The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump's mixed messages on Iran and the NDP elects a new leader

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Rudyard and Andrew reflect on Trump's mixed messaging about the war with Iran. Troop deployment to the region would suggest he is escalating this conflict which could throw the world economy into a recession. What happens when Trump leaves office? Does America snap back to normalcy or does another Trump-like leader take his place? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Andrew turn to the NDP and their newly elected leader, Avi Lewis. Lewis's election signals the federal NDP has become a party that values identity politics over the working class and is uninterested in pragmatism or trying to reach power by gradual steps. Could Avi Lewis surprise us all and energize young people like Zohran Mamdani has done in New York City? And if so, what is the galvanizing issue on the left?   Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to full episodes of Munk Dialogues with Andrew Coyne. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up.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.

Can any system, no matter how well designed, can it withstand somebody so completely outside the norm as Trump, somebody who is not bound by any norm of any behavior of any kind? Nobody has ever confronted this before. We've never seen anything like this before in a Democratic country. The drumbeats of war get louder, or do they? This president is sending a lot of mixed messages. One day, seeming to suggest the United States is heading towards a ground war in the Middle, least. Others saying negotiations and a deal are close to help break it all down and talk about the NDP's election of a new leader, joined in studio by a friend of the monk debates and a regular contributor, Andrew Coyne of the Globe of Mail. Good to see you. Let's jump in. It's been another

kind of chaotic weekend of cross currents and conflicting messages out of the president and various administration officials, where do we find ourselves, Andrew, today, Monday as we record, do you have any feeling as to what could the coming week hold for this pretty increasingly globally consequential conflict? Yeah, short answer, no, but I think we should be guided less by what comes out of the president's mouth, which changes every few hours, if not minutes. He invents negotiations that aren't happening, makes ultimatums that

he then withdraws just before the market's open. He's clearly improvising on the fly because he doesn't know what he's doing. I think you can be guided more by actions, and if you look at the buildup of U.S. troops in the region,

it is hard to see how you do that, and I mean it's not inconceivable. You then just send them home again, but at this point you'd say it's more likely than not that they're going to launch some kind of ground operation which it will be is not clear and it's not clear that any of them are very good options I mean you're clearly not going to invade and conquer Iran

country of 92 million people the size I believe of a third of the United States continental United States ringed by mountains it's not happening are you going to go in and take out the nuclear material Well, chances are the Iranians have had some time to prepare for that. Probably aren't keeping it all in one spot convenient for you to scoop it up. You'd have to, you know, be unbelievable the fight you'd face going in.

So that's dodgy, but not, I suppose, inconceivable. The third option is you're just going in to take control of Karg Island and the oil terminals there, as many people have said, great, you take it, but can you hold it? what's the logistical requirements to supply a force like that, what's the loss of life, et cetera. And when you see people like Senator Lindsey Graham saying, we took Iwo Jima, it just doesn't fill you with a great deal of confidence. So looking at the physical buildup, they've got now something like 10,000 troops in the region over their usual retinue. It looks like they're preparing something. Yeah.

This weekend we also saw the largest of the no-kings rallies across the United States. In fact, it became a global phenomenon with protests in European capitals. What do you make of that and how, you know, it seems that domestic opposition to this president's building. There are some new polls out that suggest, you know, he's now below 40% popularity, some even in the mid-th century. 30s, and then literally Andrew, millions of people, if you add up all the cities across the U.S. that participated in the No King's protests over the weekend. I mean, this must be an immense, for any normal administration. This would be a check, a worry, an urgent concern.

How do you think he's factoring that into his calculus around the war, the midterm elections? does this register with him? It's not clear. I mean, any normal administration would have turned tail months ago, whatever their original intentions. With you're down, I mean, it's extraordinary that his support is over 3% given what he's doing to the country. But to be down in the mid-30s, six months out from midterm elections,

it's catastrophic. And a lot of Republican congressmen, in both the House and the Senate, are looking at losing their seats under this guy. Almost none of them have broken with him. That may change once the primaries are over. Primary season, for the most part, ends in June. There's a few late primaries, but for most part ends in June.

If they're still looking at these kind of numbers, you're already seeing cracks over Ukraine, cracks over the Epstein files, certainly cracks over Iran. I mean, in each of these things, he's completely done 180 degree, either from traditional Republican policy or his own policies. So it's becoming increasingly difficult for any. of them to stay with him and you have to figure there's going to be more breaks as time goes on. But it's extraordinary that he shows so little evidence of carrying where he's at the Bulls.

