The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: how the Liberals are benefitting from the Canada-US trade war

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Andrew Coyne is a Globe and Mail Columnist and one of Canada's most trusted commentators. He joins us for a far reaching conversation about how the Liberal Party went from having no hope in this election to being the frontrunner, and how the widespread anti-elite sentiment in Canada has been affected by erratic policies south of the border. Andrew and Rudyard then turn their attention to the man pushing these disastrous policies: Donald Trump. Are we witnessing a decline in mental health and increase in erratic behaviour due to his advanced age?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates. Roger Griffiths here, your chair, joined in studio by Andrew Coyne, who's going to be here on our YouTube channel and our podcast feed for the next little bit, talking about all things Canadian and American. Andrew, so fortunate to be able to have these conversations and exchanges with you. We always get such a great reaction, just to flatter you for a moment, from our community when we have you on. And to flatter you a bit more, I think it's because people appreciate the kind of civility. and substance to which you've brought to your writing and your journalism over these years. So let's start with the Canadian election, because a lot of our U.S. listeners, no doubt, are also keen to know what the heck is going on in Canada. We've kind of hit the midway mark in this campaign.

How would you characterize the election to date in terms of your experience of what? 11, 12 federal elections? Yeah, yeah. You keep reminding me how old I am. It's been kind of surprisingly dull. All of the movement, there was this frenetic movement in the polls before the election when there was a mass movement away from the, to some extent, from the conservatives, particularly from the NDP, towards the liberals.

The liberals went from having no hope, looking at being crushed to being at this point the favorites, possibly even for a majority government. But the campaign itself, not much has happened, not much has moved. keep seeing people trying to detect a narrowing of the race. I think that reflects the desire for a horse race. I haven't seen much evidence of it. Doesn't mean it won't happen. And I think what's going on, I think, is this race has become so much about the leaders. Every race is to some extent, every election is to some extent, but I think particularly this race, because of the Trump factor, which I'm sure we'll get into. And people kind of made up their mind about what they thought about

Mark Carney in particular, I think in a way that's hard to move them off of. When you're looking at things like his extremely impressive biography, you know, the only person I can think of has been a central bank governor for two different countries, as well as his business career, etc. The Tories have thrown everything they can at him in terms of accusing him of every possible perfidy. And certainly at least according to one pollster, his approval ratings have gone up in the course of the campaign. So I think the nature of the race is that plus his persona, people just kind of made up their minds.

And similarly, a large block of the elector, I think, have kind of made up their mind about Pierre Paulyevra, having seen him over an extended period of time. I think that was masked for a while when Justin Trudeau was still the prime minister because he was in such odium that people were just determined to get rid of him. And I don't mean any offense by this,

but they sort of held, we were willing to sort of hold their nose and vote for Pallever. But once they had an alternative, a proportion of those voters said, okay, now that I've got an alternative, I don't want to vote for him. So long and the short of it being, not a whole lot has happened in the course of the race. There hasn't been a lot of really substantive, exciting policy announcements. I don't mean there haven't been any, but there hasn't been a lot of that.

And so it's been mostly kind of stasis. Yeah. Many of our international listeners have probably heard of Mark Carney. As you say, he has this distinction of being both the previous governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada. He's played major roles in global summits around climate change and ethical investing. Are you surprised, Andrew, at the extent to which someone who's, in a sense, so new to politics, has really stepped into this race almost in the Canadian political context out of the blue and then shot to the lead in public opinion polls.

How do you understand that? I mean, I think back to the French election that brought Macron into power, where suddenly we saw a decimation of the mainline traditional political parties and basically the power of Macron as a single person as a brand, as an idea. Is that what we're witnessing now in Canada, just how sickly these political parties are? Or I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe this isn't the right analogy. There may be some of that. I think every situation is different.

