The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Return of Smoke Mirrors and The Truth, Plus the Trump Day One

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Bruce Anderson & former Conservative campaign manager, Fred DeLorey. Also, Keith Boag, on the Trump presidency launching.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, and it's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. It's back. Bruce Anderson's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. It's back with Bruce and Fred Delorey. That's coming right up. Okay, well, we all remember Bruce, of course. And Bruce is now working or advising on the Carney campaign, the Liberal Leadership Proyes. Fred was the campaign manager for the Conservative campaign four years ago in 2021 for Erin O'Toole. So we've got, well, we've got two parties, very obviously represented here in the sense of experience. And so we're... Yeah, but it's about smoke mirrors and the truth. And let's be honest,

I'm here for the truth part. And Fred is a great guy. And we're going to see how it goes. Gloves are off right out of the gate. Right out of the gate. I have to explain why am I in a bedroom. Well, I'm actually in a hotel room in Winnipeg where it is unbelievably cold. When the plane landed here, I couldn't get the door open. It took 15 minutes to warm up the door to get it open. And when I passed by the Golden Boy in the legislature, I'm sure they were fitting him out for a parka. I mean, it's cold. Minus 46 with the wind chill.

Your life sucks. Let's go. Yeah. All right. Our lives have changed dramatically over the last four or five years, over the last 20 years, but in kind of increments every four or five years with the change in technology. It's affected every aspect of our lives. I assume it's also affected the way political campaigns are run, no matter what level those campaigns are. Are we looking today, whether it's leadership race or an upcoming election campaign,

the kind of races we've not seen before as a result of the changes in what we have accessible to us to run those campaigns. Bruce, you start. Yeah, it's changing so quickly and the pace of change keeps accelerating and it's across all kinds of dimensions of politics and not just in campaigns, but politics every day. Politics is a 24-7, 365 thing now. And, you know, we think of ourselves as having these 37-day campaigns. And somehow that's better than, you know, what happens in the United States where campaigns just kind of run perpetually. But we're more in that world than we like to admit, because so much of what happens in politics now is virtual, doesn't necessarily

require people to be in a large room together, although obviously some of that happens. I think Pierre Polyev has been pretty effective at showing that he can draw crowds. But you also saw the flip side of that with a launch event that went a little bit awry the other day. And it's sort of for political organizers, it's not hard to imagine that putting fewer of your chips on big turnouts and big crowds and more of your effort through virtual and direct and digital is good. Also, when I first started in consulting, there was kind of a rule of thumb that you could tell a client that they could get faster, cheap, or high quality, and they could pick two of those three things, but they couldn't get all three of them. Well, it turns out in terms

of political communication, because of technology, you can do fast and good and cheap. When I looked at the videos that Freeland and Gould put out the other day, and I kind of compared them to the production values of the now kind of famous Trudeau on the escalator ad that kicked off his 2015 campaign, that ad probably would have cost a quarter of a million dollars to make. If I looked at Freelance, I would say maybe that was $30,000. If I looked at Goulds, maybe that's $1,000. And, you know, is the effectiveness of the $250,000 one better than the others? I don't think so. I mean, I have quibbles with the other two, but those costs and the ability to make those kinds of things happen in no time flat has really changed. And Fred, in his work, has been one of the pioneers of figuring out how to

do content that looks fantastic, that's packaged great, that comes out, even if sometimes it's for ideas that, you know, well, they're his ideas, I guess. How do you look at this, Fred? Well, I remember a conversation I had vividly, the last conversation I had with the late Senator Doug Finlay, who passed away in 2013. And for those listeners who may not know, Doug was a longtime national campaign manager for the Conservative Party and one of the best there ever was

and trained a lot of us. At this point, though, when we were having dinner, he had retired from the campaign trail. And when we were there, I remember asking him, you know, Doug or Senator, would you ever consider managing another campaign? And what he told me really struck me. He said in that beautiful, thick Scottish accent that I know you and Peter and