It does make you wonder what they have in store for the midterm elections in terms of them being free and fair. You're seeing more and more chatter within the MAGA world, for example, of having ICE officials, ice thugs on hand to intimidate. voters particularly in blue polling stations the thing they're trying to do with the voting rights is I think in the same vein so you know and we're still six months out yeah so just as I said we shouldn't off the top we shouldn't necessarily attach any truth significance to anything that comes out of his mouth we should not assume

any kind of normalty and any kind of normal behavior normal responses to democratic developments because this is not a president who has any interest in democracy. Yeah. We're also seeing Andrew some, you know, some movement around this chaos at the U, at American airports, an inability for the Republican-controlled Congress to accept the compromise that was negotiated within the Senate. So that kind of sense of kind of chaos in an advanced economy where your domestic air travel is starting to, in a sense, break down. We saw the horrific Air Canada accent at LaGuardia, who knows to the extent to which that, you know, is connected to all this chaos. It just seems to paint a picture to me,

Andrew, of a U.S. that is what, I don't know, being ground down, you know, between these millstones. on the top, a kind of chaotic and competent administration on the bottom, you know, real voter frustration with the economy, with ice, with, you know, a whole set of issues. What do you make of this moment right now in the U.S.? And how exceptional is it and potentially how explosive could it be as we move towards them in terms? And as this war, potentially, if you're right, and I would agree with you that with the troop deployments, it would suggest that there is an increased risk here that we're going to go another

round with the Iranians. There will be the potential increasing likelihood as the week goes on for some kind of outright declaration of a, well, there'll never be a declaration of a war because you need congressional approval for that. But, you know, we're, this seems, this conflict in Middle East seems to be culminating at the time that all this domestic turmoil and ferment is happening in the US. And we'll feed back into it. So the cost of the war, first of all, is astronomical. They're spending billions of dollars almost every day, certainly every week.

Oh, but now he's saying, Andrew, he's going to ask the Gulf states to begin to pay for the war. This is his latest kind of shaped out. To pay for the war that destabilize them where they discover the United States is not a responsible ally, et cetera, et cetera. So enormous upfront costs, first of all, of the war itself. secondary cost of if it continues, and maybe even if it doesn't continue, going to pitch the world economy into a recession. People talk about this being an oil shock, an energy shock,

unlike anything we've ever seen going back even to 1973. So that's going to have effects, among other things, on the fiscal capacity of the United States, which was already calamitous. They were running multi-trillion dollar deficits even before this in peacetime. 5 to 6% of GDP? Yeah. Yeah. So a traditional fiscal conservative government facing that would have been certainly making efforts to rein in expenses, but would have been doing so presumably in some kind of rational way,

as opposed to the way that the early Trump administration did with the Doge exercise, where you just went in and eviscerated things without any attempt to understand who was doing what or why they were there, et cetera. It was just driven by complete dogma. and one consequence of that is the air traffic control system where they've just laid off people with no understanding of the actual capacity of need. So you've got a picture of a weakened state capacity in the United States

already, frankly, even before Trump, you know, this has been a longstanding problem in the United States of a state machinery that was ceasing to function in various ways. When you've got governments being routinely shut down, now because of political disputes between the parties. And in this case, I think more justified than most because of the outrageous behavior of the ICE agents and the mayhem and murders that they were committing, that's clearly a dysfunctional democracy and also an increasingly dysfunctional state that cannot do basic

things like run the air traffic control system. I mean, the height of it was the official who was supposed to be a official who was supposed to supposed to investigate the crash at LaGuardia, couldn't get there for several hours because they were held up by the lineups in the airports and where it was they were coming from. So it's, you know, if an actual nine-year-old were in the White House and running the Iran war, it would be indistinguishable from the way that Trump is running it. If an actual agent of the Russian Federation were running the domestic economy and going to, you know, government in the United States and attempting to destroy it from within, their behavior would be

indistinguishable from what is happening under the current White House. It is that bad. He is, again, a constant theme of this show is we have to avoid analyzing Trump through any kind of lens of, oh, he's a normal president making mistakes. He's a nihilist. He has people around him who want to bring everything crashing down so they can rebuild their techno-libertarian utopia out of it or whatever white nationalist or Christian nationalists. There are these various strains of extremism among the people around him who share only one thing in common, which is they figured out they can manipulate Trump

to stand for whatever they want to stand for, at least for a couple of days at a time. And make an incredible amount of money through corruption and favorable treatment. That's right. You've got various strands of the coalition around Trump who are either revolutionary zealots or grifters, sometimes both. And in Trump's case, you just have a... a simpleton slash ignoramus slash monumentally corrupt everything in between.

