Front Burner - What did Reagan really believe about tariffs?

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Why has U.S. President Donald Trump suspended trade talks with Canada? Why did the U.S. ambassador to Canada level an expletive-laced tirade at Ontario's trade representative, in front of more than 200 people? Why is Trump's treasury secretary accusing the Ontario government of running a psy-op?Because of a 60-second ad, featuring clips of former president Ronald Reagan explaining why he thinks tariffs — Trump's self-professed "favourite word" — are bad economic policy.Rick Perlstein has written extensively about the history of American conservative politics, including the book Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980. He breaks down what Reagan actually believed about tariffs and free trade, and why bringing up the spectre of Reagan — one of the most sacred figures in American conservatism — has caused so much chaos.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Of the seven great nations that make up the G7, it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca and ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson.

So if you were about one of 200 people invited to this event for the Canadian American Business Council in Ottawa this week, it sounds like you had a very good chance of witnessing the U.S. ambassador to Canada, absolutely really. ripping into Ontario's trade representative in what has been described as an expletive-filled tirade. Why was he dropping F-bombs? Well, because of the now infamous ad put out by the Ontario government, quoting former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The ad that was, according to Trump, fraudulent, and some kind of foreign interference.

The ad Trump blamed for blowing up the trade talks. Canada lied. I mean, what they did was terrible. They made up a fake statement by President Reagan. We have a deal right now that's very good for us. Any deal that would have been made would have been better for them than the one they have right now. That's why I'm surprised they did this. Look, I think we all know that these negotiations may have been blown up, ad or no ad.

But today, we wanted to look at what it was about the ad that apparently set the president off. Why does it matter what Ronald Reagan believed or didn't believe about free trade? How is Reagan's legacy looming over or at odds with the moment? modern Republican Party. I can think a few people better to do this with than Rick Pearlstein. He is the author of a number of books on the history of the conservative movement in the United States, including his most recent book, Reagan Land, America's right turn, 1976 to 1980. Rick, it is...

So great to have you on Front Burner. Yeah, this is a really great subject. It brings a lot of very, very important things together. So let's start with this ad that the government of Ontario ran. And I'll just give people a little bit more info on it if they haven't seen it yet. It is edited together from this radio address that Reagan gave on April 25, 1987. It's just Reagan's voice and he's making the argument that imposing tariffs on foreign markets is not the right thing for America and American jobs long term. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars.

The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers and less and less competition. So soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens. Market shrink and collapse, businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs. When you saw the ad which Trump has flagged as fraudulent, what did you think? Well, right off the top that, you know, Trump can kind of plead ignorance, right? And it's not a very learned man, but that it is absolutely fundamentally true that this is what Ronald Reagan believed. And it's not only the case that Ronald Reagan believed it, it's what, you know, 99% of responsible, you know, economists believe, right?

Donald Trump has an economist named Peter Navarro, the guy he relies on for these policies. He's such a fringe figure that in the book he wrote, making these arguments that, you know, tariffs are the most important thing for a nation's prosperity. He literally made up a source that was kind of scrambling around the letters of his name to quote, you know, as his authority. So there's, you know, no intellectual justification for Donald Trump's position. and Reagan was known as the Great Communicator and he communicated quite brilliantly something that was very near and dear to him because he was someone who was profoundly affected

his family was profoundly affected by the Great Depression. His dad was wiped out and one of the causes of the Great Depression most economists would agree was a punitive trade war, the Smoot-Hawley Terror. The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity.

Now, it hasn't always been easy. There are those in the Congress, just as there were back in the 30s, who want to go for the quick political advantage, who risk America's prosperity for the sake of a short-term appeal to some special interest group. And, you know, not only that, but his intellectual background in economics, he basically believed in. I mean, it's almost not even libertarian economics. It's just mainstream economics that, you know, countries do different things well, right? That countries have to be able to trade with each other in order to achieve a shared prosperity that trade is a win-win.

There are ins and outs that involve, you know, sometimes there are bumps in the road, right? We might get a little more deeply into the context with that particular speech that was quoted in the commercial. But then along, comes Donald Trump, and then along comes even more disturbingly the Ronald Reagan Foundation, right? Which is the group, you want to talk about that? I do want to talk about the foundation. But first, let's talk a little bit more about the context of the speech because, you know, I think the kernel of truth here that people are pointing at is that when the speech was made, it was made because Reagan had actually just slapped duties. So tariffs, in another word, on Japanese semiconductors.