Bruce would appreciate. And believe me, I'd like to mimic it here, but my wife says I'm absolutely never allowed to do a Scottish accent because it's terrible. So I'll spare you that. But the Senator said, you know, I've been out of the game too long and the technology has changed too much. This was this was over a decade ago. He told me this and it really struck a chord. And I'll never forget that. And he went on to explain how things are constantly evolving in our game. It's constantly moving. And if you're not staying up on it, you at least need to have the drive to relearn it and get when you get back involved and do it. And that stayed with me. And I remember the Conservatives, we've gone through a lot of leadership races in the last number of years. In 2017, we had one. In 2018, we had one in Ontario

in 2020, again, at the federal level, and I was able to manage a campaign in each one of those. I finished third, second and first, so I kept doing better each time. And from each one, learn so much about the technology and how you can reach voters, how you can get to them and communicate to them. And data's changed drastically for us. We used to have this perception that when it comes to social media, it's about getting voter ID,

because in politics it's about making phone calls, knocking on doors, and IDing those votes and then dragging them out. Now, social media has moved it where it's a persuasion tool, which is something it's it's not replaced advertising. It's amplified it. It's a bigger way to do it. You can you need to put your advertising dollars into social media, of course, but there's also the ability to go viral and to really connect with people and to find those groups. I'm really interested in this whole thing that's happening with TikTok because I was reading something the other day that said it's a persuasion to all social media, more generally, including TikTok, but also it's increased voter engagement among

young people to a significant degree. And it used to be the case that campaigns would start with the assumption that the turnout levels are going to be significantly higher the older the age cohort is and really don't spend too much time with young people. But what happened with TikTok just in the last couple of days in the U.S. is a really interesting thing because you've had this whole thing. It's a huge app for young people. And it went dark for, I guess, 24 hours. And when it came back up, all of those young people who are kind of going, oh, my God, I've lost this thing that I really use a lot. They got a message that said, thank you to Donald Trump for restarting this app. And I can't help but think that's a pretty effective political message for him among an audience, with an audience that might not have been all that predisposed towards him, or at least some of them would be, but maybe not the majority.

Let me extend this a little bit, because I watched a fabulous interview with Ezra Klein the other day. He's a writer for the New York Times. You both are aware of him. He's a very smart guy. Every time. And he makes a lot of good points. But the point he was making the other day kind of made me sit back, because money has always been such a key part of politics, right?

It's kind of the lifeblood of what makes campaigns work. He's saying that for the first time, this past campaign has made him think that money is no longer the most important thing. Getting attention is the most important thing. And he used the example of, you know, the Democrats had bags of money, lots and lots of money for that campaign, but they lost. The Trump people, the Republican side, didn't have as much money, but they certainly knew how to get attention. By, you know, good attention and bad attention, but it was all attention. And it was focused on Trump. You know, whether it was assassination attempts,

whether it was, you know, some of the crazy things he did at the podium, some of the singing and dancing and maneuvers that he made with his hands and the microphone. He was getting attention almost every day of the campaign. And Klein is saying, that's now what works. You get attention. It doesn't matter how much money you've got in terms of, you know, to a degree, in terms of the advertising of, you know, to a degree, in terms of the advertising and, you know, what your events look like. It's what you do at them. It's the attention you're able to grab.

Now, what do you make of that? Because that, if true, would be a fundamental shift in the way we look at campaigning. Fred? Well, I think he's fundamentally wrong. What happened in the US and what happens in a lot of countries and we're seeing in Canada, strategy is what matters.

Your narrative is what matters. Money can't replace any of that. You can have all the money in the world. If you have a bad strategy, you're not going to win. If the other side does. If they can reach voters, go viral, push out your messages. I can see where he's coming from, but it seems like he's a bit delayed in understanding that it's about putting together your story on why you should win and why you're running. Trump had a reason. You may not agree with him, you may not like it,

but he had something that he was pushing to so many voters. Kamala Harris and the Democrats didn't have that. They didn't have a real narrative other than we don't like Donald Trump. That's not a story that appeals to enough people or appealed to enough people. The money didn't matter, ultimately. So much money is wasted on campaigns if it's not spent properly and if you don't have that good strategy. And I see it all the time where campaigns do not, you know, they launch, they go out, they do all this stuff.

