The Munk Debates Podcast - Trump sends in the National Guard (again) and Mark Carney goes to Washington

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Rudyard and Andrew react to the deployment of U.S. National Guard troops to American cities, specifically guards from red states being sent into blue states. This is a watershed moment, speeding up America's worrying slide into authoritarianism. Is it fair to separate Trump's ego-driven action from his handlers like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought who have more concrete designs on America? And what are the chances there will be free and fair elections in next year's midterms? Rudyard and Andrew then turn to Mark Carney's trip to Washington to meet with Donald Trump. The two leaders seem to have a reasonably good personal relationship. Why does Trump like Carney better than his predecessor? And what kind of trade overtures can Carney come home with that would be acceptable to the Canadian public?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.

People cannot be shy about this anymore. After about the 400th warning sign, you have to stop saying, oh, that word sounds so foreign to United States. Everything that's happening in the United States is foreign to the United States. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Rudyard Griffiths here, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined in studio by journalist Andrew Coyne for our continuing weekly conversations. Andrew, thanks for coming into Monk Debate H.Q.

Good to be at the Worldwide Headquarters. Indeed, the world right. Well, we must be doing something right because last week we had well over 70,000 people watch our video, which is fantastic. I love to see those numbers. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments. Clearly, Canadians have Trump top of mind. And that's where I want to begin with the news that we're seeing over this weekend into today, remarkable scenes of National Guard troops deployed to American cities.

And I think what is so noticeable and needs us to comment on is the fact now that Trump is using National Guard troops from other states to go into, in this case, Portland, Oregon, where a judge had previously banned him from deploying the Oregon National Guard to suppress so-called insurrectionists. Andrew, is this as consequential as I think it might be? It certainly viewed that way. Now, you know, help me out. But last I saw the judge had also ruled that he couldn't bring them in from Texas.

And I presume it also means to California, basically saying you can't do an end run around my order this way. So unless there's been something that I haven't to. Not in the last five minutes, but I think we have to wait and see, in fact, who is respecting what judge is order? Because there seems to be now a pattern here of behavior of rulings that are going against the president. And the president just ignores them. Or find some plausible thing to say that I'm not. really ignoring it. It's just an interpretation, but yeah, basically ignoring, and we'll see what happens with this. This is certainly a watershed moment. As the governor of Illinois said,

this is basically he's ordered the invasion of Chicago, talking about Chicago, but, you know, the Oregon thing as well. He's ordering out-of-state National Guard to go into other states, typically ordering guardsmen from red states into blue states is ominous all on its own. Of course, the whole idea of using soldiers or National Guard to police the streets is fraught with danger. That's not what they're trained for. You know, we only have to think back to Kent State as to what can happen when, you know, lightly trained guardsmen are confronted with chaotic situations. The odd thing is the National Guard would be a step up from ICE, these thugs. And I've seen it speculated that they may have hired proud boys and three percenters,

because we haven't heard much from them lately, but they're certainly adopting the same tactics of just absolute bully boy tactics, lawlessness, dragging people out of home depots, putting zip ties on kids, I forget which of the various forces it was that sent a helicopter to repel into an apartment block. There's now talking about sending in the 80-second airborne,

and this is just insanity to deal with non-crisis to begin with, even if there were, the kinds of chaos in the streets, when Trump talks about war-raveraged Portland, for Christ's sakes, even if there were such a problem, that's the proper procedure is the governor of the state in question appeals to the feds to send in backup and, you know, federalizes the National Guard

and the relevant state in that, you don't do it over the heads of, you know, over the opposition of the local governor, particularly when there's no such apprehended insurrection, of that nonsense, either in Portland or in Chicago. So there's no doubt what this is. This is what Trump talked about when he was in front of those 800 generals, was we're fighting a war within against the enemy within. And the enemy within is being more and more loosely drawn to basically encompass anybody who puts up any kind of opposition to him. So is this, again, this is a reoccurring part of my conversations with you. Is this

simply a pig-headed president who has this ed fix in his mind now that he's going to get his way and god damn it i'm going to deploy the national guard where i think and when i think and it's no more complicated than that or is there something else going on here is there an agenda to normalize the deployment of troops onto american streets to as you say start to apprehend people in ways that suggest a kind of casual brutality to the entire kind of exercise. I'm struggling here to calibrate for this in terms of, you know, we know that the president is pig-headed and we know that he can get his dander up when people push back at him. Is that the totality of it? No. If it were, if it were just Trump, you could make some sort of plausible theory because he is

