The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Even Possible To Negotiate With Donald Trump?

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

The first Moore Butts conversation of the new season is the 22nd in our series of going behind the doors of political intrigue. In this case, the discussion centres around the negotiations that have to take place if anyone is going to make a trade deal with the US President. Gerald Butts is Justin Trudeau's former principal secretary who was in the room when Canada and Trump hammered out a new trade deal in 2018. James Moore is a former Harper-era cabinet minister, and as always, has thoughts on this subject too.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. How do you negotiate with Donald Trump? That's a good question. And it's the basis for more buts conversation number 22. Coming right up. And hello there. Tuesday of week one of season six of the bridge. We started yesterday with another great

conversation with Dr. Janice Stein. Today is station number 22. And the good news on the Moore-Buts conversations, which you've enjoyed for the last couple of years, that, you know, every six weeks or two months or so, is going to be much more regular this year. The plan is every second Tuesday. More buts will alternate on Tuesdays with Rob Russo and Altheiraj with a reporter's notebook. So those are our Tuesdays ahead,

but starting this day with more butts and their conversation on the topic of Donald Trump and how do you actually negotiate with this guy as Canada and many other countries are trying to do right now on the trade deal. So we'll talk to James Moore and Jerry Butts

in just a couple of minutes. But we do have some housekeeping, as we often do. Starting with the question of the week. The question of the week, and we've already had lots of good answers on this, question of the week is, what caught your eye

in the summer of 2025? what did you see or hear or watch or take part in that caught your eye that made you think that made you say this is something I want to know more about or this could affect my life so what is it that caught your eye in the summer of 2025 I'd like to hear your answers to that and here's the way you do that. You write to The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. You have your email in before 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday of this week. Anything after that will be too late. Keep your answers to 75 words

or fewer. Apparently, I've been grammatically wrong by saying 75 words or less. It's 75 words or fewer. So anything over 75 words? Sorry, that's not going to make it. So keep it short. And we've determined in the spring that people can keep it short and really make their point. Remember to include your name and the location you're writing from.

That too is very important. A word about the rest of the week. Starting with tomorrow, Wednesdays is our encore edition. I actually got a letter in the mail over the last couple of days. And I'm just checking this. see who wrote it. I think it was Don Campbell. How Don Campbell wrote it from

Where's Don? I'm not sure where Don's from. He had a suggestion about Wednesdays. He doesn't mind the encore editions, although, you know, he listens all the time, so he's heard them. He's a big fan of the end bits.

And Don said, Why don't you try doing an N-Bit show on Wednesday? Well, we can't do that every Wednesday, but we just might be able to do it occasionally. So we'll maybe even try it tomorrow, just for the heck of it. The whole idea of Encore Wednesdays is, hey, I'm getting on. I passed 77 this summer.

I love in every minute of it, but I've gone to a four-day week. But we'll see. We'll try this out occasionally and see how it works. And I'm sure you'll tell me. So that's a snapshot of the time ahead here. Thursday, of course, is your turn, and that's where you're. You've got to come up with the answers to the question of the week. What caught your eye in the summer of 2025?

Plus the random ranter with his first go of the year, this season anyway. And then Friday, of course, is good talk. All right. Enough of the housekeeping. Let's get to our first Moore Butts conversation of this season 6, and that is More Butts Conversation number 20. And here we go with Jerry Butts and James Moore. Jerry Butts, of course, the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau.

And James Moore, the former Stephen Harper Cabinet Minister, who have checked their partisanship at the door and try to take us behind the scenes of what things are really like in our crazy world of politics. Here we go, More Butts Conversation Number 22. All right, gentlemen, the conversation this week is centered around this question. Is it possible or how is it possible to negotiate with Donald Trump? Only one of the three of us has actually been in the room when it's getting around to

or completing a negotiation, and that, of course, is you, Jerry. So tell us what that's like when you're in the room with this guy. Yeah, thanks, Peter. and I hope everyone had a great summer. Happy Labor Day weekend. I think this is coming out slightly after, but I hope everybody got some time with their families over the summer.