Andrew, I don't know if you saw that New York Times had a fantastic story over the weekend showing the detailed drawings of the ballroom that the president has designed and that there is no doorway up the ceremonial staircase to enter the building. Instead, there's a small doorway to the side. The stairway to nowhere. You can laugh about this, but it goes back to something you know that I worry about is what is his mental state, right? Like how could someone who is compisementis come up with that design? And then second, what environment have we created in the United States, the highest levels of his government where he is now, this design is becoming real?

They are building according to an architectural plan that, can you say this word, that is, you know, that a moron would struggle to make worse? What you have in the Trump White House is sort of 1984 meets Looney Tunes. Okay. It's comically inept, but it has the same dynamic of any autocratic to, you know, totalitarian state, which is if the leader says two plus two equals five, everyone agrees it equals five. And so on big matters and small, on the conduct of the Iran war, he's getting apparently briefings that consists of montages of things blowing up to show how powerful the American military. He doesn't read anything that's put in front of them.

So it's only going to be these kinds of video briefings. And they're not telling him from everything one reads. they're not telling him the stuff he needs to hear not that he would take it in if they did and on small matters like the design of this preposterous ballroom that dwarfs the size of the White House itself anybody could look at that

can say the emperor is no architect and yet nobody dares to say it so it's fascinating to watch it seems almost like it seems mentally ill oh of course it is the design and I guess urge viewers to go and Google it and look at it yourself. It suggests that there's something really wrong with the person who conceptually, spatially, is trying to figure a building out.

And it apparently takes up all of his waking hours. I mean, to be fair. Well, he was flipping through it on Air Force One with reporters. Instead of answering questions about the Iraq War, he had a full presentation on his ballroom. I mean, to be fair to him, you know, he's lazy-assed about everything else, but about this ballroom, he's pretty dedicated. He just doesn't have the first clue what he's doing.

And this is the field that he made his name in, his real estate development. So look, it's some complicated mixture of crazy money makes you crazy. That happened to him long ago. You know, the damage in the wounds from his upbringing as a child, which clearly plays through in the father's child of the man. his lifetime of experience of lying through his teeth about everything and getting away with it because he would just keep tying people up in court, refusing to pay his suppliers, etc. Add to that the desperation of the people around him that he's their ticket not only for themselves

and their own career aspirations, but also that they've convinced themselves that if they're not in power America, as we know it, is destroyed, even though they're doing their best to destroy it. you have a bunch of things which add up to completely irrational decision-making on his part, which is not checked or balanced by any other countervailing force within the White House or outside the White House. It all adds up to insane behavior. Is he clinically insane? I don't know. In a way, it doesn't matter. It's sort of a reverse-churing test.

If you're talking to him and it doesn't make any sense and it sounds like a madman, then it's the functional equivalent of a madman. Yeah. And just finally, to add these like sins of omission and commission by the president this week, we're now been told that there is new currency coming out that will bear his signature. There are a variety of coins that will feature his likeness. This is actually in contravention to American law, which does not allow living, not forget sitting, living, you know, political figures to be featured. It all starts to feel a bit like Chow Cheshcu. It's the Romanian dictator. I think he referred to himself as the genius of the Carpathians. And, you know, he, too, liked monumental architecture.