essentially a child, and anybody who has to deal with them basically talks about it as if they were dealing with a child. And it's entirely possible if it were only about his ego and his vanity that the sort of scenario you're talking about might hold. But bear in mind, he's got a bunch of people around him who have much more virulent ambitions, much more coherent and cogent ambitions, appalling as they may be. Trump has no particular agenda. other than Trump should run things, everyone should say great things about Trump. But, you know, Stephen Miller or was it Russell Vought, these people have much more concrete designs. And they add up to essentially establishing a dictatorship in the United States.

People cannot be shy about this anymore. After about the 400th warning sign, you have to stop saying, oh, that word sounds so foreign to United States. Everything that's happening in the United States is foreign to the United States. This is all of this. It's absolutely unprecedented. Serious people who look at this in a serious way, who have made comparisons across countries, are saying this. And so every time I say it, I sort of have to sort of pause for a second as I'm saying it to say, is this reality? But that's where this is going.

When you look at the rhetoric that Stephen Miller is using, which sometimes backed up in Trump's speeches, perhaps he writes some of us Trump speeches, it is hysterical over the top, designed to inflame, designed to portray any and all opposition to the president, including from judges, for example, as part of a vast conspiracy, a vast insurrection, designed to perpetuate a state of domestic terrorism. So all of this is just completely over the top. It has no bearing on reality whatsoever. And when you add up what they're doing, whether they're going after, media critics, whether they're putting soldiers in the streets, whether they're sending these masked men in the United States of America, masked men without badges.

And there's videos up the wazoo now online where you can watch the whole horrifying thing where they snatch these people off the street without a warrant, take them in unmarked cars to God knows where, on the basis typically of their skin color. How terrifying would this be if you were, let's say you were an undocumented immigrant. cases, they're not. They're in some cases U.S. citizens. Some cases, they're people who have a right to be here. But even if you're an actual undocumented immigrant, to be kidnapped off the street by a bunch of thugs with masks, I mean, it must be just terrifying.

For this to happen even once, it would be appalling. But it's now obviously a pattern and a policy. And it would not be happening if it did not have the approval from the very top. This is happening against the backdrop of

government shutdown, which is into multiple days with no obvious end in sight, threatened mass layoffs by Russ Voigt, the director of the Budget Office, Trump seemingly encouraging him or others to think of the shutdown as an opportunity to kind of take up the baton of Doge and... Project 2025. ...begin to whack away. I start wondering about stacking here. It's something we've again talked about in the past, the sense of an increasing tempo, the degree to which there's this intensity that is crystallizing.

And this is a good, let's face it, year before the midterms. What's happening here? Why do you think we're now stacking multiple crises on top of each other? We've got Venezuelan boats getting blown out of the water. We've got a government shutdown. We have, as you say, ice agents running amok across Democrat cities, and now we have, you know, the National Guard being attempted deployed out of one state into another. I just, I'm trying to see, is this just the cascading of chaos, or is it, again, something

where the wheels come off the bus, the wheels come off the bus? Yeah, again, I think you have to separate Trump from his handlers. Trump, and we've talked about this, I think in Trump, case is just a pure delight in chaos for chaos's sake. He has to keep upping the dose, has to get more and more outrageous in order to still get the same outrageous response that he needs and that his followers need. But there's also potentially a sort of strategic objective to it from the people around it, which is it's a, I suppose it's a variant of flooding the zone. You just throw so many things at people that they don't know where to look, they don't

know where to summon their outrage, to focus it. And so you keep people on the back heel. You just make it impossible for them to comprehend what's happening through the sheer kind of blitzkrieg speed of it. I think also part of it may be try to get as much done before things really start to certain south. He's already down in the mid-30s, high 30s in the approval rating. It's astonishing. It's as high as that. But if the economy continues to swoon, if we get closer to the midterms, and maybe you want to back off a little bit in the run-up to the mid-term,

so you want to get everything done now. That's presuming they have any plan to win the midterms. And it has to be taken seriously the prospect. When you look at the things like the gerrymandering, the organized gerrymanding at various state levels and whatever else they have planned, remember these are the people who ran, you know, the relatively amateurish January 6th plot,

But the plot there was very clear was to overturn a Democratic election result. They're much more organized, much more ruthless, much more planning involved this time. And it would frankly surprise me if they didn't have some plan to assure themselves a victory in the midterms, if not to ignore the result or to suspend the election because of the emergency that they declare in the United States. There's all kinds of possibilities. But I would have to say the chances of there being a free and fair election result in the midterms must be at this point viewed as less than 50-50. The longer time goes on.