It's unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life. And I wish I could, I've said this before, but I wish I could say it's all an act for the cameras. It's not all an act for the cameras. The way he is in front of the cameras is exactly the way he is behind closed doors. He has this firm conviction that the United States has been ripped off

by its trading partners for most of his life. And that it's the hottest, I think the most appropriate analogy that I can think of is he thinks of the US economy like it's the hottest nightclub on the strip. And the way to make more money if you own that nightclub is to increase the cover charge. And his thinking about the US economy is not much deeper than that.

He thinks that he's got an asset that everybody wants to be part of and therefore he should charge the people who want, to come in a higher entry fee. And that's such a radical departure from the rules-based multilateral order that the United States played a chief role in forging in the post-war period. And therefore, everyone that you and I know, every business leader, every senior bureaucrat, every politician,

has grown up in that world, and they're accustomed to negotiating within those boundaries. And it's quite a shock to the system when you get behind closed doors with someone like the President of the United States and he realized he doesn't, not only does he not obey those rules, he doesn't believe they should have been rules in the first place. Well, the thing that puzzles me is, you know, clearly these kind of conversations and negotiations

are much deeper than what he, what his basic beliefs are. Correct. And so that is what returns me to this question. How do you negotiate with a guy like that? Well, you have to always be on guard to protect her. interests and because he's always on guard to protect his. I'll tell you a story I probably shouldn't tell him in public, but I'll tell it anyway. What the heck? It's been a long time. So some of your viewers can cast their memories back to 2018 and remember the so-called

crisis generated by Donald Trump's ill-tempered tweet after the Charlevoix 7 in Quebec. Let me tell you the backstory of what happened there. So it was it was one of the various low points of the NAFTA negotiations. They were threatening 232 tariffs. Stop me when you've heard this before. On our steel and aluminum industries, it was really a nail-biter. How were Trudeau and Trump going to get along in Quebec?

And he shows up, arrives on Marine One, the helicopter lands, this beautiful sunny day on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. And he walks the red carpet. And he and Trudeau greet each other warmly. and two kiss cheek from Sophie and the stock market goes up like 250 or 300 points. I can remember what the number was.

And so Trump, normally when you have a bilateral meeting between two heads of government, it's something called a photo splash at the beginning. You've been part of them, James. You've been part of many of them over the course of your career as well, I'm sure. And what's supposed to happen is the host says, welcome to Canada. The visitor says it's great to be here. And then you say, all right, everybody

get the hell out of the room so we can have a real conversation. But when Donald Trump's involved, and there are 30 cameras in front of them in a room not much bigger than my home office, it's soliloquy time, right? So he sees this as an open invitation for a performance and to talk at length about whatever it is that's on his mind. And in this case, he was so surprised by the stock market reaction to his greeting with Trudeau, he went on and on about how, you know, these morons on Wall Street don't realize that Justin and I are friends and can you believe that the stock market went up, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he literally goes on, you probably probably find the tape.

He goes on for like four or five minutes about this, which is an eternity in meetings like this where everybody's trying to keep their poker face. And then we finally, poor Cameron Ahmed finally gets everybody out of the room. And when they leave the room, he's still going on about this. And he goes on for another two or three minutes about how the stock market's gone up. And then he stops. And I've met the guy like, I don't know, maybe five or six times at this point. When he finally stops, he looks right at me and he says, you know, if you are a dishonest person, you can make a lot of money in this business. And I thought to myself, this is not something any other president of the United States

would ever say, right? So you are dealing with a very different breed of cat here is my point. And you just, you really need to protect your own interests, try and hope, you hope that the eye of Soron is pointed somewhere else most of the time and not at Canada. And I'm not sure it's possible to make a durable deal with a guy who doesn't believe in the textbook definition of a deal. It's funny because that quote you had of him is something that a lot. A lot of people have wondered a lot about over the last few months over the way the market has bounced back and forth with huge gaps each time.

