The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump undermines his own party and the crisis of Canadian conservatism

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Rudyard and Andrew unpack President Trump's speech last night, in which he cast doubt on the integrity of U.S. elections and alleged foreign interference ahead of the midterms. Will this strategy backfire by depressing Republican turnout? And how far might Trump go in attempting to shape the outcome in November?In the second half of the show (for paid subscribers), Rudyard and Andrew are joined by special guest Sean Speer to reflect on the state of conservatism in Canada. Andrew argues that too many Conservatives have substituted outrage and attitude for serious policy ideas—a symptom of a movement that has lost confidence in its purpose. He also delivers a blunt message to those who have grown pessimistic about the Conservative cause. What kind of leader does the party need to restore energy, direction, and confidence to its base?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.

So if you're a Republican seeking election or re-election in this thing, you're once again, you have to be furious with the president. If you're not completely drinking the Kool-Aid, you've got to be furious with him. You may not express it publicly, but this is not going to help your chances. If you're wondering what the president was saying last night and his address to the nation, well, join the club. In fact, join Andrew Coyne and myself, Roger Griffiths, chair of the monk debates for today's Monk Dialogue. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. Good to be with you. So what are we to

make of the politics of this speech that the president gave last night? If we set aside, and we'll get into it, some of the allegations that were made and the extent to which many of those dogs don't hunt in terms of the case that the president was trying to prosecute against election interference, what do you think politically he was trying to do in the setup to the midterms, Andrew? He's trying to delegitimize them, which is an old, old tactic he's pursued in any number of different campaigns and elections, sometimes even does it about campaigns that he won, which is bizarre, but he clearly can see where the midterm elections are headed and they are not headed to good places for the Republicans at all. And rather than actually change course and try to make him

in his party more electable, he's setting about to make the elections delegitimized in the eyes of Americans. And a broader agenda than that, it's quite clear, is to justify measures to either attempt to alter the results of the elections or to ignore the result of the election. So there is a great sense of alarm across America today at where this is going. It was predictable as the tides, but nevertheless, this is further confirmation that Trump is not going to allow a free and fair election in 2026 or 28, at least to the extent that it actually results in any consequences for him or his party. And we can get into what kinds of measures he might be prepared to do as a result of this, but this is the first step where you lay down the pretext for it,

that these elections were rigged or fixed in some way by malevolent forces that we can't see or identify, but maybe it was China. And therefore, I, Donald Trump, am empowered to call in the military or what have you. So that's the general reasoning as far as it goes. Now, it has a fascinating potential side effect, which is, as our friend David from has pointed out, if you're a Republican voter and you believe in Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is telling you that the elections are rigged, why do you go to the polls then? If you're a Democrat or a non-aligned voter and you're

furious at Trump, and this is one of the reasons you're furious, it's going to give you one more reason to crawl over a broken glass to get to the polls. But it's just going to demoralize and depress Republican turnout as it's done in the past when he's made these claims. And so if you're a Republican seeking election or re-election in this thing, you're once again, you have to be furious with the president. If you're not completely drinking the Kool-Aid, you've got to be furious with him. You may not express it publicly, but this is not going to help your chances. Andrew, I'm curious that at the opening moments of his address, the president announced that he was declassifying evidence of election interference and tampering.

God knows we've talked about the consequences of that in Canada. It is a real problem here. In contrast, though, as U.S. media and other experts have poured through this document dump, some 18 hours since the Oval Office address, it seems as if there is really very little, if anything, of any particular note, there is very few fact proof points that would support the president's assertion that he made once again that the election of Joe Biden was rigged, that his defeat was engineered. In fact, one of the intelligence assessments went so far as to say the Chinese did not act,

did not implement actual plans to interfere. And I just, what are we to make of this? And it's not just last night, Andrew. It's throughout this administration. There is just a seeming, to call it a casual relationship with the truth, doesn't insults the truth and insults us. It just, what is this? Why would you go and make a speech like this and then not, and drop evidence in air quotes?

and that evidence not in any way substantiate the claims that you argue. Well, the difficulty he has is he doesn't actually have any evidence. So he's in the position if he's going to propagate this lie that unless he completely fabricates evidence, and for some reason he has not gone to that length, then all you can do is resent evidence that doesn't actually confirm your case. So, I mean, we have the great good fortune that as dictators and coup plotters go, is enormously incompetent. The people around are even more incompetent.

And so he does stuff like this. It's so slipshod and so embarrassing. It's like a great-aater trying to half-ass a term paper that he hasn't read the research for and can't be bothered to support. So, yeah, you've got evidence that either is blacked out, almost entirely, or where you can read it,

doesn't say anything or prove anything, or in some cases, you know, the biggest single incident of foreign interference, of course, was the 2016 election with the Russians interfering on Trump's behalf. And there is some references in there to that event about the Russians trying to help Trump, not trying to help his opponents. The biggest thing that Trump kept pointed to was, you know, China having access to all these voter rules, which is numerous commentators have pointed out. In the United States, you can get them. basically by buying them off the net or they're on the public record, you just go to the website of the state involved, et cetera. So it wouldn't require some nefarious hacking activity in the

part of the Chinese to do that. There's no doubt that various countries are trying to interfere with everybody's elections these days. So foreign interference is an issue. But the issue that Trump's presenting that it's all designed to stop him and it's all being run by the Democrats and it's all being covered up and it's actually had some impact on the election results and the fairness thereof. It's all complete hooey. It's entirely designed to justify his own attempts to rig an election. The president's cited as one of his examples a kind of online sleuth of rather dubious antecedents. This is an individual who has previously alleged that there were Chinese military bases in the United States that released COVID into the continental U.S., exposing the U.S. population. The same person that the president cited last night in a different context was that TikTok had access to driver's licenses.

