Trump’s lunatic tariff war

At this point, one has to pity Prime Minister Mark Carney. His best efforts to approach the Trump tariff issue with calm resolve have so far reaped nothing but a continuing blizzard of contradictory, increasing ludicrous, lie-studded social media posts, which are apparently how U.S. President Donald Trump chooses to announce major policy changes.

Carney’s decision to cancel the digital services tax, which would have seen much-needed billions dumped into Canada’s coffers by internet giants that completely avoid paying taxes on income they pull in from Canadian users of their services, did not in the least pacify Trump.

Nor would any other concession Canada should make to try and reach a sane conclusion to Trump’s tariff mania.

Because, and here’s the thing that continues to go unsaid, the mania is the key. The man is flat-out nuts. He follows no logic. He is not rational. He is not about to listen to any form of actual reason from anybody, though he’s happy to embrace increasingly insane advice from his batch of rabid uber-right-wing enablers. They play perfectly into his vicious, revenge-driven paranoia.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, in his first interview with CBC radio since he lost his seat in the recent election, noted he wants to hear Carney’s plan to put a stop to the “tariff chaos.” He followed up by saying it had been foolish of Carney to announce deadlines for reaching a revised trade agreement, since that just gives the other side the hammer — they can wait out the clock the Canadians have set.

That Carney announcing publicly a plan to end the “tariff chaos” would similarly provide the U.S. with even more ammunition in the tariff war (should Trump even notice and give credence to such a plan) did not seem to occur to Poilievre. Nor, apparently, did it occur to him that such a plan is clearly impossible.

The seatless Tory leader is assuming a level of rationality in Trump that simply does not exist. To be fair, if Poilievre is taking his analysis cues from the media, he’s not getting the picture at all, since the media continues to labour under the dangerously misguided assumption that there is some form of twisted logic to Trump’s lunatic maunderings.

Trump tweets, the media scrambles to assemble panels of experts who solemnly parse the blathering, attempt assessments of possible economic outcomes, and studiously avoid noting the one glaringly obvious conclusion: Trump is both demented and increasingly visibly senile, and that’s an unfortunate — and completely unmanageable — combination of characteristics in an American president and world leader.

One media voice, that of Lawrence O’Donnell at MSNBC, has been yelling this fact out for months now, though he recently added to his litany of criticism of Trump that the man is also remarkably stupid. He has begun tossing into his nightly tirades a series of pepper shots at the White House press corps, who, he notes, either don’t understand that it’s Americans who will pay the billions Trump wants to reap — or have consciously chosen not to question the lie every time Trump boasts his tariffs will bring in billions from other nations. Just once, O’Donnell moaned last week, he would like to hear a member of that press corps ask ”sir, why are you lying to the American people about the fact that they will be paying the costs of those tariffs?” Ideally, O’Donnell would love to see that question asked over and over, by every White House press corps member.

Ain’t gonna happen, of course.

Media commentators and expert pundits, who months ago did point that fact out during the initial tariff salvos, have given up correcting the whopping lie. Occasionally, a new pundit will express the thought, be ignored by the other assembled panel members, and give it up as a hopeless effort at communicating a shred of truth.

Faced with the constant whipsaw of tariff threats from Trump, it would be perfectly understandable — and to some of us, perfectly forgivable — if Carney and his negotiating team bravely soldiering on to try and reach some form of agreement under this crazed onslaught, were also to give it up as a hopeless effort. Even if, through some bizarre miracle, an agreement were to be reached, we all know Trump could simply decide to ignore it, as he has ignored every aspect of American and international law, every ethic, every bit of decency left in America, since he was elected.

And he will continue to do so.

For all any of us know, Carney is fully aware of the hopelessness of the cause, but is keeping up a public charade while he quietly goes about severing all the possible economic ties with the U.S. that can be severed, replacing them as best can be done by trade relationships with any nation but Trump’s.

We do know two things for sure: Carney is undeniably smarter than Trump.

And he’s not crazy.

Judy Waytiuk is a retired Winnipeg journalist.