James, what do you make of all this? Just building off Jerry's point there at the end, you know, I remember back in Trump 45 when he first came in, had a meeting with Newt Gingrich and Gordon Giffin, former ambassador from President Clinton to Canada. And we were sitting with a bunch of clients. we all at the time worked together at Denton's law firm. We were singing about the bunch of clients and some folks from the federal government,

provincial government and all that. And Ambassador Giffin sort of having a new gingrich who made the point. Is there a Trump tower in Toronto? And people said, I don't know. There might be one planned. I think there's one coming goes, you might want to get one. It's like, okay. Like that's your strategy.

Okay. But to Jerry's point, like all these stories and Jerry's as well, But everybody seems to have these stories of Donald Trump in government, out of government, where I say he's really not like anything we've dealt with. He's really not like anything that's dealt with. All of that is just more brick and more mortar for the base of the people who love Donald Trump to say, see, he really is different. All these people who never vote from, he really is out of the loop.

And, you know, you hear stories about, like, he, in negotiations in business, he would do things to disarm people where he would sit down and he would start a negotiation with someone over whom he didn't have particular leverage or an angle that he could pursue. sue and they would start the conversation and just as the other side is starting to get a little bit of momentum, he would stop me to say, excuse me, you have really bad breath. I need you to sort of, to put the, to emasculate the other person, get them to step back, talk a little less, and kind of shift the dynamic in the room and then he would sort of counterattack. And the whole time the other person is thinking in there, because they're high EQ people, they're thinking

to themselves, is my breath really, what happened? What did I eat? What did I do? And now he's got, maybe it's only 5% or 10% of his mental GDP is now distracted by the, the breath comment, but that's enough to get a little bit of an angle in the room. So, I mean, he's a guy who is extraordinarily high EQ in his way, right? Like, you know, he'll still call women gals and, you know, he's generationally not, he's behind and all these kinds of things. But he's a high EQ when it comes to the mission of winning the moment in the room in a way that he can spread it outward.

I think the challenge for Canada on a much more grand and responsible scale is, you know, how do you allow him to have a win that is, still accretive to Canada that doesn't decimate your political support in Canada, that doesn't allow you to be seen to be bullied too much that Donald Trump can brag about and Canadians will sort of let it pass and that will be fortified and respected for the duration of the Trump presidency. We are one-eighth of the way through Trump 47. One-eighth.

This is a long, long story. And at any time, if he has bad news or if somebody comes into his office and is particularly articulate or passionate or emotive about an industry that's being hurt, he will slap on two, three, two tariffs to defend America because that's what you do. It's a tough guy. So can you negotiate with him? Yeah. But the negotiation I don't think ever really necessarily ends. And you always have to have your guard up. So Andrew Coyne had a piece a few weeks ago about just sort of surviving the Trump president.

And I think that's right, but you can't just be constantly on the defensive and just counterpunching. You do have to do other things, which we can talk about. Well, one of those other things that some people try to do, and we've seen it, you know, we've seen Carney do it. We've certainly seen a lot of other leaders do it. And that's this issue of sucking up, telling him how great he is, you know, how he deserves this out of the other award or not. from the public. Does that stuff really work? Jerry.

Sadly, I think it does, Peter. And I think the most, I wouldn't say expert, but maybe thorough job of sucking up to Donald Trump in his second term, at least in the Western world, has been by Mark Rota,

who's the Secretary General of NATO. And his, Trump's reaction to that was an immediate 180 on NATO So I think NATO is a it's a particular case

that we could spend a lot of time talking about Trump even in his his own mind probably realizes how beneficial NATO is to the United States but it's pretty remarkable the rhetorical, the change in his rhetoric about NATO before and after

the sucking up of Markrita and it's not I'm not saying that's something I could or would do. It's not, but it's hard not to observe stuff like that and go, wow, I mean, no wonder Kier Starrmer showed up in the Oval Office with a handwritten invitation from the King of England, right? And more and more people are trying that. I think for Canada, it's always, we're always in weirdly the hardest position to do something like that because there's such, constant coverage of Donald Trump and his antics in Canada.

