The Munk Debates Podcast - Trump's trade tantrum and will Mark Carney's first federal budget meet the moment?

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

To listen to the full episode consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. Rudyard and Andrew try to make sense of the Canada-US trade chaos of the past 72 hours. Andrew offers two interpretations: either Trump was looking for a reason to walk away from the table as a negotiating ploy, or he is a genuinely needy child who cannot tolerate criticism. Canada is not the unreasonable party here. Is there a point to negotiating at all if we can't have confidence that the agreement will be respected? Trump is ratcheting up turmoil on a weekly basis to the point where the public is being numbed into submission. What will happen if the U.S. Supreme Court strips Trump of his trade powers? Rudyard and Andrew then turn to the upcoming Canadian federal budget. What are Mark Carney's priorities? As the leader of a minority government will he attempt the bold action required to address our productivity and trade crisis? And if he fails, are we headed for a spring election? 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.

This is how it's going to be from now on, and it's probably going to get worse. So as crazy as his behavior is, it will get worse. And we just have to brace ourselves that this is permanent, at least for the next two, three years, reality of dealing with this guy. Trump's trade tantrum, try saying that five times fast, takes Canada-U.S. relations for a knock. We're going to unpack it all with Andrew Coyne of the Globe and Mail, who's here for another monk dialogue. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. What is 72 hours. Before we get into the individual sins of omission and commissioned by this president, what do you just make of it all?

It just seems so utterly chaotic, so utterly incomprehensible. Where are we at? Well, this is one reason why you don't give the tariff power to a single individual. You know, I'm not sure the founding fathers the Americans ever envisaged somebody quite like Trump. But the notion that he should have this weapon, which he doesn't. by the way. Congress still has, formally speaking, the power to impose tariffs. There's an emergency exception. Well, as many have said, where's the emergency here that somebody ran an ad you didn't like? It's crazy. It shows you how crazy he is. There are two, as usual, there's two possible

interpretations of this. One is, this is, you know, Trump finding a reason to play a sort of a negotiating game of walking away from the table and it's all, you know, part of his stick, the art of the deal, that kind of thing, which is, it's not impossible. The other is he's genuinely a needy little baby who gets upset when people, you know, say bad things about him. In this case, not even saying bad things about him, but just exposing him to invidious comparisons with the beloved, at least among the right, Ronald Reagan. There's some support for that theory in that it's emerging that he was ticked off about Doug Ford's rhetoric generally. and he's just thin-skinned enough and just childish enough that you can imagine that that being the actual explanation. As we've discussed in the past, it is remarkable how often he says things in private that mirror exactly the blowhard stuff he says in public. So you do get a sense as a certain strange authenticity in that, in that he appears to be every bit as needy and childish as he appears to be genuinely so,

rather than just as a matter of bargaining tactics or what have you. Andrew, doesn't it foreshadow, though, something you've said before, which is even if we could reach, let's say, a sectoral deal, which is what the Carney government had been telegraphing in the preceding weeks before the blow-up of last Friday, how is any of this bankable? When this person is so volatile, so prone to overreaction, that you have to wonder, is a printed piece of paper worth anything?

Yeah, he's clearly not bound by any norm, including the norm that you respect the law, you respect written agreements, et cetera. So it does raise that question of just what exactly are you achieving by negotiating with him. If he's so easily set off on this, he'll be easily set off again in future. And it tells you yet again that if people have this assumption that after the games are over, you know, everyone's done their positioning, et cetera, that reason will prevail in this, give your head a shake. This is how it's going to be from now on.

And it's probably going to get worse. So as crazy as this behavior is, it will get worse. And we just have to brace ourselves that this is permanent, at least for the next two, three years, reality of dealing with this guy. What did you make of the comments that came out of the administration over the weekend, both from Kevin Hassett, a key economic advisor in the White House, rumored possibly to be Trump's preference for succeeding Powell and the Federal Reserve, not in a sense, unsurious player, and Marco Rubio,

both who seemed to suggest that it wasn't just the ad, that there were frictions, frustrations, anger over Carney's statement that he would arrest Netanyahu if he visited Canada. that the negotiations actually weren't going that well because the Americans wanted a kind of top line deal and the Canadians kept coming back with more questions and more paper. Do you make anything of that? It's frankly pleasing to my ears. I would hope that the Canadian side was arguing their corner. I don't see any obligation us. We're not being the unreasonable party here. We're not the ones who want to rip up or renegotiated agreement that we just signed a few years. ago. We're not the ones who were slapping tariffs on the other side, at least not the ones who kicked it off. We're not the ones talking about annexing the others. No idea, you can have no confidence that

either Rubio or Hassett would be speaking from their own frame of mind as opposed to simply parroting the Trump line, because that's what you do, particularly in this White House. So I wouldn't be, I certainly wouldn't be wearing sackcloth and ashes of, oh my God, why are we causing such trouble here. Again, to pick up the point you made previously, is there any point in negotiating at all if you can have no confidence that the agreement that you strike will be respected? Well, there may be a point which is to simply keep the ball in the air, rag the puck, whatever metaphor you want to use, but keep talking because it's better than not talking, until Trump decides he doesn't want to talk at all. He apparently said he doesn't even want to meet with Carney because he's so upset about