First of all, as I think I said when I was last on one of your shows, you know, I'm not keen on central bank governors running for politics. I think that sets a very bad precedent. I generally don't think it's a good idea for rookies to, not to get into politics, because you're always a rookie at some point. But to step in at the leadership level, or let alone the prime minister level is not usually a good idea. It doesn't usually work. So that's all preface. The second bit of preface is a lot of people, people got into their heads in recent years that everybody's against elites. We don't want

elites. We want regular guys that we could have a beer with. We don't want these pointing headed intellectuals. And I always would listen to that. I thought, okay, maybe that's true at this moment in time. But electorates change, situations change. What was right at one point or politically right at one point is wrong at another. You know, John F. Kennedy was pretty elite, but people were pretty keen on him at the time, right? Pierre Trudeau was pretty elite. People were pretty clean on time. They got sick of them after a while, so every situation is different. And so my theory of the case would be we're just in a particular moment right now where the situation is really serious. The threat that is posed, and I use that word advisedly,

by Donald Trump as President of the United States, to our interests, our values, our very sovereignty, is serious. People understand it to be serious. And in serious times, people want serious players. And they change their metric. They change the way that they evaluate. people. They're not looking for a guy that can have a beer with. They're looking for somebody who they think has the experience and the character and the judgment and the chops to handle a very difficult situation. And that may be a mixture of how do you deal with Trump. That may be a mixture of how do you handle the economy in the wake of Trump. But whatever those sort of experiential qualities are, a certain section of the electorate, a critical section of the electorate has

decided that Carney has it. Yeah. Let me see if I can make this dog hunt in one other way. this idea of weak parties. The liberal party, under Carney, has gone through this remarkable about face on a lot of key policy, especially on climate change and the carbon tax, that it basically fought and then the previous prime minister effectively died on that hill. All of this kind of cast overboard in a matter of a few short days, including the capital gains tax, was another another big policy plank that the previous prime minister of the same party had had argued for. What does that make you feel about the memberships of these parties, how they see them when they seem so fluid and so completely open to ejecting their left or right hemisphere,

depending on which way the political wind is blowing? Well, there's a number of different answers to that. One is, this is the Liberal Party we're talking about, first of all. And the Liberal Party, for our American listeners, is famously shape-shifting. Famously is adaptable to whatever, you know, if you don't like our policies, we'll give you another one in five minutes. They adapt to the times. They move right or left, as the situation call us.

So there's some historical background. Second point would be political parties in Canada are very much personal vehicles of the leader. That has become increasingly the case over the last decades. was always true to some extent is absolutely true now, that policy is whatever the leader says the policy should be, members of parliament basically are spokespeople at best for the leadership. They are given their lines to say, they are told when to vote,

they're told when to stand up and sit down. So it's not that unusual to see that, to see the party is simply remaking itself in whatever way that the leader sees fit. The fact that the party gave itself to the leader, the fact that he won the leader, so handily certainly tells you where the party was out, and that is the party was desperate that they were looking at an absolute wipeout in this coming election. And the Liberal Party is a mixture of things in that regard. They are famously a strong brand. They have been the

quote-unquote natural governing party in Canada for over 100 years. They've won two elections in every three since 1891. At the same time, they're also a declining brand. They've been teetering on the edge of a disaster for the last few elections, going back certainly to 2011, for example. After the 2011 election, which was their worst, worst showing ever, there was a lot of talk. Well, the party really needs to rethink what it means to be a centrist party in the 21st century, when everything else is moving towards the polls, et cetera. They really need to do some hard thinking. And that talk lasted for a while until Justin Trudeau came along. And then everybody in the party went, okay, let's put that to one side. We have a savior. We've got a brand name, the son of a former

prime minister, a celebrity in his own right. And they just kind of forgot all about that. And it worked for them well enough for one election, certainly, and they struggled through a couple more. So certainly in their desperation post-justin Trudeau, Mark Carney looked like the best available thing. He was close enough to where the members of the party saw themselves, but I think the biggest thing that they saw it in was he was a potential winner. And in liberal party circles, that is the number one ideology is, can you win? Yeah. Let's begin our transition to what's happening in the United States the last a while. And again, how it's feeding back on this election. But before we go there, maybe as a kind of transition device, let's talk about the kind of progressive

