Bulwark Takes - The Day America Lost Everything

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger break down Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s historic declaration—the end of the American-led global order. With markets plunging, retaliatory tariffs announced, and $2 trillion wiped out in a day, America’s shift toward isolationism has triggered an economic and geopolitical crisis unlike anything we’ve witnessed.

Hello, everyone. I'm JVL from the Bulwark, here with my colleague Andrew Egger on the day that the age of America ended. It's been something. Eggs? Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney went and gave some remarks today, and they were sober and serious-minded and clear eyed and absolutely frank in a way that I think we're not used to seeing in international politics. Let's give a listen. The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades, is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year

period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and well, this is a tragedy. It is also the new reality. So, you know, he speaks clearly. The age of American leadership in these things is over. And it's a tragedy, but it is reality. Can you think of anything in our lifetimes like this? It's no, is the answer. It's difficult to kind of express

the feeling of seeing a speech like that where here's a guy who is expressing values that until five or 10 minutes ago made him not only, and his country, not only simpatico with the United States approach, but conducive to American prosperity, our prosperity, you and me and everybody watching this, at least in America, and around the world, and peace around the world. These were values, these are are values that until about five months ago or five minutes ago or whatever you want to say we're like we're with it we're cool

like this is this is the stuff on which this is all built this is the bedrock that makes you and i fast friends canada and america and that now a blink of an eye later are being marshaled as a perfectly rational and reasonable basis for a speech where he's saying, we still feel this way. There's a lot of countries around the world that still feel this way. We still want an international order. We would still love to be able to piece together and keep with duct tape and spit as much of this as we can keep going, going. But it's not going to be the same. It's not going to be lossless.

And it's not going to be with us in the front of the pack. And for now, it's with us as specifically the adversary of it. And it's just, I mean, it's so unmooring. And it's so astonishing. And it's so unsettling. And how can you fault him? And how can you fault any world leader who responds in this way? And that, I mean, when we got on this morning, you and me and Will, we taped a video right at the morning bell of the stock exchange. And here we are right at the end. And we were kind of like,

well, you know, who knows what the actual day will bring. Stocks were really down then. They're really down now. They're down even further now. It's the worst day since COVID shut down the entire economy. The S&P 500 down nearly 5%. Yeah, and... And this is after a month of slow correction in which it all went down like another 5% over the last month. So this is a shock following a correction.

And what's astonishing about that is that even this even this is markets still holding out some kind of hope that that this is going to be some kind of tactic from trump some kind of bank shot ruse um but and and and and just kind of the direct damage of our own tariffs again like like not even pricing in yet a lot of the stuff that i I mean that was the point of his speech is that Canada is announcing retaliatory tariffs against our – against this completely unprovoked trade war that Donald Trump has decided to launch. That is going to hurt us too. I mean like there's no winning. I mean we are all going to find out so, so quickly. It's not going to take all that much time for these things to unravel. Like for the

smaller tariffs, for the stuff Trump did in his first term, for instance, it was a drag factor on the economy and people wrote about it and there were the think pieces and there were the economic analyses and the lost productivity and all these things. But like the arrow is still pointing up, businesses adjusted, all those things were relatively well accounted for by the fact that we just had growth up until COVID, right? And so people didn't, it's hard to compare increasing prosperity versus a potential other path of slightly faster increasing prosperity. But you look, I mean, you look across just everything in the economy. Now there's no place for any of this slack to go.

It's just carnage. It's just waste. It's just value and productivity and investment and blood, sweat, and tears that have been poured into building things that the work and all of the will to build all of these all of this mutual cooperation uh uh that was to everybody's benefit all around the world so it's it's really just astonishing to see two trillion dollars in american wealth evaporated today because of this two trillion dollars and uh know, I want to talk a little bit about the contractions going on. I want to talk about what really is sort of civilizational suicide. The American government is doing this to us. There wasn't some emergency. There was no collapse, no bubble popped. It wasn't, you know, not like that. And the government has decided it's going to, first of all, it's going to destroy the government itself. which I really think can only make sense if you believe that their goal is to establish

firmer executive control over the government so that they don't have to let go of it. That's the only possible way in which any of it makes sense. Unless you then just say, they're so dumb, they have no idea what they're doing. Right? So that is the, you know, tens of thousands of federal workers just sort of locked out overnight of their jobs, the cutting off of all these government functions, sending people with no security clearances into the Social Security code base. I mean, it's insane. Also done at the same time that the American government, Marco Rubio was in Brussels today chastising the Europeans and now demanding that they spend 5% of their GDP on defense. And this is amazing because there was a story yesterday where the Europeans are starting to increase defense spending. But as they're doing it, they are stipulating that their defense spending is going to be spent at home because

they want to prop up and get going homegrown defense industries. And the American government lost its fucking mind over this. There's a Reuters story about this where the Americans are like, no, no, we want you spending your defense dollars on American weapons and contracts. It's like, what did you fucking idiots think was going to happen? You thought that you were going to tell Denmark that you were going to maybe use military force to annex territory? You were going to tell the Europeans and the NATO allies that, you know, they were on their own? You thought you were going to vote with Belarus and Russia and North Korea at the UN?