At the time, he was worried about the rising power of Japan. Now, imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take, that over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer. But the Japanese semiconductors were a special case. We had clear evidence that Japanese companies were engaging in unfair trade practices that violated an agreement. So I think this is what people are talking about

when they're saying that the speech was taken out of context and selectively edited because he was using tariffs. Yeah, that's intellectually irresponsible in the extreme, right? There are times in limited circumstances when, again, most economists

and most policymakers who believe in what's known as free trade, which is a complicated thing, but let's call it free trade for the purposes of this discussion. say that sometimes tariffs can be useful and called for, you know, in cases where both countries have factories that produce a thing that's being argued over. And one side believes the other side is acting unfairly, you know, whether it's, you know, kind of manipulating

supply or currency or all sorts of things. And that is this one-time intervention, you know, you can kind of do a shot across the bow. And everyone can emerge from this without the kind of escalation that Reagan talks about in the commercial. When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. This is very, very different, you know, really just chalk and cheese, completely different situation from how Donald Trump and his policymakers think about tariffs.

which is that you can use them all the time in order to achieve a zero-sum advantage for your country. And then it can happen in industries where America does not have industrial capacity, right? So kind of tactically speaking, if we say, you know, Canada is flooding the market with widgets, but we don't have any way to make any widgets, if we just, you know, place a tariff on Canadian, widgets, all we're doing is increasing the price of widgets with no advantage whatsoever for the United States. So, you know, there's, you know, kind of a technical economic argument that shows that, you know, the ad, generally speaking, both for what Ronald Reagan believes and what most responsible economists and policymakers believe was accurate. And by claiming that it was

out of context and distorting, that is the kind of thing that we see in, you know, authoritarian dictatorships, just lie after lie after lie. Just before you and I started talking, I was scrubbing through the entire speech, and I just, it's probably worth noting here. You know, he does basically frame it as these duties being a step that he was loath to take. And he was doing it because at the time, he said that Japan was not enforcing a trade agreement on semiconductors specifically, and that it was like an unusual case of leveraging trade policies to the point that you were making earlier. So if it's an out of context quote, if you see the full context, it only makes Reagan's point stronger and out weaker.

But let me push back a little bit because there are other arguments that people are making that like beyond this semiconductor stuff, Reagan's actual policies were more complicated than his rhetoric. For example, that he also put tariffs on motorcycles from Japan to just protect Harley Davidson and that he also pushed the Japanese as I understand it to set up factories. in the U.S. instead of exporting from Japan, Robert Lightheiser, a Reagan trade official who served as Trump's trade negotiator from 2017 to 2021, wrote in his memoir that, quote, President Reagan distinguished between free trade in theory and free trade in practice. And how would you respond to that? That's certainly true. He was a very practical politician. I could take up all the time allotted for this segment to explain ways in which Ronald Reagan often, you know, honored his principles in the breach, for example, both as governor and president

instigating high tax hikes, right? But that doesn't take away from the fact that this is an argument about what Ronald Reagan believed as an ideal. He believed that tariffs were a necessary evil or he was a hypocrite sometimes. That's fine. You know, if this is an argument about hypocrisy, that's a different kind of argument. If it's an argument that Ronald Reagan, beliefs are being distorted, that's just not true. Let's do the foundation now. So that you mentioned before, this is the Reagan Foundation, which is a nonprofit created by Reagan himself with the stated goal of advancing his legacy and principles.

And they come out and they say in a statement, that the ad used selective audio and video and quote misrepresents the presidential radio address. They even went so far as to suggest legal action. What do you make of the foundation's response here? Yeah, this is where this particular technical discussion opens out into something that's much more profound enough concern to all of us, Canadians, Americans, citizens of the world, people who care about decency and truth, right? So the way something like the Ronald Reagan Foundation works is each president basically has a library, a museum, you know, often in their birthplace.