movement in Canada, which historically has been represented and captured by what we call the new Democrats, or it's kind of our version of the Bernie Sanders kind of aOC wing of the U.S. Capital D Democrats. Why do you think in this current context that they are so catastrophically underperforming, when you think about what's happening in the United States and part when you think about what's happening in Europe, where some of those movements are actually beginning to get a little traction again precisely as a counterreaction to the rise of right-wing populism. Well, the NDP has always had a little bit of a pickle in that regard because they've had to sort of share the progressive vote with the liberals. The liberals moving left or right, as the case

may be. But when they're in their, quote-unquote, progressive mode, that's always a difficulty for the NDP to start with. The liberal strategy in every election that I can think of has been the same, which is to say to voters who are thinking of voting New Democrat, you can't possibly do that. All you will do if you do that

is you'll let the conservatives in. And when new Democratic voters are feeling frightened and scared of the conservatives, they will tend to listen to that message. When they don't feel so frightened, then they're more likely to vote their hearts and their consciences and stick with the New Democrats.

So it just so happens, think in the combination of Trump and Pierre Poyevra as the conservative leader, not to say that Pierre Paulyever is the same as Trump or aligned with Trump, but he gives off enough of a similar Trump-like vibe that people were already frightened to death by what Trump was doing and what he represented, particularly voters in the progressive end of the spectrum. And they're looking at Pueva and they're going, I'm not comfortable with him as my champion in this fight. And so they have deserted the NDP en masse. for the liberals. Part of that, I think, is also the leaders that Carney has a certain appeal that

transcends ideological boundaries. I've noticed this in talking to people. Wherever they happen to be on the ideological spectrum, they tend to say, oh, and I think Carney kind of thinks the way I do. So he's got enough of a progressive tinge in some of his policies that he can make New Democrats at least somewhat comfortable with their position. He's got enough of a kind of a bankerly, I'm all about the economy tinge to satisfy what we call blue liberals. And so he's been able to kind of expand that tent rather more than perhaps a more polarizing figure would be able to do. And so you add all, and then the final point would be the NDP leader, Jagmite Singh, has always struggled to really connect with voters and even with connect with New Democratic voters. I don't think he's long for the political world after this, quite frankly.

And so all those things combined, it's just added up to the worst possible situation for the New Democrats. and they are in a lot of trouble. Yeah. Let's shift our conversation to the U.S. because it's been a next whip-snapping week of reversals and flip-flops and kind of Trump chaos. To what extent, Andrew, though, do you feel that maybe the election here in Canada has actually had a bit of a breather from Trump? To the extent to which Canada has not been ensnared in this latest round of global tariffs,

the reversal of those tariffs, the second. territorial tariffs that are now coming off and coming on seemingly every day. Does that give a chance here for us in Canada for this election possibly to breathe a bit more for other issues that are top of mind for Canadians before the kind of Trump roller coasters started back in February? To some extent, I wouldn't want to overstate that for a couple of reasons. One is when you start talking about the 51st state annexation, that tends to burn itself into people's brain.

So yes, it hasn't been on the front page in the last couple of weeks. But I think it definitely singed people. And it's why I don't think there's been a huge amount of movement in the polls. And the second thing is, okay, maybe he's not recently been talking about taking us over, but he's been talking about taking over Greenland. And more importantly, he's been creating such utter chaos on the economy that it's a different kind of threat. It may not be the direct threat against Canada. It's the threat to the global economy,