And my European colleagues and clients, I talk about this to them all the time, that you think you get a lot of Donald Trump. You try sharing a 9,000 kilometer border with the United States and see how much Donald Trump and how much extra Donald Trump Canada gets. So Canadians have these detailed textured opinions and understandings of what's going on in the United States that other countries simply don't have. And we're rightly appalled.

We're also, I think, pretty sanguine about what needs to be done in order to not accommodate, but to live next to this elephant we always have. But it makes the political space to do a deal really hard. And I remember saying this to Bob Lighthouse, you know, Trump used to say that 51st state thing in private all the time. And I would say to Leidheiser or Kushner that, you know, guys, just so you know, if he says that publicly, we're not going to be able to negotiate with you. And that's not, like, obviously, that's not a threat.

We didn't have the leverage to have a threat, but we did have a relationship that was open enough that we could say things like that to them. And somehow they would skate him into a corner. There's nobody around Trump skating him into a corner anymore. And I think that's the biggest single difference between Trump, the Trump administration, that I worked with and the Trump administration we're all dealing with now that his guardrails are gone

he has no inhibitions on his instincts and the people who would you know Bob Lighthizer has been largely replaced by people like Howard Lutnik and Howard Lutnik if anything is going to

cheer Trump on he's not going to curb his instincts what do you make of that James I'm still trying to figure out what it says about a guy who can be swayed seemingly so easily by the sucking up stuff when everybody watching knows what's going on. Yeah, I mean, it obviously speaks to a profoundly broken person internally.

You know, the narcissism, nihilism, insecurity, you know, something to do with wanting to please. ones fall. I don't know, right? I mean, there's layers and layers that'll be analyzed for a really long time. But I think as well, like going back to policy, does the United States really need Canada to go from 2% of our GDP to 3% defense spending in order to be more secure? No. Should we? Yeah. Is it a question of fairness? Yep. Is it a question of keeping our word for sure? But does America need it for them to be more secure? No. So demanding it and then getting it, either two to three or two to five percent over time or whatever, it's also sort of pushing people around and being seen

to be pushing around. Second only to the defiant picture of Donald Trump raising his fist with blood pouring out of his ear in that field of Pennsylvania in the assassination attempt, the most circulated Donald Trump picture of the MAGA movement during the Trump 47 presidency was a picture from a couple weeks ago of Donald Trump sitting back behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office, and the European leaders all sitting in front of him like school children after school, and him sort of being seen to be leading and commanding, you know, world leaders about the war in Ukraine. And in Maga World, that was everywhere.

And it was, you know, look at how tough our president. And that was the win. Does Donald Trump really, I mean, I think it's fair to speculate. He does have a preferred outcome in the Russia-Ukraine war, and it's not on the Ukraine side. but does he really care? I don't think so. Does he care that that picture gets out and gets circulated and gets turned into T-shirts and hoodies?

Yeah, he really cares about that. And so, and I think we're almost now at a point where we're shifting from Jerry's experience and Prime Minister Trudeau's experience from 16 to 20 to 24 to 28 as the president turns 80 and he seems to have health issues that we were going from a guy

who wanted to run for president so he can build a media company and probably not win, but sort of be bullish and brass. and then have one term as president, maybe two, and then lever that into selling Bitcoin and building an empire and being a tough guy and a goal. Now I think he's thinking a lot more about his destiny.

As you see the bruises on his hands, you see the diminished health. I think we're seeing a president who's thinking a lot more about his place in history. This is why there's the push for the Nobel Prize. Why this year? Why now? Like what's going on? And so I think there's the psychology of wanting to get medals and handwritten notes from King Charles and other things that flatter him and have things named after him.

But I'm wondering if we're now sort of entering a phase where this man of these sort of personality defects and dynamics is looking for something a little bit more precious as he sort of enters his sunset years. And I think that's going to be something that's very unique that we've never seen before to try to manage from the world's biggest superpower. I want to dial you back for a moment to something you said that. what you described is that meeting between the European leaders and Trump in the Oval Office and where everybody was sitting

and what it looked like, certainly to the MAGA people, certainly to Trump. But we're talking about negotiation here. And I'm wondering when you look at that image, who really got played there? Was it the Europeans or was it Trump who got played? Because his position kind of did a 180 in that. But the European leaders going into that,

I mean, as Jerry talks about the splash in the beginning, but everybody knows that it's all staged. It's all like literally minute by minute and moment by moment from when the cameras are live in the room, not the room and all the. They consented to that. The European leaders knew that that was coming. They didn't know it would be circulated.