In Ronald Reagan's case, it's in a town called Simi Valley. And the National Archives runs the kind of public function and a foundation runs the museum that is dedicated to elevating their image in the eyes of history. Right. So it's, you know, not particularly objective sort of organization. But what is fascinating about this is that these people whose job it is, supposedly, I presume they have a fiduciary value as board members, right, to uphold what Ronald Reagan stood for and believed are lying. So Ronald Reagan said what he said in the commercial and believed it at the bottom of his heart, and they're saying he believed something the opposite of what he actually believed in the service of a president of the United States. who clearly aspires to be a dictator, right? Right now, we have a case before the Supreme Court

and whether he's even allowed to unilaterally impose these tariffs, and it completely betrays the fundamental point of our Constitution, which is that taxation happens, initiates in the House of Representatives and is controlled by the legislative branch. So that's fantastical. What Donald Trump believes is not true. The Ronald Reagan Foundation by saying that Ronald Reagan would have disagreed with Ronald Reagan is doing something that's not true. And the fact that they're kind of trimming their sales towards a lie presented by the aspiring dictator really is a pretty powerful emblem of how Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have completely consumed all canons of truth.

decency for all these important institutions within the Republican Party. It really is something out of George Orwell's 1984. Do you think that they are worried about what could happen to them if they didn't respond like that? Well, I mean, I don't know who the people running the foundation are individually, but a name that comes to mind is Ed Meese, who was called Reagan's Brain. He was his attorney general. He was his cabinet secretary when he was governor, is someone who is completely all in for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, even at times when they go against what Ronald Reagan said and believed. So what they're doing is they're willing to sacrifice their duty as legatees or Ronald Reagan's legacy in order to serve the power of the guy,

who's in charge now, right? Why are they doing this? Why does anyone, you know, trims their sales towards powerful forces as against the principles they're sworn to uphold? I mean, we see it every day. This is the story of liberty versus tyranny. And, you know, they're basically taking the side of tyranny. You mentioned that Supreme Court case. Trump has also blamed us, blamed Canada in one true social post for running the ad to interfere with that U.S. Supreme Court decision. Well, and, you know, to make an argument about a Supreme Court deliberation, in fact, is not interference. It's an argument. It's speech. And in America, we're supposed to believe that you can make any argument about any judicial proceeding. And that is not only legitimate, but encouraged. Canada is making an argument. Possibly they are trying to influence the Supreme Court. That's fine. That's, you know, that's their prerogative, right? And the fact that Donald Trump would respond this way, maybe on some level,

suggest a guilty conscience that he, you know, knows he's intellectually and politically in the wrong. But, you know, that's a very scary part of this entire situation, too, in which it's one of these many, many test case that have made it up to the Supreme Court in which the court that's supposed to say what the Constitution says and what it means is willing to bend every previous intellectual principle towards a monarchical conception of what the president can and can't too. This is very, very basic. Congress has the power to tax. The president, right, has seized that power. He is directly defying the spirit of the constitution. He is claiming the power to do so by inventing a national security emergency and factually wrong. In fact, you know, if anything,

the national security of America is profoundly harmed by sundering the ties between the United States and Canada and weakening the American economy, as, you know, his tariffs will do. So, you know, yes, this will be a very carefully watched case. And many of these cases so far, the conservative majority, six to three majorians in the media court, have underwent the most astonishing gymnastics to let Trump be able to exercise prerogatives that the people who wrote the Constitution directly did not want the president ever to be able to do. So the stakes being so high, you know, you can see why he was so defensive in this case. Yeah, accusing us of foreign interference. I think Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, called it a sigh up, a sly up.

This is a kind of propaganda against U.S. citizens. You know, it's Psiops. Why would the government of Ontario, I'm told that they've spent $75 million on these ads to come across the U.S. border. So what was the purpose of that other than to sway public opinion? The other argument that I've heard people make in their attempts to try and explain why they've gone so nuts over this advertisement is that it's Reagan, right? This is a figure who has long been very beloved in the conservative movement. I feel like you are the perfect person to explain why using Reagan's words against the administration's center peace policy tariffs could be considered such a slap in the face rhetorically. Right. It's a really interesting historical, political, cultural discussion because, yes, Ronald Reagan has always been, you know, the towering figure.

in the Republican Party who, you know, brought the party back from ignominy, you know, after Watergate, and set the terms for the American political discussion for the next several generations. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation, to limit ourselves to small dreams. We're not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline.

And you get into some very tricky waters when you point to the fact that Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump fundamentally differ on some very big questions about the relationship between different states when it came to trade and also different states when it came to immigration. And in my book, Reaganland, one of the things I did was I researched the speech that he gave when he announced his presidential run in November of 1979.