which we are an integral part, and particularly since we're next door to the United States, when they sneeze, we get a cold. So I think it still remains an issue that, okay, which party and which leader can navigate through this economic storm that we appear to be entering if we're all going to get sucked into a recession because Trump is so unnerved investor sentiment. He's created such uncertainty. You know, am I going to have a 50% tariff applied to me today or 20% tomorrow, etc.? If I locate a plant in the United States because I'm trying to beat the tariff,

am I going to look like an idiot because they then get rid of the tariff? Conversely, if I locate in another country because I think there's going to be a free trade deal or something between America and that country, and then it turns out that was all a bluff. So I just think he's creating the worst possible conditions for investors, that kind of just unmitigated uncertainty. And that certainly puts the economy and navigating the economy. Now, I think there's an opening, perhaps more of an opening for the conservatives in that fight than on a pure kind of existential who's our champion thing. If you get it onto policy rather than leadership.

So what's been clear from the polling data is Carney outpoles the liberals, probably ever underpoles the conservatives. You get it on to policy, I'm not saying the conservatives have really come forward with a lot of these policies, but if it was on a pure policy debate, they've got a bit more of an argument to make, okay, we've got a more. pro-growth, unambiguously, pro-development, pro-productivity platform. The difficulty they've faced is partly, I don't think they've been bold enough or radical enough to really put that front and center. I think it's been too incremental. But secondly, Carney's been doing everything he can to kind of copy them and sailing as close to them as he possibly can to prevent them from getting any traction on that so

you can keep the race, keep the focus on leadership. So, yes, not having Trump threatening our... Our survival every day is probably taking some of the heat out of that, but I'm not sure if it's enough to really affect things at this point. Hi, Monk listeners. I want to tell you about our upcoming spring 2025 month debate. On Thursday, May 29th, we will gather at Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall to debate the motion be it resolved. This is America's golden age. Arguing in favor of the motion is the political consultant, pollster, and senior counselor to President Trump during his first term in office, Kelly Ann Conway.

Her debate partner is the president of the prominent U.S. think tank, the Heritage Foundation, who are the architects of Project 2025. That's Kevin Roberts. Arguing against the motion is the New York Times columnist, podcaster, bestselling author, one of America's most influential commentators on just about everything. That's Ezra Klein. He'll be joined on stage by senior advisor to former President Barack Obama and co-host of the International Sensation, Pod Save the World. world. If you're listening to podcasts, you listen to Pod Save the World, and that's Ben Rhodes. The debate will be streamed online, so if you can't make it in person, you can watch it live from the comfort of your living room. Monk supporters and curators will have the opportunity

to purchase tickets on April 16th before they go on sale to the general public. To become a monk curator or supporter, visit our website, triple w monk debates.com. There you'll find all kinds of ticketing information and details on how to watch the live stream. and to get those advanced tickets if you can make the debate in person. Again, all that information on how to attend and watch the debate is on our website, www.w.w. monkdebates.com. Let's go to what we've seen in the United States specifically in the last week or so. I have a theory, but it's unpopular, Andrew, but I sense maybe you subscribe to it.

And it's unpopular because I think people don't want to believe things that are truly alarming, that we like to think that there's a pattern when sometimes there may not be a pattern. And my theory about Trump increasing, and I think it's been validated over the last week to 10 days, is that this could be a case of the kind of madness of kings, that this could be a scenario where a person, unfortunately, at the apex of, you know, the largest military and economic power in the history of the world, is actually fundamentally in some ways unbalanced and irrational. Why do you think it's so hard for people to accept that scenario

when you can go back through history to George III or others to look at all kinds of bad Roman emperors from Caligula to Nero? The list goes on and on. Yet we seem so reluctant, it seems, to acknowledge that it could really be the individual, his psychological state and either a moment of decline or the metastisization of a delusion and a set of complexes that now are swamping him and swamping his administration. Yeah, I mean, I think the evidence points overwhelmingly to that. It's not like we've had a brief exposure to him.