Maybe they didn't quite know the angle or whatever. But they knew that there would be photographers in the room and the White House photographer has been coached to get a particular angle that will have a particular emotive impact from the MAGA base and all that. But they surrendered to that possibility. and they recognize that. And maybe there's an upside. And you sure haven't seen Trump give, you know,

lectures in the last, you know, 60 days about the failure of NATO, the failure of European countries not spending enough on military and all that. It'll come back around. But there's been a holiday for 60 days. Okay. Well, maybe you buy 60 days, 60 days at a time.

And you just kind of work your way through the presidency. And, you know, maybe that's what, what Prime Minister Carney is doing for Canada right now. You send down ministers. You keep the conversation going, you know, you you you and all that and you kind of you play for time you bide for time and I don't want to be morbid about it but but I do think that there's a health dynamic creeping into this I do think that there's the but the the midterms coming up that'll be that'll matter the you know markets react

but economies respond to tariffs and it takes a little bit of time but you so you see the shift happening and maybe that will start to bite into him and some voices around him who he does still trust start saying you know what you know let's let's start looking at what a wind looks like and put it and raise it to the sky and say that you're the best president ever but let's let's be maybe a little cautious about this because i don't think you want to hurt your legacy right as you move forward and there's a bit of a nudge and a wink to a friend about what that really means about his life and his legacy for his kids and so i think there's a bit of a shift going on here about what's going on and and i think you know there there's a dance and it's stuff that you can't really coach you can't

really teach but yeah you you observe it and you kind of realize the dynamic and you hope that people in positions of responsible decision making get it you want to jump in on this year well i was just thinking um i think that's a very astute and serious argument james's making i'm just going to say something a joke i heard that it was really funny i will mention the person's name because they'll probably end up in a prison in el salvador but uh an an american friend of mine described him as his his quote unquote health issues as james described them they described him as uh obviously rotting banana. Well.

And I do think that joking aside, there's a serious point here, which is you don't close a negotiation when the terms are not favoring you, if you can all at all avoid it.

Right? You try and do things that change the facts on the ground and mix metaphors. You just play for time if you And you hope that the other party gets distracted with other issues, which is clearly happening. I can't believe how little coverage there's been of the United States sending a large portion of its Navy to the coast of Venezuela right now, for instance. There's a lot of stuff going on if you're president of the United States. That resolute desk that James described has a lot of files on it on any given day.

And Canada's is pretty small. So you hope that the gravity of that solar system works in your favor. And a lot of times it does, right? So getting the relationship on a more cordial, mutually respectful footing than it had been prior to the prime minister's election, I think is the single most important thing he's done because it allows for all of the other options to be played out. For Canada, the two most consequential things that have happened this summer, on the trade file. One was Donald Trump sort of in a sideways, you tell he was either coming off or going on to Marine One at the White House. And he just sort of said to, but it asked probably

by Kenny Simpson or someone about Canada and what's going on probably after the August deadline. And he said, look, Canada's probably maybe one of those countries where we just tariff and that's it. Which for a lot of Canadians is kind of music to our ears. That's okay. If that's where we are, that's where we are. Because, you know, we don't quite exactly know 70, 80, 90 percent of Canadian goods going to the United States are under the umbrella of Kuzma, that's fine. But if President Trump has the brain of Kuzma's Kuzma, tariffs or tariffs, let's just keep Kuzma. If that's how he settles it and he actually doesn't have scores to settle on the Kuzma side, then we're in a good spot. But that's a big gap that we have to sort of