So that would explain why the president is not doing what any normal president would be doing if he was down at 35% of the poll, which would be finding every possible thing he could to turn down the temperature to make nice with people to try to win votes back. He just does not seem that concerned about it, and you have to ask yourself why. We're also not talking about Jeffrey Epstein, are we? Well, exactly. I mean, you know, shutting the Congress has two functions. One is, yeah, it allows them to permanently lay people off.

And it keeps Congress from meeting, keeps them from swearing in that 218th vote that Democrat was elected in a special election, what we would call a by-election, prevents that vote from happening to demand that the Epstein files be produced. And it distracts attention mightily. from all that. And no economic data. Well, exactly. And how, you know, how much can we trust the economic data now coming out of this White House when they've made clear that producing accurate economic data is like a lot of things as a firing offense. You put that all together. You might almost sense that the White House would be fine if Congress remained shut down indefinitely. Well, and that's an interesting question. You know, at some point, if they want to get laws passed, if, then you think it has to come back.

Again, the early polling data is the public is heavily blaming the Republicans for the shutdown, which they usually do. Well, they control both houses. So it's pretty hard for them to claim the Democrats made them do it. Yeah, if they could muster their members, they could pass a continuing resolution. That's right. So it's the public, I think, is quite. rightly saying you broke it, you bought it. But whether that will, again, whether that has the normal influence on that we don't know.

This is the thing with Trump is he violates absolutely every norm and every canon, including rational self-interest. You can't actually assume that there's any plan or that he has any, you know, rational appraisal of what's in his own interest, never mind the public interest or, you know, any other kind of interest. So into this fever swamp, strides Mr. Carney tomorrow. What do you make of this? Why meeting now should we assume that the principles only meet when there's something that they're ready to announce? Ordinarily. So that's one theory is exactly that they're not going to hold a meeting if they don't have something to announce. The other competing theory is he and Trump,

into each other at the UN. Trump said, hey, let's get together, or McCarney said, and it's as unplanned as that. I mean, look at the lack of planning that has gone into other Trump enterprises, and it's entirely possible that this is as silly as that. Now, you know, they seem to have

a reasonably good personal relationship, whether that translates into working relationship, who knows. But Trump, we've talked about this, I think it's because Carney looks like somebody from quote-unquote central Canada, that Trump seems to like the cut of his jib. But that doesn't necessarily translate into anything.

Yeah, Brookfield was also very helpful to Jared Kushner. Right. Important time when one of his buildings was about to go bankrupt in New York and made a loan on incredibly favorable terms to Kushner. So I've always wondered the extent to which Wall Street contacts are working the phones on behalf of Canada. If they are, God bless them. They keep doing it.

Money well spent. Who knows? It's a very fair point. There certainly seemed to be, for once, in the Kearney government, they seem to be trying to lower expectations, which I would encourage them to do more often. He came in, and I don't know whether it was ego or there was some larger plan, but they made a lot of boasts about all the huge things they were going to do in, you know, faster than the blink of an eye. And it's not necessarily the smartest strategy in politics. The good thing in politics is to be underestimated to get expectations. It's as low as you possibly can.