And then you're going to demand that these people buy American weapons? Eggs, are they this stupid? I mean, you get to a point at which it almost feels like a luxury or like pointless or anything to even do analysis, like to sit here, like you and me, and do analysis about it. Because it's like, or anything to even do analysis, like to sit here like you and me and do analysis about it. Because it's like, like what, what can you even extract? Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it is a stupidity. Is it malice? It's like an Ouroboros of these two things constantly spiraling around each other and,

and, and dragging one another down to like places that we haven't seen before. I mean, like, like, yes, like, like, like no one could expect no one. I mean, like they're, they're out of their minds. They're out of their, they're completely off their rockers. They've, I mean, I don't know, maybe one, maybe one cool way that you can, that you can get European defense spending up as a portion of GDP is to crash the European economy, just shrink the pie, you know, like, like mission accomplished guys, like you, you, uh, however much they're spending on defense is now, uh, five to 6% larger as a percent of GDP than it was this morning. Um, so that's cool. Uh, I don't know. It's just, what, what, what can you, what can you say? What

can you, you, you hope they'll let us back in someday. You know what I mean? Like, like not even as, not as the, the leaders of this coalition of liberal democracies around the world. You just hope they'll let us come back and play ball. You know what I mean? Well, and this this gets us to the the part that I I find. I don't think Americans have got their heads around this yet. There is no going back from this. Donald Trump tomorrow said, my bad. I didn't.

You know what? That scamp, Peter Navarro, he didn't explain to me what this tariff nonsense was. And I have fired him. And those tariffs are off. Very sorry, everybody. Big oopsie. It wouldn't matter. Because the American people voted this guy in.

They did it while he was absolutely campaigning on doing all of this stuff. And Europe now sees the character of the American people. They can't create a global economic order based on us. We are not reliable. And the wants and desires of our stupid, illiterate, unserious, decadent people, which is us, that's America. Vladimir Putin had us pegged you can't base long term plans on a people who will choose this and you sure as hell

economic plans are one thing you sure as hell can't make security plans and there are an astonishing number of people who would hear you say all of that and essentially say oh no like there goes those guys crying over their vanished norms again, you know, sobbing because, you know, we're not the world's

policemen anymore. Those aren't our problems anymore. You know, America first. That's kind of a stock response. The degree to which Trump was insulated in his first term, the degree to which, you know, we were playing with training wheels on, bowling with the bumpers up on all of his earlier kind of abortive attempts to do trade war stuff, to meddle with NATO, all these things, just because of the reservoir of faith and confidence

that all of our allies had in America. And the way that they were willing to nod along and play along and treat it all as a blip. Because anything can happen once, right? What is the old, you know, like once is a random event and twice is enemy fire, right? Like when it happens twice

and there's no, you know, there was no hiding the football it's not like trump campaigned on one thing and now is doing something different like it's this is who we are and but and not just that i mean the the fact that they are now forced to really grapple with that in a way that they weren't before means that this is going to be painful for us in a way that it was not before yeah i mean like the like the whole global economy is built around our currency for a reason. And that buys us everything in terms of being able to do, you know, deficit spending and just being able to like live, trade everywhere.

Like the soft power that's involved with that is immense. Who knows? Donald Trump is out there for one thing right now, deliberately trying to weaken the U.S. dollar because it makes people want to sell us their products more and it makes us want to buy. I mean like – so that's one thing. I mean just as an economic matter, that is a policy aim of his. But also just – I mean China would love to be the global currency, the currency in which we do all our business. And this, you know, maybe abandoning the international order that we are, not just economically, but kind of strategically and as a value system at the vanguard of, in terms of like real

economic, like hard tax, like, you know, we're stripping everything away. We're abandoning all of our sort of moral pretenses about all these stuff that we're going to do around the world. Even just as dollars and cents, it's the dumbest fucking thing you could imagine in turn and and this is like can i say one other thing because like i've been thinking about this we we all talk about like like touching the stove right like ah here you go america like like you made your decision and now you're gonna have to suffer front for it to a certain degree and maybe that'll shake some sense into you. This has never been my favorite argument.