figure out in the fullness of time. And the second thing was he said last week, he goes, I quite like him. I like Mark. You know, I like working with him. So he respects him. And so, and this is a guy who's been across the table from union leaders and carpenters and, you know, service staff and like all kinds of people. He can read a person's profile and their structure and they, as the kids say, real, recognizes real. And, you know, he very quickly decides whether or not he respects you. And, you know, he's not calling our, although he could ironically, but he doesn't call our prime minister or governor. He doesn't make fun of him. He doesn't laugh at him. He doesn't talk about 51st state anymore. That's kind of gone away because I think he's kind of gotten tired of the

joke himself. And so there's been a bit of a cooling of the temperature. Canadians are still very hardened about it and very stern about it. On any given day, 10% of the economic activity in Las Vegas is Canada. And now that's down to about 1%. So Canadians, we're tough, stern people. And we don't put up with crap. And especially when it's so insulting and unnecessary. And so we will still do what we're going to do. And it'll take probably a generation for us to sort of, sort of, you know, de-thaw. But the president might have moved on a little bit. I'm hopeful that that. That's true.

You know, I totally agree with you about what this has said about Canadians. And I think a lot of us kind of doubted that six months ago. Would they really be that upset? How would they show that upsetedness? Well, they've certainly shown it. And what they buy, where they go. I mean, it is remarkable. I said on the podcast maybe, you know, six months ago,

that I was to an exhausted and annoyed grocery. store manager near my place here where he's he was moving all the stuff up the catchups and the dips and the chips and all the stuff that's made in Canada to the front he goes because our staff like everybody comes in and says which where's the Canadian stuff and and we're and we're having to take people down the aisle not this one this one this one but not that one and pointing stuff out he said we'll just create a section and it's more than like more than just alcohol so like it's it's everything and and and the other day well the other day a couple weeks ago I was on a car lot and you know just looking at different cars and kind of doing a little bit early car shopping.

because it's that time. And same thing. He said people are coming in the lot. And so this truck is made in, this one's the Canadian, that one's not, okay. And they're moving the inventory around the lot because Canadian, we're feisty. We don't, we don't like being insulted from a country that we've, yes, had a lot taken from. But we've given a lot too as well, including blood, sweat and sacrifice. And don't talk to us that way.

You know, we're talking negotiation here. and in many ways what you've just outlined is negotiation too. We might not have figured it out. We might not have thought about it when we were hitting the negotiating table, but people notice it now,

and the American surely notice it. You see more and more stuff coming out about how different American groups and states are saying, this has got to end. This is killing us. Okay, we've got to take quick break, and then we've got one more segment

on this negotiation issue, and we'll get to it right after this. And welcome back, Conversation Moore Butts, the Moore Butts Conversations. I think this is number 22 that we're having this week as we launch a new season of the bridge. James Moore, Jerry Butz, with us. The topic is negotiation and how do you negotiate if that's at all possible with Donald Trump? a couple of times we've mentioned the meetings that have been going on this summer and there was one just last week that seemed to go well

between Howard Lutnik and Dominic Lebon the Canadian and the American leading these things in terms of their cabinets on the discussions. Now here's my question because it fits with the clearly these two guys are negotiating they're talking real issues and they're trying to come to a compromise but does it mean anything when Donald Trump is not in the room? What kind of clout does Lutnik have if he hits Trump on an off day and he walks in and say, hey, we've agreed to this?

What kind of cloud has he got when he says that? Jerry, you're starting. Well, we certainly learned this in the first term, and I've heard this from colleagues around the world who are negotiating with the administration now, that the only person who really speaks for Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And that was true when his son-in-law was a senior advisor in the first term. It's even truer now. I think that we've seen this cabinet secretary staff fall in and out of favor more quickly with Trump

than pretty much anybody in the history of politics. Lutnik has been there for seven months now, which, to put that in some historical perspective, is about as long as Steve Bannon lasted in the White House. So, you know, I think that it's a legitimate question, and I know, for instance, in the European, quote-unquote, deal that they just struck, there was a big gulf between what Trump's team agreed to and what Trump would ultimately agree to. And there had to be some last-minute changes to the deal to make it palatable or acceptable to Trump. So that is always risk with Donald Trump. James? Yeah, I mean, that's for sure true, and especially when you look at the people, and it's not just the people in his administration in his cabinet, certainly they had the cabinet meeting last week, right?

