Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Embarrassed as Rupert Murdoch Calls Canada Trade War “Dumbest” in History
Episode Date: August 25, 2026Popok reports on Rupert Murdoch, once Trump's ally through ownership of Fox News, has not only won Trump's defamation case against him, but has turned on Trump and has his Wall Street Journal Editors... turn on Trump for his economic insanity of attacking Canada. Canada is now literally at "war" with the US on trade, and that's a bad thing for Trump's political fortunes and the American economy. Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@LegalAFMTN?sub_confirmation=1 Become a member of Legal AF YouTube community: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgZJZZbnLFPr5GJdCuIwpA/join Become a member of the Legal AF Substack: https://michaelpopok.substack.com/20off Follow Legal AF on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/legalafmtn.bsky.social Follow Michael Popok on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mspopok.bsky.social Subscribe to the Legal AF podcast feed here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/legal-af-by-meidastouch/id1580828595 Subscribe to the Intersection with Michael Popok podcast feed here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-intersection-with-michael-popok/id1818863274 Subscribe to Unprecedented with Michael Popok and Dina Doll podcast feed here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unprecedented-by-legal-af/id1867023089 Subscribe to Court of History with Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz podcast feed here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-court-of-history/id1867022920 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Do you know that there's a case that's literally called Trump versus Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch has now gotten his revenge,
as his Wall Street Journal just declared in an editorial opinion page article this morning that Donald Trump's war with Canada, his shooting himself in the foot, if not in other regions of his body, is the dumbest trade war revisited.
And this is the revenge of Rupert Murdoch and his papers.
He's winning the case in Florida in which Donald Trump sued Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch,
in the Wall Street Journal because they published articles about the now-confirmed Epstein birthday
book that had Donald Trump's submission pasted into it, some bawdy pornographic outline of a woman
30 years ago to Epstein on his 50th birthday.
They're win in that case. Judge Gales in Miami, Southern District of Florida, about to dismiss it, I'm sure, with prejudice as being not defamatory.
Putting that aside for a minute, you now have the trade war. This will go down in the annals of history as the dumbest, most deleterious, most destructive trade war in history created because Donald Trump wants to embarrass the Canadians.
We are so intertwined as an economy that it is not, it is not being hyperbolic to say that Canada fuels the American economy without the fuel line between Canada and the United States.
I mean, literally the fuel line, whether it's electric power grid, hydroelectric power, coal, raw materials, rare earth mineral,
steal things that we need from the north.
They literally, the Canadians, are the reason that we're able to reasonably cheaply run our
own economy and create our own gross domestic product.
No two ways about it.
Let me read to you here on Legal A.F to kick off Monday morning, we're doing the stories that
we need to at the intersection of law, politics, and the economy to show, and the political
aspect of it is Donald Trump has what the Wall Street Journal calls frigid poll numbers. I think that's
being kind. And he was hoping that the Canadians would give him a bailout, right? So he could be able to
brag about, oh, they want to be the 51st state and all this other, you know, stuff to undermine their
national pride. How's that working? Canada's Mark Carney Prime Minister strong. Donald Trump,
feeble, weak, lashing.
out at people he should be moving to embrace. There is no trade deficit between the U.S. and Canada.
Let me repeat that. There is no trade deficit. When you add in the service economy, we provide more
service exports to Canada. They import our services, financial services, law firms, consulting
firms, AI firms, technology firms, crypto firms, you name it. We are net ahead. It's almost equal.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal.
No, well, here's what Rupert Murdoch says out loud about Donald Trump today.
And if you don't think that voters for Donald Trump, we read the Wall Street Journal,
then you don't understand the financial markets and people who invest.
This is important.
This is how they end the article, the opinion of the editorial board.
Mr. Trump's latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods,
construction materials and manufacturing components.
Republicans are already getting pounded on the campaign trail over his tariffs and inflation.
One reason for Mr. Trump's frigid approval rating is that voters believe Mr. Trump is waging
blunderbust wars without a strategy.
And on trade, they are right.
Listen, I know somebody who's one degree separated from Steve Whitkoff, the special envoy to Iran
and one of Donald Trump's closest advisors in cryptocurrency partner.
And this mutual friend said to Steve Whitkoff,
so what's the plan?
What's the plan for a run?
And he literally looked at his watch and said, it's Tuesday.
There is no plan.
The plan is it's Tuesday.
What does that tell you?
And you have the same problem on the economic side
because you have low lights and featherweights
running the economic program for Donald Trump,
led by Donald Trump.
who effectively operates as his own trade representative.
Let me continue from the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper
to his editorial opinions under the dumbest trade war revisited.
The why it's revisited is because they wrote six months ago,
eight months ago about Donald Trump going after Mexico and Canada
and finding that to be ridiculous.
The best thing the Wall Street Journal said
could ever have happened to Donald Trump,
Donald Trump doesn't see it that way, is that the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs,
because it would give him some glimmer of hope of a successful economy.