They don't have that core narrative, that core story. Why should we elect this person? Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think there were two parts to what you were quoting Ezra saying. One is that money doesn't matter as much as it used to. And the other was engagement is the most important thing. And what I hear Fred saying is engagement is kind of the first utterance of a conversation with a voter. And it isn't going to be very effective if it doesn't have a story, a narrative that is interesting to them. But I also agree with Fred's point, and I guess Ezra's, that money

isn't as important as it used to be. If you look at the amount of money that we spend, and it's different in Canada from the United States, obviously, we just don't get to spend as much money as Americans do. It's been the same, right? We're capped during the election. Right. And that's a big difference. If you look at what's happened to the spending in the United States, it's continued to look like a kind of an arms race. But in the way of an arms race, you've got two sides that are assembling massive arsenals and are using it on some fairly predictable stuff. There's still a lot of money spent on TV advertising, even though the digital proportion has gone up very dramatically. The volume of dollars in total has also gone up. And so I was looking at like local TV stations got 13 billion dollars in political advertising. And most of those local stations would have been in the in the swing states. So you're talking about a relatively small number of stations

just feasting on this revenue. And they're doing it because the parties get the money, not because that money is particularly well spent. The last point for me is, why does Donald Trump work? I mean, there are lots of answers to that. But to me, he's direct to the voters he's a storyteller whether we think his story kind of is coherent or makes sense or you know fits the pattern he's a storyteller and different elements of his story are going to resonate with people and they're going to go i remember when he said this thing and i i didn't hear about the the sharks and the battery and all the other stuff but they remember

something from it so he's direct he's a storyteller and the last two things which I think are so important he's authentic you know we might like or not like his authenticity but he looks like he is who he is every time he gets up on that stage. And he's unpredictable. And unpredictable is essentially the engagement part. How do you get people to pay attention? Being unpredictable is a pretty good way to do it. I don't know if he's still got that, if he's got that great story. I think if Fred was running his campaign, there might be a clearer narrative at the end of the day, but he wouldn't want to take away the unpredictability and the authenticity and the direct and the storytelling,

because those are things that really have worked for Donald Trump. Something tells me that nobody could run a Trump campaign. I was thinking the same thing. Trying to go head to head with him on telling him what he should be doing or not doing, I don't think would work too well. But you were about to make another point there, Fred. What was that? Well, just on Bruce's comment about how much local media does so well

during the elections in the U.S. and their political system, maybe that's the solution in Canada, is that we take off the caps from political parties and let them actually spend money all the time during the elections, and then maybe we can help save local media. Is there anything that we're going to hear that's more shocking today than a conservative saying we should lift the caps on campaign spending? I don't think so.

Well, I think we should. I don't think caps are ridiculous. Explain how it works for those of our audience who don't get it. Elections Canada wants a level playing field of all political parties, so we're allowed to raise as much money as we want, but we can only spend so much during a campaign. So they put a 30-some million dollar cap on what you can spend. So how much you can travel, how much you can pay organizers, how much you can spend in advertising. To me, it's never made sense. If you want to cap donations, that's fine.

But if a lot of Canadians want to give a lot of money to a political party, that's their choice. And parties should be allowed to spend that during an election has always been my view. And there is a cap on donations. There is a cap. 1,700 is the cap. But Fred's, you know, I hear Fred's point, and I think there's an argument there that that artificially imposing a kind of a level playing field on spending by parties within a writ period is a choice. And it you could look at it as a choice that puts a finger on the scale in favor of the parties that don't have as much money as the party that has more. But it is also true that outside the writ

period, parties can do what they want. Right, Fred? I mean, so we're only talking about a pretty narrow window. But Canadians mostly, like once that writ is dropped is when the whole, as you guys know from being involved in campaigns and covering them, the world changes once the writ drops. And that's when the dollars are most valuable. And I find the whole having a cap is just not necessary. So when we watch, say, for those in Ontario, we're watching the conservative, you know, what used to be called the big blue machine, the provincial organization, preparing for what looks like could be an early election. That money that they're spending on multiple ads on television, that sort of free game, they can go as much as they want there?