It was North Korea-esque, it was crazy. But more than that, and this is why I is almost a 50-year-old lifelong conservative, I'm so depressed by the collapse of the Republican Party, is that, you know, there were times in, you know, the, certainly the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, the Reagan administration, H.W. Bush, where you did have voices, you know, disagreeing. There were people who were not all on board the Iraq War. There were people who were very, you know, aggressive against George H.W. Bush and his tax increases. There were people in the Republican Party who shamed and criticized Ronald Reagan for not recognizing Martin Luther King Day. But there was dissent and disagreement within the Republican Party from the right, from the left. And it was sort of a healthy brokerage party where different voices could speak up.

But now it's just so locked in. such a cult of personality and it's so unshakable that is scary that a president who does have discretionary powers that he can exercise that are enormously consequential to the world limited but consequential and there really is nobody to hold him to account and then now he's you know buying up buying up companies in the private sector buying up chunks of intel firing or the overseers and the and the and the scrutiners of government just you know who are providing statistical information to the American public about what's actually demonstrably happening in the economy

and he fires these people. It's these police on the streets of Washington, Chicago, and L.A., for no reason, or National Guard, rather, taking over the police. Like, there's a creep here that's going on with no protests. I mean, what's going on can be debated plenty, but no protest, no disagreement. You know, Republicans used to say that the Second Amendment

was necessary in order to keep him bear arms to protect from a government that's overreaching and overbearing. Well, they might want to look to the, left into their right because I think you might be seeing a little bit of that. And there's no voice even articulating that sort of principle of republicanism and that we're a union of states and states have rights and dispatching the Republican, the National Guard into non-Republican, like this is, this is getting sketchy and Harry. And nobody has anything to say about it. This is a problem. And this is not a healthy functioning political party.

Six months ago, when it was around six months ago, when Trump decided the tariffs were actually going to happen. That was the issue that was front of mind for him. That's what he was focused on. That's what he talked about every day. Today, you don't hear him talking about tariffs very often. There's a lot of other things going on, as Jerry mentioned, whether it's the American Navy off the coast of Venezuela,

whether it's a continuous situation in Ukraine with Russia and the Gaza situation, China, India, you name it. There are all kinds of. other things going on and there's the Epstein files, et cetera, et cetera. Is this still friend of mind for him? Do you think he I know he's historically

cared about this terrorist issue. Do you think he cares about it as much right now? Yeah, I think he does. I think he's just having a hard time communicating about it and in any normal government and this is certainly not that this, there's sort of, it's almost like a

physics equation, Peter, that you start when you run the equation, you enter government with a lot of mass, right? And it's, this is our agenda. These are our new people. Everything the prime minister, the president says, is covered very closely. And it's interpreted for the most part in good faith that this is what the new government that's got a fresh mandate from the people want to do and how they're going to go about

achieving it. And over time, you kind of lose mass and issues that you never expected to have to deal with. you have to deal with them and people stop being interested in you and the novelty of a new government and they start to get interested in issues as they arise and have an accrue novelty of their own. And I think, James should probably back me up on this,

I hope that when a government says, you know, I'm not going to talk about issue X, I'm going to get back to the business that the people really care about. What it really means is, in this case in particular, the Epstein files. I think are dominating the internal processes of the Trump administration. When he says, I don't care about that loser, who's or whatever, he said,

I can't believe you, people are still talking about this. I'm going to get back to talking about trade or X or Y or Zed. It's a tacit acknowledgement that he knows that that's all people want to talk about. And he's desperately trying to get people to talk about something else. And we've all been through those situations in politics. you've been on the other side of that prosecuting the case, Peter, many times in your career, whenever a politician looks you in the eye and says, well, that's not really important. Let me tell you what's really important.