So they seem perhaps to have adjusted to that. They've got a sort of a good story to tell in a sense in that we seem to have gotten off lighter than most countries. Because we have the NAFTA, as I prefer to call it, Kuzma, if you want to call it that, in place. That he negotiated. So in a sense, he has a bit of ownership over. Yeah, again, a normal person would. That's right. It doesn't prevent from saying almost worse to the effect of who negotiated this.

nonsense. So, you know, he's not necessarily fully apprised of reality. Just to connect a few dots and hypothesize it, we'll be dropping this episode the day that Mark Carney is meeting. I think Dominic LeBlanc might have said the quiet part out loud when he testified recently in front of our parliamentary committee indicating that Trump likes large numbers. He likes large investments in the United States. We've seen this with Japan and Europe, whether those investments ever happen or why Trump thinks of the government of Japan or the European Union can force corporations to invest the United States is another issue. But I guess, and we're not going to relitigate the Golden Dome, but my sense is that that might be an area where you could see an alignment of a series of

kind of interests on part of the president, which is to have somebody buy into this scheme, a large number that he can announce most of that money i presume going to u.s defense contractors raytheon and locky martin and others who will build this hypothetical golden dome what do you think about that do you think you'd have a meeting to say mr president were committed to i don't know 25 billion dollars or some ridiculous uh number and then try to use that to extract some some concessionary relief on maybe be some of the sectoral tariffs or to try to show some progress. Because up to this point, it's really hard, I guess, for the Carney government to point to any meaningful progress despite having made compromises on the digital services tax,

on retaliatory tariffs. What do you make of that? Well, the flaw in the thinking up until now may have been that it was traditional statecraft. So traditional statecraft would be either you put retaliatory measures on the table that designed to hurt key constituencies and put the pressure on that way, or you make concessions that are designed to elicit concessions in kind, and it's all directed towards some combination of the national interest and your narrow political interests. I think with Trump, let me quote you from the, an excerpt I read from the former NATO

Secretary General Stoltenberg's memoirs, where he talks about this meeting of NATO that nearly ran off the rails. And it finally, they managed to passionately together. Trump sent him a note saying, if you could just say that I, Trump extracted several billion dollars more in, 33 billion dollars more in spending promises, that will probably make it work. In other words, it's just all about making himself look good. I don't think you can be too cynical with Trump. This is a recurring theme here. But most of the time you have to train yourself away from those types of analyses. It's too easy to attribute motives to people. It's usually something more complicated than that. With Trump, you almost have to train yourself back in the other direction of thinking,

okay, how would this benefit Trump either in his ego needs to have everyone paying attention to him, everyone praising him? And that should certainly be part of the toolkit for anybody who's having to negotiate with him. And or how can you make it worth as well? just in terms of personal pecuniary interest. Probably that's not available to us, but certainly... There's always his crypto coin. We could start, we could take a collection plate around and buy into the Trump coin. If the list of buyers of that ever becomes public, I'm sure we'll learn some fascinating lessons.

But certainly, yeah. So if you could frame some agreement such that it's, this is an act of visionary statesmanship by Mr. Trump, only he could have made this deal. It's the art of the deal. This is what happens when you get a seasoned real estate negotiate at the table. Frankly, we were just in awe as we watched him work. Something along those lines in the communique. But I wouldn't have huge expectations of it, maybe at the margin.

But he wants to impose tariffs on the world. He wants to impose tariffs because he's, to the extent, that he's thought about these things. He's got an economic theory that says that that is the way to go. He wants to extract them because then he's the guy who's making the decisions and everyone else has to come. The entire economy spins and spirals around him and his predilections. It becomes a matter of paying court at the court of King Trump.

So, as we've said before, I don't envy anybody having to be in these negotiations. It's fair game, just in terms of pure politics, for a Pierre-Pollier, I would just say, you better come back with a win this time. Only because, again, Carney ran that election basically on I'm the man, I'm the guy, elbows up. So if you win some cheap political points by doing so, you deserve to lose a few cheap political points when it doesn't pan out quite that way. But what if winning those political points comes with a $15 or $20 billion price tag for a piece of unproven technology in the Golden Dome? and with, as we've talked about before, all the precariousness of Trump going forward that you don't know. The next day he could be waking up and talking again about 100% tariffs on Canadian film.

He's talking about Canadian cabinetry. I mean, he's getting very specific, Andrew, in his dislikes here. Next we'll be down to, like, I don't know. Craft beers. I know. He has, and as with many things, I think it depends on who talked to him last. What was the story I saw the other day? Oh, he was talking to the governor of Portland, I think it was.

The governor of Oregon, I think it was, who said, you know, there's no war here. And he said, well, what are these scenes I'm seeing on my TV screen then? So, John C. Gardner is the president. It's a malignant Chancy Gardner. This is, I've often described him this way, that it would be fascinating to know exactly how he's briefed. Everyone knows that he doesn't read. So who presents him the last thing at night may well be an important part of this. But it does say don't get your hopes up too much.