It is. And unions and others can spend money too right now. It's wide open outside of an election period. Okay, last quick question. We call this smoke mirrors no truth. Whether you're a liberal getting ready to vote in a liberal leadership race or a Canadian who's anxious to have their vote counted in a federal election at some point this year, what's your advice to make sure that you don't get blown away by the smoke and mirrors and you're only hearing the truth? Who wants to go first on that?

I'm going to let Bruce answer that one first. Well, look, I mean, I think that we know that there's a real problem that's developing and nobody knows how to solve it around things that are variously called deep fakes or disinformation. And nobody knows how to solve it because even if you thought that it would be a reasonable thing to ask a regulator to control for it, regulators don't have the equipment. They don't have the wherewithal to really find it, fix it, deal with it. And so we'd end up just kind of of that sort than there ever used to be. meantime until there's some sort of technological fix for it. They're just going to have to power through, not be distracted by too much of this stuff, figure out what their narrative is, understand that people are going to see a lot of things that aren't true, and they're going to become more inured to it in the same way that

there's a lot of scams coming at us all the time, financial scams and frauds. And, you know, while some of them work, a lot of them don't because people just have figured out, okay, somebody is going to send me a message on my phone, and I'm going to understand that I'm not going to click on it. I think there's going to be that aspect of public opinion over time as well. You get the last word, Fred. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there's a lot of, you know, social media has boiled the world down to tiny, small town squares. That's where we all live in now and occupy the territory.

It's all political people on my Twitter feed. There's stuff that we're seeing and it's all there's a there's a lot of truth. There's a lot of misinformation out there. And I think everyone has that now. We're learning from it when you see stuff and you say, oh, here's an interesting story. You find it it's fake people are becoming more questionable of the stuff they see and and you know not as trusting of it which i think is good i think that we need to always when you see it is this real maybe that's the same way we should have been treating legacy media for the last

while too right like is there it's not always right either right every a lot of every you know the newspapers in this country were all started for partisan reasons. So there's different people pushing different messages, and we just need to be aware of that and looking for it. Just before we go, Peter, I thought of one other anecdote that relates to the part of the country that Fred comes from, that brings together the whole question of money and persuasion. And it was a story told to me by a politician from Cape Breton. And he said that, you know, the most effective thing that they ever did was that they would fill up the trunk of the car with mickeys of,

I think it was rum. I'm going to tell you, Bruce. I have a lot of stories I can share that I've been told, not that I've ever experienced. Who knows if they're real or not, but apparently they've been happening. And it's not just Cape Breton. There's other parts of the country that have similar stories to that as well. That's right.

That's fair enough. But it's the only one I heard personally that way, though. All right. Smoke, mirrors, and the truth. Great conversation. Fred DeLore, Bruce Anderson. They'll be back next Tuesday and Tuesdays throughout the Liberal Leadership Campaign. We'll talk to you then. Thanks, gentlemen.

You bet. Take care, guys. Thanks, folks. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Keith Bogue now. Keith's going to, you know, has guided us through the last year of American politics and the Trump win and now the Trump inauguration. Keith, of course, former Washington bureau chief for the CBC, chief political correspondent in Ottawa as well. So he knows all the ropes on this. Keith, you've got to explain to me.

I mean, we've always known that you've got to be careful assuming too much from Donald Trump. You never know when he's serious, when he's not serious. The day started, and there was kind of relief around Ottawa. Gee, he didn't really, you know, no talk about the tariffs and the inauguration day speech. And so they were, you know, kind of breathing easier. But by the evening, that had all changed. And it was back on, but probably February 1st, probably 25%. How are we supposed to read this, trying to figure out Trump from yesterday? You know, in some sense, it's impossible to read it correctly.