He too, like Trump, you know, his name on every building, the Trump Kennedy Center, the president was referring to. The giant posters of them all over Washington. Yes. And now, you know, the currency featuring his likeness and echoing back on the people, it's so out of, this is I guess when I'm struggling with Andrew. it's just so out of sync with America's best traditions, with how American society and democracy worked up into just, you know, what was that,

like 12 months ago. How can you go off a waterfall this fast and fall this far? I mean, am I just wrong? Are we wrong to think about what America was? Did we misunderstand it before? Because it was something different, and this is just simply the confirmation that it wasn't. something different it wasn't that city on the hill that we've been told or has something else happened that I'm failing to understand why in 12 months have we gone

from Joe Biden to Chow Chescu the genius of the Carpathians? I think there's several tributaries to it I think it's a vital question to try to answer because it plays into the corollary question which is what happens after Trump is there's a lively debate going on is does America snap back into normalcy after that? Does it just continue on under some other leader with the same craziness or something in between? And those are obviously vital questions for people who are trying to plan. You know, how permanent do you, if you're trying to deal with this administration, how permanent do you think this behavior is? I think there's three broad avenues that occur to me.

one is that there is something has cracked in American society that has long roots, deep roots. The divisions within the society, the willingness of people to put up with this kind of crazy behavior because at least it's doing in their opponents, that would certainly be one strand and would suggest very deep roots to it. A second would be a breakdown in the checks and balances.

that the system of countervailing powers in the United States that was supposed to prevent this has not prevented. And I think there are real questions and issues around systematic reform coming out of this that the Americans are going to have to confront. I think we talked about this on a previous show that I think the rest of the world is going to have to impress upon the Americans

that they're going to have to confront because this kind of wild instability is not just bad for America, it's bad for the world. and we don't get a vote in their elections, but we have to have impress upon them that this is unacceptable. But then the third element is, can any system, no matter how well designed, can it withstand somebody so completely outside the norm as Trump,

somebody who is not bound by any norm of any behavior of any kind? Nobody has ever confronted this before. We've never seen anything like this before in a Democratic country, without question. And when you, you know, so I always make this comparison, you know, until now, the worst we can imagine was Richard Nixon during Watergate, who by comparison looks like an absolute model citizen. You know, when he was caught, he said, you got me. You know, when the Supreme Court said, you got to hand over the tapes, he handed over the tapes. Trump is of a completely different order.

And that inability of the rest of us to comprehend that, to imagine that, to make the leap of understanding what is. going to be required to confront that. I mean, you said a minute ago that such and such thing was against the law. He's broken dozens of laws and nothing has come about it. I mean, there are court cases that for a while at least countermand it, but are any of them going to permanently prevent him? You know, I always say it's only a convention that we obey the law. Ultimately, the distinction between convention and the legal text breaks down because obeying the legal text requires that we basically subscribe to the idea that you have to obey the law. And if somebody just says, I'm not doing any of that, we in the media don't know how to handle it,

the Congress doesn't know how to handle it, none of our institutions are really up to that task at this point. Now, maybe as a result of this, some of these reforms will come in that will be built to withstand even this kind of black swan event. And I think, you know, the founding of the American Republic, they brought in a, a bunch of safeguards because of what they'd gone through prior to that under George the 3rd. And there were real violations that they're very much, you can, when you're reading the constitutional text of the United States, you're sort of living through, feeling that angst that they were feeling at the time.

I hope and pray that there will be institutional reforms that will come out of this, that they will learn the lesson that if you get a madman in power, we have to have some way of constraining him even then, even if he won't be constrained. Yeah. And we may have to face this, you know, if and when Trump is required to leave and refuses to leave. Right. And I would mean almost literally what if he barricades himself in the White House. Yeah. Well, you'd hope the 25th Amendment would come into effect. I wouldn't count it in anything. Not with that. I can well imagine there'd be some crisis about trying to eject him from the office when his time has come.

Wow. Wow. Well, Andrew, thank you for agreeing to stick around just for a little. little bonus episode exclusively for Monk members and Monk donors. Andrew is going to talk about the NDP. They just had a big election or the weekend. Abby Lewis is their new leader. What does this mean for this storied Canadian political party? So if you're enjoying these podcasts and you're watching and listening, please head over to the Monk Debates website. Sign up as a member. Join at one of the donation levels that makes sense for you. You get a charitable tax receipt and we'll also send you a link to listen to the back half of this show and all of our other premium audio and video content right after you enroll. So here's that. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the first half

of our monk dialogue with Andrew Coyne. To get access to the full episode right now, consider becoming a monk donor. For just $50 a year, less than a dollar a week, you will get 72-hour advanced access to all of our premium podcasts, including Friday Focus with Janice, Stein. You also get our live streams of mainstage debates and all kinds of other great perks and privileges. Simply go to our website, triplew.munkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. And click on the join button on the top right hand corner of the screen. Again, that website, triplew.com. The monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. 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.