You know from your viewers what they think is really important. And I think this is a really important moment in the development of Trump's second term. Can he get the agenda back, the public agenda back, from all of these, what he would consider, secondary and tertiary issues that the media and social media and town halls for Republican Congresspeople want to focus on and bring it back to the central issue, which is the Democrats and Republicans together have screwed over the average American economy by selling the economy to selling their jobs to first Mexico and then China. That is the core promise of the Trump presidency, that he's going to recreate the economy that, um,

delivered good middle-class jobs for people in the heartland of the United States. And I think he's having a hard time keeping it on that, but it doesn't mean he personally is less interested in it. James, you get the last word. Yeah, I think I think all that's true. But I think it's sort of like, you know, a golfer stepping up to the tea and looking at his bag of clubs and thinking, what am I going to use today?

What's in the docket, right? Is it strategic strike on an Iran nuclear facility? Is it talking about tariffs? Is it, well, immigrants, that's a good one. That's a good go-to. Are we going to deploy? And just whatever keeps him in the news. And sometimes it's on a defensive footing in order to change the headlines and all that.

I think that's true. But sometimes it's just needing to be in the news. I imagine that he watches Fox first, of course, ABC, NBC. And he might sit back. And if he's not in the first or second story of all the major networks on any given night, he thinks he's had a bad day he's failed his communication staff has failed and tomorrow he better dial up the temperature a little bit and and so again we're riding on the back of this of this wild dynamic and it's really hard and by the way all this has you know it's not just a political science governance exercise on the in the companies that I work with on boards and advisory work that I do for for large scale companies who are thinking about making serious capital expenditure decisions in Canada and elsewhere there's the five to ten rule right

It takes five years basically to devise a plan and to gather capital and deploy it and to get it realized. It's two to five years to make a serious capital expenditure and to see whether or not that bears fruit. Then you have five to ten years after that to see if the business model works and then to see if you want to have an exit or transition or what have you. So these are five to ten year major capital expenditure decisions that large scale companies have to make. And you're looking at this and we're dealing with President Trump and massive decisions and eradicacies on a 24-hour news cycle. and it makes it impossible to do business in Canada. It's equally true in the United States, and eventually that will catch up with them.

And so the uncertainty of things will eventually spill into the United States and catch up with him. I'm convinced that that's true. Okay, we're going to leave it at that of our first conversation for the new season of the bridge, and it's good to be able to tell listeners and hopefully in the future viewers as well, that James Moore, Jerry Butts have agreed.

They're going to be on every second Tuesday like this, so that'll be great. They'll alternate with a new panel we're starting with Rob Russo and Althea Raj. They'll be on the alternate Tuesdays. So that's your Tuesday lineup for the next year, we hope. All right, gentlemen, thank you both. Great to talk to you.

As always, as always. Well, there you go. The first episode of Moore Butts, conversation in this case number 22. We've been lucky to hear from both Jerry Butts and James Moore over the last couple of years in their various conversations. But we are going to regularize it, if you wish, this year in season six of the bridge, by hearing from them every couple of weeks. If you have ideas on things they can talk, about? Don't be shy. Send them in to the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The idea of these conversations is not to get into the partisan tank that so often happens with those in the

political orbit in Canada. And that's the beauty of Moore and Butts. They clearly have a lot of respect for each other. After having dealt with each other from opposite sides of the political spectrum over the last, what, 10, 15 years. But they draw upon each other to give us some sense of what it's like in the back rooms of power and the kind of things that happen, the kind of things that are considered by the players on both sides. So we thank them, as we always do and look forward to their next conversation in a couple of weeks' time.

Just a snapshot of the week ahead. is the Encore edition, but we may try something a little different tomorrow, as mentioned earlier. Thursday is your turn, and the question of the week is, what caught your eye in the summer of 2025 that is worthy of discussion? So mention that to me in an email at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Have it in before 6pm on Eastern Time on Wednesday. Keep it to 75 words or fewer. Also, always include your name and the location that you're writing from. You follow those rules, there's a good chance we'll get your letter on.

It's a space available thing, as you can well imagine. Also on Thursday, the random ranter, he's had all summer to think of some rants and looking forward to hearing what he's got to say this week. Friday, good talk with Bruce Anderson and Chantelli Bear. That'll do it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in just under 24 hours.