We've watched him get steadily worse, frankly, over the last few months, over the last few years, whatever time frame you want to take on it. The mind nevertheless rebels against that, partly I think out of a desire for normalcy, partly out of, I guess, a desire for like a false balance. Come on, you must have some compensating virtues. Nobody's all bad. Well, some people are. I think we found one.

You know, it's very hard for me to name for you a virtue that Donald Trump possesses. It's very hard for me to name a vice that he would not be capable of. There's something extremely damaged about it. I mean, I think, and the evidence for those. who force themselves to pay attention. Some of this is people, they don't pay attention. They want to look at something else. They're distracted.

Or they want to see in him what they want to see. Just as I was saying that people do this with Carney. They do this with Trump in spades. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say, the thing I like about Trump is, you know, he'll balance the budget. Or the thing about Trump is he'll stand up to our adversaries. Or the thing I like about Trump is he'll bring honor and character back to the white,

like just things that are just manifestly the opposite of the budget. truth. But people, there's this desire for people, particularly once they're into that partisan envelope, to see what they want to see. But I think it's absolutely the best explanation of him is, he has a combination of personality disorders, particularly that kind of malignant narcissism that many people have spoken of, that manifests as a desire to destroy things, to break things, to break things down, to bring other people down to make him feel large, that he feels he's not been given the due respect that he should deserve, and this is his revenge on the world, if you will. And so he's going through the institutions of American democracy one by one and basically destroying

them. The dynamic of that is, this is the other part of people's inability to come to terms with it is, he's always getting worse. And I don't think that's accidental. I think it is, it's a kind of a flip side of a phenomenon that many people have observed, which is he does 10 things in any one day, any one of which would be career destroying for any previous individual in politics. And he gets there for a volume discount on it. People price it in. They're not shocked by it anymore because he's been so bad before. Well, okay, that's some extent his superpower, but it's also for him innervating. What he wants is constant outrage. And so to keep amping up the outrage, both for his own psychological needs and for those of his supporters who want to see him

owning the libs, et cetera, he has to keep getting worse. He has to keep exceeding expectations of how bad he can be. And I think I could absolutely say that with utter confidence. He's worse now than he was a few months ago when he took over the presidency. I wrote a column on the day after the election, gloomily foreseeing all kinds of terrible things to come. He's gone far beyond that in the three months he's been in power. He was worse during the election campaign than he was, you know, in the years prior to that. He was worse during the presidency, his first presidency, than he was.

when you campaign for it, he's gotten steadily worse. He's constantly pushing the envelope. And so we're now into, you know, deporting people to be tortured without due process. We're into threatening to invade Greenland. We're into corruption on a grand scale, threatening 60 minutes with mass fines because they broadcast something he doesn't like. Executive orders targeting individuals. Exactly. So it's just, it's, he's on an exponential curve.

And it's hard for the mind to keep up with that. We keep thinking about him, even if we're inclined to be critical of him, we're thinking about him like Donald Trump's circa 2018. This is much worse, much less with, you know, no guardrails, essentially. And he's destroying these norms in ways that make it very difficult for the law or the institutions of American democracy to keep up with them. Now, the good news is, in a way, is he's also destroying the economy. He's also damaging a lot of things that weren't part of the original MAGA deal. They were all signed up for him to detourke 12 million people or to beat up on this or that institution that they didn't like. They weren't terribly keen in seeing their 401Ks destroyed.

So he's rapidly losing altitude in the polls. That's making Republicans who were willing to sign on to him because they were more afraid of their base than they were of the electorate. That's making them nervous because they're now looking at staring at the face of some catastrophic results. in the midterm elections. And so I think you've got two phenomenon racing in opposite directions in the same time. One is of him steadily breaking through more norms, steadily acquiring more power

through the sort of logic of autocracy, which is everybody who might have wanted to stand up to him feels they can't because nobody else did and they don't want to be the last person standing and so they try to jump out in front and suck up to him. So that phenomenon where you tend to accrue steadily increasing power,

That's on the one hand. On the other hand, every president starts at the peak of their power and prestige. And Stedler goes down. Every president, to some extent, overreeds their mandate. And Trump has done that in spades. I mean, he won one of the most narrowest margins in U.S. history. Nobody who, I think, or very few people who voted for him were signing on for a revolution. And yet that's what he's bringing him.