Don't invest too much in this because you cannot be sure that he'll live up to any undertaking he makes. You cannot ascribe to him the usual political motives, which is let's get this settled. Most times, you know, presidents or prime ministers, they know there's some constituency or other they've got to keep happy or that has the capacity to cause them trouble. And so they look for a way to let's try to put out this fire at least possible costs. And that's the usual way of statesmen. In Trump's case, you just simply cannot assume that, any of that. So I was hoping that in a sense, Mark Carney is stepping into this kind of fetid morass that is the White House right now. In fact, that would be to his advantage because there would be so much

else that, you know, he hasn't culminated his Nobel Peace Prize. He's been thwarted in the Ukraine. We'll see what happens in Gaza. Those discussions clearly will go on for many more days. He has, you know, troops on the streets. He's got a Supreme Court that just came back from recess this week that will start hearing some very consequential cases. Could that all, could we hope, maybe, it works in Canada's favor because here is a variable where he could just say, I'm going to put this to bed for the next, whatever, the renegotiation people. period is 12 or so months. I'm just going to say to Mr. Carney, you have the best deal in the world. And we look forward to renegotiating Kuzma with you. And Mark Carney gets to come back

to Canada and say, look, I told you so. Now, it's not his deal. It's the deal that Justin Trudeau and Trump won negotiated together. So I think he's a little rich at times in trying to extract political value as if it was his deal. But nonetheless, it would give him peace. And maybe Trump could say, that's off the table. I don't have to worry about it for the next 12 months. It's hard to square that, though, with his recent talk again of the 51st state. So, yeah, if he was getting good advice, and maybe he does on occasion, then that would be, I would agree with you. You know, you've got a lot of things on your plate, Mr. President. You're very busy with the golf, sir.

This is really not your top priority. Ukraine is maybe one of them and, you know, achieving peace. in the streets of America, you know, he's got a lot of other potentially higher priorities. But again, their favorite tactic seems to be flood the zone. Seems to be deliberately overloaded yourself because you're overloading everybody else as well. Right. And that may be the core insight of this, that traditional issue management is you don't try to take on too many things at once. You set a few priorities. And from your perspective, that makes sense. But if your ambition is just to paralyze and neutralize anybody's ability to oppose you, then you'd have a different strategic mindset.

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Thanks in advance for joining our community. Final question, your bet. Let's wager. What do you think? does Carney comes home with something, surely, out of this meeting. Yeah, I would say that's a better than 50-50 for the reason that we said that why do you agree to a meeting if you're not going to get anything out of it? If it's just another getting acquainted meeting, are you just setting yourself up to make yourself a target from an increasingly aggressive conservative opposition? When you're already starting to sink in the polls a little bit, there's a little bit of a softening.

don't want to overstate this, but there's a little bit of softening. People are still pretty keen on Carney himself, but they're not as interested in the Trump thing as much. I think they'll have reason to come back to being so, but at this particular moment, they're not, you know, maybe you don't want to set yourself up as a target at this particular moment with a budget coming and everything else. And just to slip in there one to ask, see if we could qualify in this, expectations that it could be something big that comes out of tomorrow, that it could be, let's say, a year-long hiatus. Because I think regardless of what happens, we're in the Kuzma NAFTA structure. Thankfully, we are.

There is a process. There's, in fact, domestic legislation. Congress would have to reopen to repeal domestic legislation to actually undo NAFTA. So some of the president's unilateral powers are curtailed here. So the chance of something big, like no more tariffs on. steel, auto, aluminum, those things which I sense right now are the big kind of irritants of the relationship. If I had to guess, and it's basically a guess, I would say that's unlikely. I think there'd be a little bit more foreshadowing of that. But if they do, then they'll have

successfully exceeded expectations by a wide margin. But I would rate that a lower probability. Yeah, the president does seem cranky these days. He seems, we've talked about this before, he seems in a state of decline to maybe put it charitably. Barely sentient, I would be my sense of it. That's the title of the episode, Andrew. Barely Sentient. You certainly were more than just barely sentience, sir. We thank you for coming here to Monk Dialogues

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