For a long time. For a long time. That's what he said for a long time. I think all you can do in there is argue your corner be as reasonable as you can because that's just good form. But I'm not too upset that the Americans are upset, no. Yeah. If you step back for a moment, you just look at that last week in the United States. It was a wild one.

We had the East Wing basically demolished without any kind of permission or sanction from anyone or any institution or body. And having been assured that nothing would be touched. Exactly. We had these extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean of suspected drug boats. We don't know. One man was taken into custody. He was subsequently released because there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute. We have Congress shut down along with the entire federal government.

We have troops in two major cities, Portland and Chicago. We have a peace talk unraveling and falling apart kind of officially, it seems, with Russia. Do you have a sense, Andrew, that each week we are kind of ratcheting up in some level of just chaos and turmoil and did this ad and all that simply get caught up in an administration that seems to be spiraling towards something? 100%. And you missed a few things. What did I? What did I miss? Well, okay, so the government is shut down. So who's paying for the troops? Oh, a donor materializes anonymously to donate $130 million to pay the troops

who just happens to have been a guy who was caught up in the Epstein files. I think it's Andrew Mellon, one of the Mellons. That's interesting. And as other people have made the point when it's not the government paying for the Army, but somebody's privately paying for the Army. It's a private army at that point. in addition to, you know, the ice thugs that are basically Trump's stormtroopers, he is getting crazier and crater. He is escalating more and more. There is a, it's not random. It's all in the

same direction of personal rule, rule by fiat, rule by fear, rule by armed force. There is more and more things coming out that fit into a pattern of them trying to fix the 2026 midterm elections. So troops in the street, first of all, that could be used to intimidate people coming to the polls. The gerrymandering. The gerrymandering. The appointment of New York Times had a big story on how they're placing in all the sort of supervisory ranks of the electoral machinery, people who were election, 2020 deniers, who are supposedly going to stop the steel this time, i.e. engineer the steel.

So 2026, you know, the odds of that being a free and fair election are falling by the week. And that's going to be another watershed moment when people kind of wake up, I think people wake up in waves, depending on how closely they've been following this, as to how much of a threat this is. You know, Andrew, we forgot that his son seems to be on the cost of being awarded a major contract at the Pentagon to provide drones to the Army. And this is the point. You can't keep up.

Yeah. Even, you know, we're paid to follow this closely. And there's going to be things that are going to slip our minds because there's So many of them every single day, which means that, A, you just can't keep up. You don't notice the things when they pass. To the extent that you notice, you get numbed by it into submission because who has the energy to follow up each and everyone? If you do, you get accused of Trump Darrangement Syndrome, et cetera.

And even if you're able to surmount that, you find yourself starting to grade him on a curve. Is this crazier than I expected from them? Then I'll be upset if it's just more of Trump. Trump, then you kind of roll your eyes and it's insidious. It is overwhelming. It is not something anybody could ever have foretold a person of this level of turpitude. It's very important to remind ourselves just that this is truly aberrant and abhorrent at the same at the same time. All this is happening, Andrew, is we barrel towards November 5th when the U.S. Supreme Court will take up an appeals court decision that argued that the president doesn't have these emergency powers,

as he's interpreted them to levy a variety of tariffs around the world, including on Canada. How do you think the Supreme Court is looking at this moment? It would seem particularly perilous. In other words, they are now meeting the president, nine or so months into his presidency, in a febrile state. And they will now have to be able to. to make a decision where I think most jurisprudence would suggest, as the appeals court correctly ruled, and this is a serious appeals court in D.C., that these powers are not his. They reside with Congress, and he is serially abusing them. Fibrell is a good word. Trump has been doing his best to raise the stakes with absurd claims about how, if he's forced to take off these tariffs

that he only just put on, that this would mean the collapse of the American economy, that the U.S. government would be, you know, deprived of funds that it was, you know. Great Depression. Madness and chaos. It's not just Trump. It's, you know, people like Scott Bassett. That's Treasury Secretary, you're parroting these lines. So some absurd stakes raising, and the only purpose of which is to put more pressure on the Supreme Court, it's going to be a very interesting moment.