And that's what we learned from the first administration where he made promises in the future that he had no intention of or seemed to have no intention of keeping. Well, what's different about this is typically when he says something to answer a question, but doesn't really have a firm commitment, we manage two weeks. And so he did something, you know, in last term on infrastructure, but it was two weeks away. The same thing with healthcare, it was always two weeks away. So what's notable in this case is that he has mentioned a date specific February 1st, he will be announcing tariffs, he says says he's still looking at whether there'll be 25%, but 25% is definitely on the table.

But I think what it means is that there's still room for stuff to happen between now and February 1st in terms of negotiation, perhaps. I don't think that there's much to happen in terms of his rethinking of it, though. I think that that's the point of having a specific date. He's telling you that this is a commitment that he's going to live up to. And unless somebody does something about it that really pleases him, you can expect that something will happen on February 1st. So you don't look at February 1st in the other way is, gee, it's two weeks away. Maybe it's the old two-week away line. I don't, but maybe I should, you know? I mean, I think I began my little speech there by

saying that he's unpredictable and you can't count on him. And all of that is still true. But I note that when he gave a specific date, that signaled something that to me was different from it being like what we used to joke about on the first administration term, another infrastructure week, which seemed to happen over and over and over again without ever really happening for his entire administration. What do you make of some of the comments that have been coming out of some of his potential cabinet secretaries that are impacted by this particular issue? Because they sound like the conversations that have been going on with their Canadian counterparts have actually been, you know, pretty good, that they see movement. I mean, even yesterday, there was talk from one of them, I think Holman,

that, wow, those two more helicopters on the border, that's a good move, that's moving in the right direction. So do you think, what's your sense of the kind of conversations that have been going on at a lower level? Obviously, we don't know the particulars of any of them, but there seems to be more progress being made there. So one of the things that could be is a reflection back on the last round when they renegotiated NAFTA. And the US trade representative at the time, Lighthizer, wrote in his book later that he didn't like the way the Canadians went about it. Now,

Canadians were very proud of the way they went about it, and perhaps he didn't like it because it worked. But essentially what they did was try to build right people now. You should be talking to the administration. Don't try and build a coalition against us by doing an end run around the administration and going to the governors and states. Now, I don't know that that's even true, and he may not know whether that's true either. But I think the fact that they believe that Canada learned something about how to negotiate and not annoy Americans, meaning doing an end run around the administration is having some effect. Or it could just be as simple as what they say. You're headed in the right direction. You're getting warmer.

You're getting warmer. Do more. And that will be better for you. But it is, in a sense, the other moment with Trump, and that was the pardons? Didn't mention them as such in his inauguration speech, but by last night, he was mentioning them. And basically saying blank and pardon to thousands of January 6th convicted prisoners. Right. So first of all, it went further than people were expecting. That there was, you know, there was a sort of feeling over the last couple of weeks

that he may pardon people who hadn't committed violent crimes, but those who had would have served their sentences. And that view seemed to have been shared by his attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, as late as last week, at least, and perhaps even later. I don't know whether she got any heads up on this at all, but it certainly isn't what she was expecting. And she did seem to indicate that people who have committed violent crimes should not be pardoned. This is sort of the maximum that he could have done for those people. And the intention here, I think on reflecting, he thought like, if I really want to continue with this, what we would call gaslighting about the 2020 election and how it was stolen and how these people are all hostages,

then I can't give an inch on this. I have to release them all, either through pardons, which is what most of them got, or having their sentences commuted. But it is to reestablish, first of all, that these people were American patriots who were fighting against a regime that had stolen an election from them. Second, and the other maybe even more insidious thing is that it's a demonstration to his loyalists that I'll have your back. So if you're thinking, so if I need you to break the law in the future,

you know you can do it and I'll be with you. You won't be going to jail. So I think those are the things that are important. It is a rewriting of history though, or an attempt to rewrite history in a way that flatters him and absolves him of any responsibility for what happened on January 6th, because it reframes what happened on January 26th as a patriotic act rather than what it was, which was a criminal act. What is your sense of the people immediately around Trump? And I ask this question because the way we looked at the first term is that the people he had around him

in key positions that could affect how, you know, what he said and how he said it, were not necessarily the people he wanted. They were the people he scrambled together at the last moment when he suddenly won the election, wasn't really prepared for taking over the White House. This time he's had lots of time to prepare, and he got the people he wants around him. When you look at yesterday, from the main speech at noon hour to what he did last night, what does it say about the people who are immediately around him, who have the influence on what he says, how he says it, right up to and including the moment that he utters the words?