We live on a continent whose three countries possess the assets to make it the strongest, most prosperous, and self-sufficient area on earth. And one of the big features of the speech at its center was his impassioned advocacy for some kind of trading union between Mexico and Canada and the United States. A North American accord would permit achievement of that potential in each country beyond that which I believe any of us, strong as we are, could accomplish in the presence or the absence I should say of such cooperation. In fact, the key to our own future security may lie in both Mexico and Canada becoming much

stronger countries than they are today. And it was, you know, the exact same kind of rhetoric we heard in the commercial that basically we should cunder these barriers between our three countries. And it was a very fascinating document because not only does he talk about free trade, and in fact, this vision was realized in the form of NAFTA, but he also talks about the free movement of peoples across borders, right? And he's talking about immigration. And, you know, it's a important not to go too far to this and make Ronald Reagan seem like this, you know, great universalist humanitarian because many of his immigration policies, for example, involving Haitian refugees were quite cruel and restrictive. But when it came to what we're talking about

now, which is, you know, poor Mexican families coming to America to experience the bounty that America had to offer, he loved that, right? I mean, he fetishized that. When he talks, about America as a shining city on a hill, that was what he was talking about. These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow. They are not Jews or Christians, conservatives or liberals, or Democrats or Republicans. They're Americans, awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still a shining city on a hill. So, you know, when he talked about kind of the free trade area of the Americas, he was talking about, first of all, he was speaking to his business constituency that frankly wanted, you know, cheap labor and wanted to be able to not only locate their factories where it was most economically efficient for them, but they have people coming to work in their factories in the United States who, you know, were hungry for, you know, wages that might be a little lower than Americans would enjoy. But he also was very idealistic about it, right? And when he, you know, gave that. speech. I mean, it was literally the center of his presentation of the nation about why he should be

president. And it was precisely the opposite of everything Donald Trump believes when it comes to the relationship between the United States and Canada. I've spoken of a shining city all my political life. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. a city with pre-ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. It's sneaky, underhanded. They don't want us to talk about it.

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between. Intact insurance. I wonder if you could just compare and contrast these two leaders and their administration's a little bit more for me. I'd be curious to hear how, like, where you would even take it. Right. I mean, obviously my book is part of a four book series and the Reagan book is a thousand pages. So, you know, it's a complicated subject. But I would say that there are continuity you know, it's like history 101. History is a study of continuity and change. And I think the continuity is Reagan could have very monarchical ideas about what he was allowed to do as president. I mean, the whole point of the Iran-Contra scandal was that Congress passed a law saying America could not send money or arms to the anti-communist rebels in the nation of

Nicaragua. And the White House did it anyway. With off the books money that they earned selling illegally selling arms to Iran. So it was a serious scandal. And, you know, it was never directly tied to Ronald Reagan personally, partially because a guy named Oliver North shredded stacks and stacks of documents. So we'll never really know what he knew and what he didn't know. But it certainly was in the spirit of what Ronald Reagan believed, which said he should be able to, you know, fight against the communists who are going to be in Texas any day now. It was equally as fantastical as the kind of things that Q&M believes, right? So Ronald Reagan was not the same guy and Donald Trump is the crazy guy, right? They both had insane aspects.

And they both believed that they should be able to do whatever they wanted about the things that were most passionate to them. Now, on the other hand, the conservatism that Ronald Reagan represented was not. quite as fanatically nationalist as Donald Trump. And, of course, they had a very different feeling tone associated with their politics, right? Ronald Reagan was associated with, you know, kind of this bright, shining, smiling optimism. Let us begin an era of national renewal. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Right.

We shall be as a city on a hill. And Donald Trump is associated with. this apocalypticism, right? The enemy is at the gates and we're suffering American carnage and we have to destroy our enemy. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries, making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. And, you know, Ronald Reagan also had that in his politics, too, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s when he took on student protesters.

So when I was at a Donald Trump rally in New Hampshire in 2016, and he was just kind of entering the scene, I saw a guy walking around with a T-shirt, which had an actual photograph of Ronald Reagan on it, giving the finger to a bunch of student protesters. Right? So this kind of like American carnage, F you did the enemy thing was, you know, part of Reaganism too. Yeah. Right. There was a joke, what, you know, what'll, what'll Tehran be like, you know, 10 seconds after Reagan's inauguration? It'll be green and it'll glow, right? He's going to nuke Iran for taking American hostages. So it's, you know, not as simple as he was the nice guy and Trump was the mean guy. But then you get into the complex situation of where does Ronald Reagan sit, right, within the Republican culture of. today. Yes. And in this MAGA. Yeah, and within MAGA. And, you know, my sense is that for many