In fact, the platform doesn't capture your driver's license. Again, Andrew, I just like, what is going on, since my frustration, like, what is going on the background? There is Susie Wiles. There is a chief of staff. There is Todd Blanche. There is an acting attorney general. There is a U.S. government.

Planes are flying and landing on airports by the federal aviation administration. The border checkpoints are operating. God knows. The U.S. military is fighting a war in the Straits of Hermuz. I mean, this is a functional country. But what we saw last night would just, it seemed like a complete disconnect between the president, his remarks, what he says, and then the reality of the United States is the world's most powerful nation, not just in 2026, but arguably in the history of the world. It's a barely functioning government right now. There are things that it just simply can't do that it used to be able to do.

It has all the military power, for example, but if you deploy it in as vastly incompetent a way strategically as you did in Iran, you get the results that you get in Iran. So there's nothing wrong with the hardware or the fighting men and women who are operating it. It's that the grand design is not a grand design. So, yeah, let's be clear. There are no grown-ups in this administration. There was in the first administration. There were people who, for good or real and with very mixed results,

attempted to be the grown-ups who would keep Trump from breaking things. So those individuals had some, you know, they have to judge them by their track record as how able they were, but at least they had some claim to being grown-ups with good intentions. If you signed on and joined this government in this administration, you were not there to restrain Trump, you were there to enable him. And so even the people who sort of culturally or temperamentally don't look as crazy as some of the others, like Todd Blanche,

are nevertheless being foot soldiers in very deeply damaging and dangerous. Because they are doing bad things on behalf of the president. They don't look quite as wild-eyed as a Pete Higgseth or Cash Patel do. But they are every bit as dangerous, maybe more so for not being so evidently loony. And I would include Susie Wiles in that. You know, she signed on for this just because she has. the make the trains run on time job description doesn't mean that she's not making the trains run to crazyville yeah so andrews we wrap up this the the first complimentary half of uh today's monk dialogue um

what is your risk meter saying right now with the midterm elections because you and i have discussed this in the past and i guess i've gone through phases maybe a greater anxiety and worry earlier in the year. I was consoled by our friend David Frum's analysis that if there really was a blue wave, it's much harder to fix an election where you're losing the house by half a dozen seats. But last night was jarring. Last night, again, suggests that this is a president, you know, tortured by these demons. He is refusing to let this argument lapse or even be curtailed. And he's marshalling a forest of lies that don't even have credible support from any source that one would associate credibility with. And instead is extending, you know, his points of validation into the extremes of the Internet and X and, frankly, wackos who are engaging in kind of rank conspiracy.

and we're all just supposed to accept that as bona fides that assert his claim and, as you say, raised doubts about what's going to happen in November. Yeah, I think it's, I would say it's a near certainty that he's going to try something. Yeah. And he already is trying things. For example, he's trying to do something with mail-in ballots via the U.S. Postal Service to make it harder for people to vote by mail, which is a big part of voting in a lot of states the United States. And how a lot of Republicans vote, as you say, it's contrary to his own interests.

Whether that will necessarily be to his benefit, but I don't know, but he will clearly is already engaged in things to, you know, the Save Act, as he calls it, is an attempt to try to suppress voter turnout on the Democratic side. So there are various things he will almost certainly try to affect the results, whether they will have any impact in a wave election, as you say, is to be doubted, but not entirely discounted, depending on how far he's willing to go on that. The larger question is, what is he prepared to do in and around election day to deter people from voting that he doesn't want to vote? And secondly, if he does get a result he doesn't like, what does he do about that? Does he accept the result? Do the senators get seated? Do the House or representatives

get to get to take their seats or does he come up with some rationale as to why that has to be overturned or challenged or what have you? And I would say there is a certainly greater than 50% chance as of today of something larger and crazier than that occurring. People should not take too much comfort in the idea that, oh, if it's a really clear result that Trump will have no choice but to accept it. They should not take too much comfort in the precedent, quote unquote, set by Victor Orban in Hungary, who was clearly a dictator, clearly had rigged many things his way, but got such a bad result in the recent Hungarian election that he had to accept it and step down from power. Orban is a much more garden variety autocrat.

He's used some of the techniques of Trump-style populism. He's jumped on that bandwagon. He's a much more known quantity. He's a rational actor. He just likes power. Trump is not a rational actor. He does not observe any of the norms, even of other dictators and other autocrats. He doesn't even obey the norms of rational self-interest. So you cannot assume any sort of rational or predictable behavior based on any like-minded model or precedent. And I would go further and say, with Trump, it is usually best to assume he will do the worst possible thing. So I am extremely concerned about what's going to happen in the midterm elections. I think the odds are at least of he'll trying something,

and quite likely he'll try something really quite major and bad. Okay. Andrew, thank you for being part of this, the public-facing portion of today's Monk Dialogue. If you're enjoying these conversations with Andrew and our weekly analysis with Janice Gross-Stey, on geopolitics and all the great premium audio and video content that we offer at the monk debates, please consider becoming a donor. You can do that today for as little as $2 a week.

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