So let me get this straight. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a guy who was running central banks before he stumbled into politics, pulled his negotiators out of trade talks with the United States on a Friday night. Walked away. Announced retaliatory tariffs effective September 8. And the response from our brilliant media class? A standing ovation. Salon, Yahoo, the whole clapping-seal gallery over at MeidasTouch, all falling over themselves to celebrate a foreign leader telling the American president to pound sand.
Now I’m not a globalist. I don’t pretend to understand the finer points of trade policy the way some think-tank parrot with a poli-sci degree does. But I know what it looks like when the little guy gets played, and right now the little guy is the American factory worker who was promised these tariffs would bring jobs back. Instead he’s watching Canada, our own neighbor, our biggest trading partner, walk out of the room. And the press is cheering. Ask yourself who benefits from that. Not you. Not me. The people who benefit are the same ones who’ve been benefiting for thirty years while every factory in this country got shipped overseas.
The Salon piece, which Yahoo republished like it was scripture, leans hard on Tony Schwartz. That’s the ghostwriter who put Trump’s name on “The Art of the Deal” back in 1987 and has spent every waking moment since 2015 telling anyone with a microphone that he’s sorry. Schwartz told the New Yorker that if he wrote the book today he’d call it “The Sociopath.” Real stand-up guy, Tony. Spends eighteen months glued to the man, cashes the checks, builds his whole career on Trump’s name, and then discovers his conscience right when it’s most profitable to do so. That’s not remorse. That’s a career pivot. And the media treats it like prophecy.
Here’s what nobody in the Salon article wants to talk about. Jeremy Shapiro, some director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Washington Post that Trump’s bluffs worked for as long as they did because of the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.” Read that again. This isn’t about Trump’s personality. This is about a system that was already cracking. The diplomatic capital was already spent. Trump didn’t drain it. He just happened to be sitting in the chair when the account hit zero. But it’s easier to blame one man than to ask why every administration since Bush has been running the same playbook.
Samuel Phelps / DFAT (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThe article rattles off a list of world leaders who aren’t listening to Trump anymore. Iran won’t bend. Putin keeps fighting in Ukraine. Europe shrugged at the Greenland demands. Trading partners are ignoring the tariffs. And somehow this is all framed as Trump’s personal failure rather than what it actually is: the entire post-war order coming apart at the seams. That was going to happen no matter who sat in the Oval Office. The experts just needed a face to pin it on.
JD Vance, to his credit, reportedly mocked Carney for trying to “out-tough” Trump on trade. Good. At least someone in that building remembers which country they work for. Because the alternative is what we’re watching right now: a foreign leader slapping tariffs on American goods and the American press calling it a victory for democracy.
Carney walked away from the table. Fine. That’s his call. He’s got his own problems up there. But when the dust settles and the tariffs hit, the people who actually feel it won’t be the pundits or the prime ministers. It’ll be the guy on the line in Ohio and the farmer in Saskatchewan. And neither one of them is being asked what they think about any of this. They never are.
The whole thing smells. Trump talks tough, Carney talks tougher, the markets twitch, and the media sells it as a morality play. Meanwhile the same people who shipped your job to Mexico in 1994 are writing columns about how Trump ruined diplomacy. The sheer nerve of it is almost something to admire.
Almost.