Well, we know that hasn't happened because Trump has tried to issue new tariffs.
Here's what the opinion piece says.
To justify his new tariffs, Mr. Trump said Canada discriminated against the U.S.
by retaliating against his national security tariffs on autos.
He also claimed that Canada provinces had restricted sales of U.S. alcoholic beverages
in response to his emergency tariffs last year.
Yet U.S. distillers, the ones that make the alcohol,
begged Mr. Trump to hold off on his new Section 338 tariffs.
They know the longer Canada locks out American booze,
the tougher it will be to regain market share in the future.
And then in terms of who's winning the political war, it's carny.
Not by a little, by a lot.
I said in a recent hot take that almost 70% of candidates,
Canadians have rallied around Carney because they, you know, it's almost like time of war.
It's a time of tariff war.
They are uniting as a country.
They were pretty united to begin with, but they are uniting as a country to fight off a common enemy of the United States.
Almost 70% support Mark Carney against Donald Trump in the tariff war.
Somebody wrote in one of my messages that they're Canadian, they've seen polling that says,
the people that live in Quebec, in Quebec, 85% support Mark Carney in the war.
this fight. Here's what the Wall Street Journal continues to say. Canadian Prime Minister,
Mark Carney, threatened to retaliate dollar for dollar starting September 8. Both sides could still
walk back from the ledge, though Mr. Trump's escalation could make this harder for Mr. Carney
politically, since Canadians don't like being bullied by Washington. Well, that's, that is an
understatement. Here's how they kicked off the opinion piece. President Trump took exception last year
when we called his tariffs against Canada and Mexico, the dumbest trade war in history.
It got dumber this weekend as Mr. Trump escalated with another round of border taxes on Canadian imports,
a mere 10 weeks before the midterm elections.
Let's do back-to-back. Let's do Carney versus Trump.
Play Carney. Play Prime Minister Carney.
Canada will match Washington's new tariffs, dollar for dollar,
in order to protect Canadian workers, farmers, families, and businesses.
In recent days, the United States proposed new terms that run economic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits for Canada and called into question the reliability of any deal.
In short, they asked too much and they offered too little.
And here's the Trump side.
Did you direct Secretary Besson to intervene in the bond market?
No, not at all.
No, he's a very capable man.
He wanted to do it.
He's very good at it. He is a good touch, very good natural touch for the bonds and interest.
And he did that, yeah.
The yields have come back up since then.
Have you talked to him about another type of intervention?
Is that something he will be doing?
We have many types of intervention.
That's one.
The ultimate intervention is our military.
And if we have to use that, we will.
These are incredible headlines that just came out over the last 24 hours.
It's probably easier if I show to him.
This matters.
We can't, I'm going to state the obvious.
We cannot operate our economy with as efficiently as we've had in the numbers that we've been able to generate without Canadian support.
And the sooner we recognize that.
And the sooner some economic negotiator representing the United States recognizes that, the better.
We can't go it alone.
It can't, as the ambassador to the United States from Canada recently said, it may be America
first, but it can't be America only.
I mean, that's not, we generate more services and goods than we as Americans can consume.
We need markets outside of America.
The easiest, too, because of borders, transportation, communications, a common history,
Mexico and Canada.
Why are we at war with them?
It's bad enough we're at a real war with Iran.
Why are we at war with our allies about economics?
Other than to feed Donald Trump's ego.
What's going to happen?
Whatever is going to happen, whether Mark Carney,
and this is going to be on his timetable,
whether Prime Minister Carney decides to bail out Donald Trump
with a deal before the midterms of the United States
is going to be up to Mark Carney.
If I were him, I would wait.
I would wait until Donald Trump has been cut down further in size because of a tremendous
round of losses with the Democrats taking the House and maybe even the Senate.
If the Democrats pick up the 20 or 30 seats that are projected, maybe even more,
and maybe flip four seats in the Senate to get control of the Senate,
Donald Trump will be crippled.
He'll be, I mean, he won't admit it.
He'll talk tougher.
but the reality politically is that he will be emasculated.
And that's when the Canadians should come back to the table,
when they're begged to come back to the table,
and then make the deal that they're entitled to make
because of their importance in our own economy.
That's how I would run things.
If there was any chance that my negotiating with Trump
would bolster his fortunes at the midterm, his party's fortunes, I would decline as long as
Canada economically has braced for a long winter, which I believe that they have.
You know, he's doing all the right things, Carney. It's got a domestic support package for the
provinces, giving them millions and millions and millions of dollars to get through a tough,
a difficult winter. They are at war. It's unfortunate that they're at war with the American government.
hopefully not the American people who are still traveling to Canada and trying to extend a hand,
as I recently did when I went to Montreal for Father's Day.
But this is a war, and they have to be on war footing.
And I believe that they're doing the right thing, and we continue to support them.
And the Canadian Midas, Midas, Midians, and the Elbows Up and the Maple Midas and all of that stuff here on Legal AF.
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