelenskiy look like the bad guy. It’s an attempt to corrupt American public opinion. And Greg, this has been my concern all along. We know that Trump is one of the worst people this country has ever produced. The question is, What are we going to become? Are we going to become like him? Is he going to fundamentally change us? And he has changed way too much, but these numbers tell me that there is some core of moral decency and sanity that Americans are rejecting Trump’s capitulation to Putin.
Saletan: No, and I’m not exactly certain to what extent Americans associate the two with each other. The Canada situation is, in part, just economics, right? It’s that people think it’s stupid for us to pick a fight with a friend as Canada is our closest trading partner. And for people who don’t understand this, the American economy is deeply integrated both with the Canadian economy and the Mexican economy. It’s not just that they have their factories and we have ours and we’re competing and they try to sell into us; it’s that we’re exchanging supplies and parts. The whole supply chain is integrated. You can’t cut off the Canadians or cut off the Mexicans without spite; we’re hurting ourselves when we do that. So part of that is economics.
Sargent: Yeah, one could actually look at this as Trump thinking, at least at the outset, that he could bamboozle the American people into thinking all this stuff with Canada is just a shrewd leverage play, that he’s trying get the upper hand in tariff talks and that sort of thing. But as usual, he and MAGA have overplayed this and revealed their actual designs. And those designs, I think, are potentially what really are causing a public backlash—this perception that it actually is an imperialist design on Canada, which is just utterly crazy on Trump and MAGA’s part. I think that’s maybe what’s going on here.
Sargent: Well, maybe the way to think about this is that it’s a fundamental rejection of what you might call Putinism as executed through the Trump vessel. I want to read a line from your piece, which is a very good one, about Trump, “He sees Ukraine through Putin’s eyes. They’re the same eyes through which Trump stares hungrily at Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and the Panama Canal. They’re the eyes of a predator.” This, I think, is now becoming clear to people.
Everything is about acquisition. Everything’s about confiscation. It’s about dominion. And I think it’s a very healthy thing for other nations in the world to recognize that this behavior, whether it comes from Putin the predator or Trump the predator, is dangerous, and that they need to unite against it.
Saletan: Right, right. There is no real respect for national sovereignty, of course.
Saletan: Right. It serves him in multiple ways. One is that Trump is systematically destroying the Western alliance. It’s not just with Canada but also with Europe. Trump’s line was that Putin went into Crimea when Obama was president; and then Putin goes into the rest of Ukraine when Biden is president; but in between, when I was president, Putin didn’t do anything. Greg, the reason Putin didn’t attack Ukraine while Trump was president is that Putin was busy capturing a much more important target, which was the United States of America. There was the whole Russian influence operation in the 2016 election. And it was what Trump did during that time, which was to fray NATO, to tear apart the fabric of NATO.
Sargent: Just to your point about how Trump is essentially becoming Putin and seeing the world through his eyes, I believe Trump recently used a line like this. Putin took Ukraine from Obama, and then Putin took more of Ukraine away from Biden, as if these things were our possessions that Putin had taken, right?
Sargent: I want to ask you though, Will, where does this all end up? Where do you see it on both fronts really finishing?
I just think there’s a deal to be cut here between Trump and Putin. hat Trump has been saying over the past 24 hours since he talked to Putin is basically, Hey, things are going great, even though, in fact, Putin is not making concessions with regard to Ukraine. Putin is talking with Trump about other things—about cooperation on extracting minerals and all sorts of other things in which they have a common interest. That is Trump selling out Ukraine. It is Trump selling out and granting Putin his empire in Asia and in Eastern Europe in exchange for looking the other way while we do our thing.
Saletan: I think Canada is not going to get invaded, but is going to be dealing with the tariffs that come down on April 2, is going to have to be developing alternative suppliers. Honestly, Greg, if Trump keeps up his tariff regimen, I’d think that we’re just going to start to see trade relationships formed between former trading partners of the U.S. And they’re going to go around us, because they have to.
Saletan: Well said, Greg. Very well said.
Saletan: Thank you, Greg.
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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