Maybe I'm caricaturing it a little bit. It's not – to me, the pain that is coming will not make anything better for anybody. More suffering heaped – like the problems that we have in America right now are basically inequality and decadence in terms of the way that people view the economy, right? You have some people who see other people getting way ahead of them. And even though, you know, like world historically they're doing okay, that doesn't feel very good when you're falling behind and everybody – and you see other people thriving and especially some people really, really thriving. That foments discontent. But also just a complete lack of any kind. I mean, like the fact that we chose this path as America because we were unhappy with our

economy, which was by far the best economy in the world post-COVID, like that's decadence right there. So it's those two things. But like making people hurt more is not going to make them more generous, more liberal, like more willing to actually think these things through. It's going to make them angrier. It's going to make them more generous, more liberal, like more, more willing to actually think these things through. It's going to make them angrier. It's going to make them more paranoid.

It's going to make them fall in on themselves. It's going to make them likelier to listen to Donald Trump when he goes and starts trying to find somebody else to blame, you know? So it, so that's, that's, what's cool. That's, what's exciting about all of this. It's not going to get better. So Andrew, you're hitting me where I live because I have been a touch-the-stove guy. And

one thing that is very uncomfortable for me, but also is historically pretty true, when people get hardship, the reaction to that is not always clear-eyed rationality.

Right? The reaction to things falling apart and losing your job is not always, huh, let me get out my spectacles here. Let me, uh, boy, so this tariff policy turned out to be really bad for macroeconomics. And this is why I lost my job at Whirlpool.

Okay, well, I gotta sort of start reconsidering my price. That's not, what's going to be. It's going to be like gypsies. Lost my job because of gypsies, right? Or whoever is put forward. This is how, this is where demagogues thrive on this shit. This is their life's blood.

And this is why I also don't really fully buy the idea that, well, economic calamity will finally doom Trump. Maybe, maybe that'll happen. But also maybe it creates a situation where he can say, emergency, gotta assume more emergency powers. He can blame more Haitians or something. I don't know. Or the globalists or, you know, the other countries. The Europeans stabbed us in the back. It's Denmark's fault, and that's why we have to go get green

or anything. Or it's Canada's fault. Canada did it. Exactly. And I don't know, like, what we've seen of American voters for the last decade, maybe they'll buy it. I don't know. Like, I'm not comfortable saying, oh, 51% of Americans will absolutely reject that nonsense.

My last thing is. Empires can only die by suicide. Right. This is I mean, it's not universally true, but it's typically how it how it goes. It's not often that you can pinpoint the actual day, but I think we got it, right? I mean, this was, it was Liberation Day. It was April 2nd, 2025, and that's the day that Donald Trump decided to blow up the global financial order and remove America from its place of world leadership. And it's an amazing thing to witness history. And it's almost never fun. Yeah, it feels great, right? The may you live in interesting times thing.

I guess I might push back a bit on, I don't think we're like cold on the slab. You know what I mean? This is horrible. This is I mean? This is horrible. This is grievous. This is unbelievable. The leadership of other countries are correct to go ahead without us right now.

Oh, yeah. It is a hard road that is being placed in front of those people. If we were able to somehow shrug it off, move in a different direction. People have changed. Political movements have bounced in weird directions before. It is not completely inconceivable

that our somewhat crippled, but still insanely powerful and economically hefty nation will bounce thermostatically in a giant way away from this. What I was talking about before, I mean, Trump's base is not doing that. We have no idea what's going to – like, they are going to continue to fall in on themselves like a dying star over all of this stuff. But, like, if you're talking median voter, maybe Democrats are swept to, like – they have a – they undergo a transformation,

and they rise to the occasion, and they smash Republicans in the midterms, and some visionary new figure is swept in who is able to reforge all these alliances. Who knows? Like, that could happen. I'm not going to say that that can't happen. But from, I will, I guess I have to agree with you from the vantage point of this moment that it is, I mean, it's the Roger Scruton quote, right? Like, good things are easily destroyed, not easily created, and there has been an astonishing amount of destruction in a 24-hour period while they have cheerleaded what's happening every step of the way. It's really astonishing.

Global tariffs, stock market collapse, the Canadian prime minister declaring the end of the American order. Two trillion dollars of wealth evaporated in 24 hours. And it's been 73 days. 73 days, my friends. Andrew, thanks for sitting in with me. Guys, subscribe to the channel. I mean, I guess I can say hit like, but I don't know why you would. It's not good.

Don't hit dislike. That doesn't help anybody out. We're going to be here trying to fight through the wreckage of all of this. Good luck, America.