years now, kind of the cult of Reagan within the Republican Party has kind of faded into the background, much in the way, you know, after 30 or 40 years, the cult of John F. Kennedy kind of faded into the background, you know, for for the Democrats. And, you know, I mean, like just for an example, you know, Bill O'Reilly, who's definitely a. figure, American broadcaster, associated with Fox News until he was run out for improprieties there, you know, once wrote a book in which he pointed out that Ronald Reagan in his second term was probably suffering from dementia. Right. So that was kind of like a straw in the wind. You know, you can now criticize Ronald Reagan, right? And, you know, now you hear a lot of people pointing out that,

you know, I noted that, you know, Reagan was very impassioned about immigration, from Mexico. There was a fascinating movement in the 1980 primary campaign in Texas, where him and George H.W. Bush were kind of competing who could say nicer things about families coming from Mexico. In response to a question about why are all these illegals from Mexico invading Texas schools? And they both kind of talked this kid down and said, no, this is great. In fact, we should be giving more money to Mexico. That's the way to keep less people from coming here. and making them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit,

and when they go on to go back, they can go back, and they can cross, and open the border both ways, and I think we could have a fine relationship, and it was... Right, that wasn't exactly, let's build a wall and make, you know, Mexico pay for it. And then in 1986, very famously, Reagan signed an immigration reform that gave amnesty to millions of Mexicans who were here illegally and said, look, you know, you're contributing to the society, practically speaking, you are Americans in the same way that I, Ronald Reagan, am an American whose ancestors came here from Ireland because they were starving. And, you know, you hear people in the Trump orbit who know about that saying, we love Reagan, but that was

his biggest mistake. Yeah, that's so interesting. I know he has not been around, obviously, to wash the rise of Trump and his political career. But, you know, just as someone who's written a thousand page book about Reagan, what do you think he would have thought about all of this, not just the free trade stuff, but all of it? Yeah. So Reagan was very different from Donald Trump in the following way. He was very aware that his views that he held in his heart of,

hearts were too extreme for kind of mass consumption, right? And he always had the wisdom to keep people around him who kind of edited what he said, right? And, you know, when I wrote my book, another fascinating document I found was, you know, a set of letters that his aides wrote for him when he was preparing his presidential campaign that he would sign. And they would always be to these kind of mainstream figures like New York Times columnists and, you know, history professors and they were basically designed to make him sound as mainstream as possible. And I found another set of letters that were the ones that he dictated to his secretary that were to his friends and he would often sound crazy. Right. He would sound, yeah, like a like a like a like a like a like a like a like a like a like a

like a Q&N supporter, right? There was one in which he said, oh, well, if you actually read the Bible, Armageddon is coming soon. And so this is what we have to do in the Middle East, right? So what would he think of Donald Trump? I think that presidents do not just get to kind of choose the positions and policies that they want from a catalog and then force them on the nation. They have to work within a political context. And I think in many ways, the Republican Party and the Republican Party and the political, political culture has become so accepting of a far-right extremism that Ronald Reagan would have

been absolutely delighted. I think he would be, you know, absolutely delighted by the aggression with which, you know, a Mike Johnson and Donald Trump are, you know, shutting down programs that he considered violating the basic freedom of Americans. And yes, I'm talking about programs like food stamps, you know, which Ronald Reagan considered a great. fraud. He was the guy who said, well, when you go to the grocery store, you see these big strapping bucks paying for sirloin steaks with food stacks. That's practically a quote, right? So what would he say about Donald Trump? In some ways, I think he would, it's so interesting. Everyone wants to kind of go under time machine going to the past. I think it would be much

more interesting to bring figures from the past into the present. I'd be fascinated by what they would be baffled by. And I think, you know, he would be disgusted with, I think, Donald Trump's cruelty and goishness, but he would kind of admire his ability to achieve aims, which were his. I mean, in his inaugural speech, you know, January 20th, 1981, he, you know, looks at the nation in the eye and says, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. And seeing Donald Trump and his legatees like Russell Vote and Elon Musk, you know, just absolutely eviscerating the function of activist government to, you know, make America a freer and fairer place. They would, I think Ronald Reagan would be pretty impressed.

He'd be pretty impressed by his guts. Rick, that was such an interesting answer to that question. Thank you so much for this. It was such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon. Podcasts.