What's your sense of who's around him? Largely, it is people who will not resist whatever impulse he wants to indulge. And that is significantly different from the first administration, where he had in particular people with military careers who understood how government worked, who understood what risk was, what the Constitution was, and were prepared to give him advice and prevent him from indulging his worst impulses. But what he has behind him now are carefully chosen people who will tell him what he wants to hear.

And so when he does something that, you know, like yesterday, he said he was going to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. That's the oath the president takes, knowing that he was going to, on his first day later in that afternoon, challenge the Constitution by signing an executive order to effectively nullify the 14th Amendment. And he was surrounded by people who helped put that document together and put it in front of him and didn't challenge him on the constitutionality of it at all, because this is what he wanted to do. And, you know, presumably they believe the courts will, you know, we'll have to settle that question if it comes to it, but they certainly aren't going to get it in his way. And I think that we should expect from that, that that will be the pattern of his administration,

that what he wants to do, they will enable. They will not challenge. They will not advise him against it. They will not cite the Constitution as an argument for why he should not act in the way that he wants to act. So I think you're looking at somebody who has a monarchical idea of what the presidency is, and he has staffed himself with people who share that view. What did you make of the inauguration speech, the document that will forever last in American history? This is what he said on day one. I mean, comparing it with the one eight years ago, the American Carnage speech, which was a very dark speech. Yesterday wasn't as dark. I mean, talk about golden age and all that. But it still had its dark moments. Yeah, I mean, he certainly painted a portrait of America as a country that

needs saving, as a country that's almost all the way over the cliff now, but God has chosen him to save it from a horrible fate. So, you know, I'm watching this and I'm thinking the gaslighting has begun. Much of what he says is true. It's a narrative he wants people to believe because it makes him look better. It gives him an easy win. If the status quo prevails, he'll just tell people that they're better off than they were, and they'll believe it, the people who support him. And July of last year, as an indication of God's will that he be the president of the United States to save it at this moment. That was the calculation. It's all deliberate. It's all deliberate. It's all gaslighting. And it is all foreshadowing the kind of presidency we're going to see for four years. We're going to see some incredible triumphs that he will find in the status quo.

He has no hesitation in playing the God card, does he? You know, he tests these things, right? He tries them out in speeches and so on. If people react positively to them, that's a green light for him. And he knows he has that, like a very fervently religious constituency within his broader constituency that will just lap that up. You know, I mean, there are doubts about whether he even believes in God. He doesn't seem to have read the Bible or pay much attention to it. I don't know. But he certainly seems to find the idea that he has been chosen by God for this moment an appealing idea. When you, I mean, you've watched him, you know, for more than eight years, you watched him running

for that 2016 campaign. You were on the ground watching him. At his core, is he any different than he was then? I think he has to be because I think he's scarred. I think he, you know, he likes to portray himself as tough and persecuted and so on. But he really did go through a lot of stuff. And, you know, the last four years, I mean, I'm sure there are things that he's enjoyed about them. But, you know, he's been in court. He's had to sit there and be disciplined by a judge. He has obviously stored up all kinds of bitterness and vindictiveness within him.

And he's now been given this opportunity to be vindictive about it. And I think that, I don't know, I come back to the pardons and I think that what he did there, you know, is in some way an indication that he does intend, to whatever extent he can, to get his revenge. And I think that, you know, when I reflected on whether Joe Biden should have pardoned the people that he did, my view changed from the morning until the evening. Because I think that Donald Trump will do everything he can to rewrite the history of his first administration so that it reads to the credulous as though he truly was a victim of persecution, that he was persecuted more than any president ever has been, that he's a victim who did nothing wrong, but was tortured by a politically driven justice system

that made up stuff about him. I think that's the narrative he wants to pursue through this, pursue in every way that he can through the rest of his life, really. And that he will use every tool at his disposal to reinforce that gaslit narrative. You love that word in this conversation. You love gaslighting. You love the word.