The most charitable interpretation that you can make of John Roberts's Supreme Court in recent months and years is, and this is very charitable, at least for Roberts' is that he's trying to avoid a breakpoint. He's trying to avoid the moment where Trump just basically says how many divisions that the Supreme Court have and defies them. And so he's been, again, on this charitable interpretation, backpedaling, trying not to give him everything, but it's remarkable how often the Supreme Court has simply yielded to Trump's insatiable demands.

Some of the Supreme Court justices, you know, Alito and Thomas, particularly you would say there's no opposition or whatever. They're just basically signed up to do whatever Trump demands. So as I say, on the charitable interpretation of Roberts's conduct of this, then this may be that point where the Supreme Court reaches a point where they cannot, with any shred of credibility intact, sign off on the president's demands. And the president indeed says, okay, I'm doing this anyway. And he's been more or less doing that with lower court rulings. but you could always paper over that by saying, well, let's see what the Supreme Court says. So the moment when he simply flatly defies the Supreme Court, and I think it's coming,

is going to be one of those watershed moments when people realize the rule of law is not going to save us. We are outside the rule of law here altogether, not just in terms of Trump's own comportment and behavior, but in terms of whether remedies are available for people whose rights have been trampled on or for people who are trying to insist on the division of powers or just basic conduct within the boundaries of the Constitution, that will be another moment when we're reminded just where we are at. So just to think this or a little bit more, because I think this is critical also for Canada because of the trade negotiations, that if he is stripped of these powers, then in some

ways our strategy of ragging the puck, at least this far makes a lot of sense because we haven't set some kind of precedent as Japan, Europe, and possibly China and the country. days will set a trading relationship type precedent under the the trump tariff powers is there an argument though that the court should keep its powder dry under that the bigger questions around the midterm elections are still in the court's future uh the voting rights act is is under is under attack there there are other as as bad as this is right now and as much as the guardrails have literally come off. There is no Congress sitting. There is no legislative handcuff, restraint on the executive. Not even there was one when Congress was sitting. Now is not the time

for the court to step into the breach. It's a tough call. The danger with that, and, you know, obviously one would prefer that the only question in each ruling would be, as it is in most administrations, what's the rule of law? What does, what do we believe the Constitution says and, you know, let the heavens fall? You know, the Supreme Court ordinarily, you would absolutely insist, should simply view things through the lens of what the Constitution says or does not say. We are in extraordinary times. Trump is a unique threat. I gave a little bit of credence to what you're arguing, that, or what you're positing, that the Supreme Court has to be a bit political in terms of dealing with this guy who, you know, threatened.

to simply overturn the rule of law entirely. The trouble is how much of a concession do you make to save what? Do you make all these concessions? And then you find even the thing you were trying to save gets overturned anyway. So you wind up of making all those concessions for nothing. I think it's a dangerous game. As I say, I could maybe cut them some slack to a degree,

but the further you go down this road, it seems to me the more you're simply storing up trouble for yourself. And so they don't enforce the rule. of law here, and then it comes up and it's about the Voting Rights Act or something arguably even more significant, and he ignores you anyway. It's a really tricky game to be playing, and it's why Supreme Court's ordinarily shouldn't play that game. And how consequential would it be, Andrew, if the court balks and they, in their ruling, in a sense, balking would require acknowledging, creating, in a sense, new law of just how

extensive the president's executive powers are. You would, in a sense, not only be a his tariff powers, you would be affirming a larger theory of the case that this president is now pursuing, which is that the executive is all powerful, and that the court is looking the other way. Because, again, it's not just the appeals court. There was the trade court previously, by any measure, a fair reading of the law would say that these powers, as they were written, reside with Congress. And for the court to walk away from that, surely, Andrew, is almost worse than courting the risk

of this existential moment where the president says, okay, as you say, where are your divisions? There is no more fundamental power that resides in a parliament or a Congress than the power of the purse. The power, you know, if you go back through the centuries, most of these rebellions and revolutions started as tax revolts. They started with the idea that the, in this case the king, the insatiable demands usually to fight a war,

and they're desperate for funds, and they start overruling and overriding traditional limits on the state. Andrew, the East Ballroom's being paid for by Palantir and a series of Silicon Valley Titans. The army is now being paid for, Andrew, by a melon sion of yesteryear and his billions of dollars. That's right. Billions of dollars. But even the billionaires can't finance the entire U.S. government. And when you look at one of the many arguments, conflicting arguments that Trump and his people make for tariffs, that they're going to finance the U.S. government, because we did it in 1910 when there wasn't an income tax,

that they're going to finance the U.S. government with tariff revenues. It's preposterous. But that is power of the purse. That is the power to tax. I think this is showing the folly of Congress having yielded even the, emergency power to a president to raise tariffs because it was bound to be abused at some point, and maybe not in the scale that Trump has abused it. Maybe somewhat argued it's been abused in the past.