And it's just going to be a question of which of those things, Trump's, you know, no pun intended. that, you know, does he get slaughtered in the 2026 midterms? Yeah. Or are the midterms canceled or screwed up in some way? Yeah. And I say that in all seriousness. That's maybe the last question I want to end with you on, Andrew, is the potential for a crescendo. Because as you say, the curve, the exponential curve that he seems to be on right now of disruption,

I mean, that exponential means you're looking at a line and then suddenly it does go vertical because the math of exponentiality, you know, kicks in. So how close do you think we might be to that? I mean, how can either he, his administration, the institutions of the United States keep up or cope with this level of, again, to euphemistically frame it as change? I mean, it's not change. It's the wrecking ball that he promised.

But it seems with each week, especially with that tariff week that we just went through, to have, again, reached another pitch that in itself was not conceivable the week before. I think we're extremely close. For example, they are in the process of, one way or another, defying court orders. And that was always, to me, and maybe I'll look back on this and think this was a quaint hope, but that was always to me one of the sort of rupacons that they may or may not be willing to cross of actually defying a Supreme Court order. This is what makes Trump different from any previous criminal in office. Richard Nixon was a crook when no one was looking. But when the Supreme Court told him he had to hand over the tapes, he handed over the tapes.

Trump wouldn't. I'm quite certain. And he's in the process of if they haven't, you know, they're trying to squirrel it by saying, actually the Supreme Court ruled for us, which is crazy in this matter of this person who was spirited out of the United States to a basically dungeon with no due process. and the administration has admitted in error. Yeah, there was a court. He had a court ruling or decision that allowed him, gave him status in the United States.

That's right. And they have a court order that he's got to be brought back from this hell that he's been plunged into. And, you know, this may have been all part of the plan was put him off to a foreign country. You can sort of manufacture excuses as to why you can't do it. But they're basically defying a court order. And if they get away with this one, they'll do it more.

And so people, a lot of people, people had vested hopes that this would ultimately constrain Trump was the rule of law, but he's in the process of destroying it. And if that goes, everything goes. And one of the consequences of the Supreme Court ruling that gave him criminal immunity, it may be to have at least emboldened him, if not empowered him, to say, well, how many divisions that the Supreme Court have. So I think there's real potential that it gets worse really rapidly in a hurry. If we get into, for example, if we continue to see this economic slide where they've set off this cascade of, you know, declining, rising interest rates yet a declining dollar. And where the U.S. dollar status is reserve currency is threatened, if the mass of American debt starts to become more burdensome in terms of higher interest rates, et cetera, and we get into a real crisis, does he start, what you have to think is the next step is he start meddling with the Fed?

Yeah. And if you start meddling with the Fed and demanding basically hyperinflationary policies to bail you out of the situation you put yourself in, that way leads to chaos. If you start threatening to default on U.S. debt, which many people are talking about as a potential next Trump move. Or even, Andrew, just bizarrely, people in the administration are flagging the idea that part of his negotiations with other countries to avoid his tariffs is that they will either forego the repayment of American. debt or accept American debt at different durations than what they hold. So this starts to get into kind of just blatant highway robbery where you are, you're running up to your allies and saying, you know what, we're completely changing the terms of trade on the world's most liquid and ubiquitous asset, which is U.S. treasuries. I can't think of anything more serious. Well, and the flaw among many in that thinking is, and you can see this, that they do not understand how the world works. I mean, this is the thing.

I talked about Trump and his psychological disturbances, but he has around him a bunch of fanatical ideologues, and many of them basically crazy, who have ideas, they're quite unhinged about, among other things, about their own agency in the world, their own ability to command that the rest of the world step to their dictates. So they think they're going to win a trade war with China, for example.