I don't know. I mean, I just think it's so true. I mean, you listen to the reality that he describes, and it's nothing like the reality that has been documented and observed. But his narrative about January 6th is in direct contradiction to what we saw with our own eyes. And he's telling us our eyes are lying to us and that he is the one who knows the truth. And I just think gaslighting is the perfect term for that. I was an admirer of the title of the book, To Gaslit Nation, because I think that is the best summation of what has happened to the United States over the last 10 years.

It has been gaslit. What are you going to be looking for in the early months of the new Trump presidency? Well, I think my view of the first Trump administration was that he was relatively lucky in that he did not have any crises during his administration until COVID came along. When COVID came along, he dropped the ball in many ways. And you could attribute his election loss to his inability to respond adequately to the crisis before him. I think it's much more likely in the first administration that he will face another crisis or multiple crises. We may already know what they are with what's happening in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. What's happening in the Middle East is not a settled conflict yet.

And those are his now. They belong to him. And they're going to be difficult. And then of course, you always look for what are called the unknown unknowns, right? We don't know what's going to be, and in a sense, this is what I'm talking about. We don't know what they're going to be, but we know that there are going to be some of them. I don't expect that he is going to get as easy a global landscape as he got in the first term. And how he handles that, I think, is quite possibly going to define him. Absolutely. That it will define his entire public life, how he handles those things when they come up.

Do I know what they are? No. That's why they're unknown unknowns. But there are risks. public life, how he handles those things when they come up. Do I know what they are? No, that's why they're unknown unknowns. But there are risks, you know, there are global risks, there are risks to the economy. His proposals on tariffs, I take very seriously. And I think that they will be dramatic, that it will be a feature of what will be known as a Trump era. And I think that they will be dramatic, that it will be a feature of what will be known as a Trump era. And I think that they, I don't discount the possibility of long-term success, but I think in the short term, it could be very, very hard for the United States. And in the long term, it could be a disaster as well. But those are the things he's going to own.

And those are the things that will define him. And some of those who are going to kind of co-own some of this stuff with him, we witnessed yesterday, and it's kind of a remarkable picture, really, the kind of billionaire's row that we saw there with Musk leading the charge. What does that mean to you? What do you think that is telling us? I think it's saying something very important about the influence people who have vast sums of money and power in terms of the communication industry, in terms of, you know, the businesses that they made their fortunes with. They're going to have a lot of influence with this president. They want to have a lot of influence with this president, because I think to some extent, they feel threatened by him. I mean, they're such high profile people that they understand the regulatory relationship at the very least that they're going to have with

the government. They understand that they need to have Donald Trump be their friend. And what that means to Donald Trump, I think we'll see over the next four years. But it wasn't just that they were lined up. It wasn't just that they were lined up behind him friend. And what that means to Donald Trump, I think we'll see over the next four years. But it wasn't just that they were lined up. It wasn't just that they were lined up behind him on the dais when he was being sworn in. They were lined up ahead of his cabinet. You know, that's not an accident. That's deliberate. And if you consider that the next row in front of him was his family, they are the people closest to him, then I think that's a good way to look at the structure of what was sitting on the dais. The most important people to him are his family.

And the second most important people to him are the tech billionaires that occupied the second and third row. It's going to be a fascinating time. We can never deny Trump that. He keeps us guessing every day. Yeah, I just worry about my own mental health. I pay as close attention to it for the next four years as I did the last. Well, there's always lots to worry about with that.

Okay, listen. Thanks for doing this, Keith. Really appreciate it and the guidance you've given us. And hopefully will continue to give us as we watch things south of the border. That's going to wrap it up for this day on The Bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in almost 24 hours.