But if American democracy survives this period, I hope that one of the reforms that will be undertaken will be to take back the tariff power exclusively to the Congress. This was executive overreach. So that's one aspect of the separation of powers that's pretty black letter and that's being run and roughshod over. The other is that the Supreme Court is the arbiter of these kinds of interbranched disputes, and if the Supreme Court cannot read sensibly a pretty open and shut case that this is an abuse of the emergency power, you know, if the Supreme Court rules with them and Trump acknowledges

the Supreme Court's ruling in his favor, that's going to doing damage to the Division of Powers and the Rule of Law. And if the Supreme Court rules sensibly and Trump ignores them, that's even worse an assault on the Division of Powers and the Rule of Law. So division of powers rule of law, individual rights, these things are all intersected and all mutually supporting, and they're all under assault. And as is democratic rule, which is sometimes thought as being in tension with individual rights, etc. That's the thing people understand. This is not just democratic populism versus individual rights and ruled law.

It's also democracy that's in the line. The Trump threat is as much to majority rule as it is to minority rights. And as Ann Applebaum, a former monk debaters put it recently, it's the difference between rule of law and rule by law. And we are now, you know, increasingly with the prosecutions that he's engaged in, with the extent to which he is now, we forgot this last week, he's now asking the U.S. Department of Justice to reimburse him for a quarter of a billion dollars for his legal fees. the lawyers at the Justice Department who will make this decision used to be his private lawyers who defended him in the very cases that he's seeking a quarter of a billion dollars of address. And meanwhile, the DOJ is prosecuting John Bolton and Brennan and Patricia James and Jack Smith. It's topsy tributy, right?

The guilty go unpunished. We didn't mention the commutation of sentence for George Santos, the pathological liar. Or the Bitcoin king, Coinbase, or I forget which one it is, who I guess bought a lot of the Trump family coin on some promise and has now been. So the rule is if you are corrupt but a supporter of Trump, then you will go free. If you are honest but a critic of Trump or an antagonist of Trump, you will have the full force of the law thrown against you. So just to put a pin in this, I mean, isn't this the moment where the Supreme Court, court has to stand up. Everyone else is missing an action at this point. Congress is shuttered. The government is shut down. Trump is behaving. I mean, these justices must know, these pardons that are happening,

the shenanigans within the Justice Department, with career prosecutors resigning, refusing to take these bogus cases forward to grand jury hearings. I mean, God, you'd hope that they would sense that we're now, we're now at that moment. We could wait. We could wait to the midterms. We could wait to some other transgression that's even worse in the future. But surely, Andrew, this is the moment to someone to say no. Let's assume that the center of the court is of a mind to take a stand at some point. And that's a big assumption because they certainly haven't shown evidence for it. There's a real question where you say, if you know he's going to run roughshod over the court at some point,

if you know he's going to defy Supreme Court ruling someday, is there an argument for saying, let's do it now. Set against that would be, oh, pick your best moment, pick your best case, and there's some argument for that. The other argument is he's just going to build up more and more momentum, and you better do it now rather than later because later will be less chance of actually, he'll actually obey it. Tough call, but I think I would be here on the side of get it over with.

And what's your totally finger in the air? What is your sense of what the court's going to do if you had to make it bad? I think they'll find some tortured way to split the difference would be the would be the I'm not sure how okay judges like to do that generally uh sometimes there's a legitimate case for it in this case it's hard to see how they're so to rule against I guess the powers but somehow extend his executive powers possibly in some way that allows for reinterpretation right or or you establish a more general principle that he that prohibits him from it again in other cases, but you allow it in this case because you find some exception. So, you know, you enunciate the general principle, but find a way to excuse this one, something like that. Yeah. Ah, that's ugly.

Andrew, we're going to keep you over for a moment to do a bonus extension as we're doing for each of our conversations with Andrew Coyne. We're going to grab our monk donors and supporters on the other side of this short break to talk about the upcoming federal budget. What does Andrew think could be in it? how important is this budget now that we're seeing a breakdown in Canada-U.S. relations as it relates to trade back after this short break. Thank you for listening to the first half of this monk dialogue with Andrew Coyne. To access the full episode, consider becoming a monk donor. For just

$25 a year, you get exclusive access to all of our full-length podcasts in video and audio and all kinds of special offers, perks, and updates, including for us. upcoming live in-person monk debate events. Simply go to our website, triplew.com. Click on the join button on the top right-hand corner of the website. Again, that website is triplew.com.com. 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 in 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.