I think they may be disabuse of that idea, but they certainly can't win a war with the boss. markets. And if anything you do that calls into question, quote unquote, the full faith and credit of the United States, that calls into question the United States is trustworthiness. And nobody believes Trump anymore. And I think that's one of the lessons that you saw over the last week or so is the consequences, and they've only just begun, of announcing to the world that basically you are untrustworthy. Your grand pronouncements only last for a day. Your word is not your bond. You lie repeatedly, everybody knew that, but I guess people thought he wouldn't

lie about certain things. But if the people who are lending you money and the people who own your bonds get that into their heads, then you get into a debt spiral. And so there's real potential for a calamity coming out of this. And the good news is, faced with an absolute meltdown the bond markets on that, whatever it was Wednesday, Trump blinked. He was prevailed upon this time by some of the people around him to back off to some extent on, you know, he still retained a lot of these tariffs. But that's going to be a question in future is, is, you know, just how interested in Gauter Dameron is he? How committed is he to just doing whatever he wants to do and let the chips fall where they may? There was this amazing

story where somebody, some news report, quoting insider, said Trump was perfectly prepared to cause a recession. He just didn't want to cause a depression. Well, you know, that was that week. Fine tuning. But, you know, as time goes on, maybe Trump's going to, you know, he always does the worst possible thing that can be imagined at that moment. And then your imagination has to expand. But at any given moment, he will do always with principled consistency the opposite of anything

that is good, true, just, or right. And so what's the craziest thing you could possibly do at this moment? It's slap on 100% tariffs on, you know, on your training. partners, but he'll think of something crazier in the future. My final contribution of this and just have you reflect on it is that what worries me, Andrew, is that we're seeing him grapple and fumble and cause this level of chaos and disruption with crises that he is manufacturing. What keeps me up at night is what we know happens to every president is that a crisis

comes from the outside in. And if you look at, you know, what the signal gate told us about the workings of his inner, you know, cabal, if we see how he behaves, I just wonder, Andrew, how this presidency wouldn't take an external crisis where it doesn't have, and it feels that it doesn't have control, and doesn't morph that into something that is truly, truly dangerous. A hundred percent. And we saw a mini example of that with COVID. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of dead people because of Trump's leadership, quite frankly. It's absolutely needless. And yeah, we get, I mean, we're certainly seeing the beginnings of a crisis in Europe with Ukraine and with his flip to basically taking the side of the Russians.

There's no two ways of it. Mass casualty event in Sunni as we're recording today. And he's saying, I was told it. was a mistake. Zolensky started this war. It was Biden's war. It's just all utter nonsense. Certainly at the very least, I would have no confidence of how he would handle a crisis over Taiwan. And at the worst, he would, again, be on the side of Xi Jinping. I mean, this idea that he's tough on China, I think it bears a lot of scrutiny. It's not actually true. And in Canada's case, if things are really crazy and he needs a diversion, you know, I don't know what I don't

I don't think he could ever get the critical mass among the military or whatever to invade Canada or anything like that. But I could well see a crisis in our north that involved Russia or China just sort of setting up shop there and basically defying our sovereignty that in previous ages we would have said, well, they'd never dare because they'd have to deal with the Americans. And I could well see Trump saying, oh, cut me in for a piece of the action. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the program.

Always great to get your analysis and insights. This is just a time with so much going on that a bit of clarity and perspective and the rationality that you bring to these things is just so important to our audience. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you so much for coming on the program. My pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, that's going to be a wrap for our show today. If you'd like to share this episode, please do so with friends and family. There's also, if you're watching an on-demand audio version on the Monk Debates podcast feed. and if you're listening, come on over to the Monk Debates YouTube channel.

You can watch Andrew and me in HD video and forward that link on also to friends and family. So thanks again for being part of the Monk Debates community. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.