WSJ What’s News - Democrats Can’t Agree How to Fight Back

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

A.M. Edition for Mar. 10. The WSJ’s Aaron Zitner says the Democratic Party is split between progressives who want direct confrontation with Republicans and moderates worried about alienating centrists who vote with their pocketbooks. Plus, Mark Carney wins the contest to become Canada’s new leader and vows to push back on Donald Trump’s trade war. And Russia regains key territory from Kyiv’s troops ahead of this week’s U.S.-Ukraine talks. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TV Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD. Ready for you. Canada gets a new leader as America's neighbor pushes back on Trump's trade war. We didn't ask for this fight. The Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. So the Americans, they should make no mistake, in trade as in hockey, Canada will win.

Plus Russia claws back key territory from Ukrainian troops. And overpowered in Washington, Democrats wrestle with whether future voters want confrontation or attack to the center. It's Monday, March 10th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is set to take over from Justin Trudeau as Canada's next Prime Minister after winning a vote this weekend to become the leader of the country's governing Liberal Party.

Journal reporter Vipal Manga says Carney is expected to call a snap election that suddenly looks winnable. When Trudeau announced that he was resigning in January, the Liberal Party was mired at the bottom of the polls. Canadian voters had soured on his economic vision and were extremely frustrated by rising inflation and seemed to be following the same path that many voters in the Western world had been doing in kicking out their incumbent parties. However, since Donald Trump started to threaten to annex Canada, calling it the 50-foot state, and impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods, the Liberal Party has rebounded strongly,

and now in some polls is virtually tied with the conservatives who are led by populist Pierre Poliev. Carney warned yesterday that his conservative rival lacks the ability to manage Trump and jumpstart the economy. He also promised to cut taxes for the middle class and rein in government spending, seeking to distance himself from Trudeau's economic agenda. Ukrainian forces are losing ground in Kursk, the slice of Russian territory that Kiev had hoped would give it leverage in any peace talks. That's according to analysts and soldiers in the area, who say Russian and North Korean troops have seized several villages there and used overwhelming drone power to largely

cut supply routes to the main Ukrainian force. The advance follows a US decision to halt intelligence sharing with Kiev, reducing Ukraine's ability to carry out long-range strikes which rely on accurate targeting data. It also comes as senior US and Ukrainian officials prepare to meet for talks in Saudi Arabia this week. Israel said yesterday it was cutting off its supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip, part of efforts to force Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages and laying down its weapons, now that talks to extend a seven-week ceasefire have stalled.

The cutoff will likely mean the enclave's desalination plant will stop working. According to an Israeli security official, Israel still supplies Gaza's population of more than two million people with water from three different pipelines. However, the country's finance minister said last week that cutting off water to Gaza in order to pressure Hamas was also a possibility. A Hamas spokesman said that Israel disregards international law and that it has practically cut off electricity since the war began in October 2023.

Meanwhile, US Federal Immigration Officers yesterday arrested a Columbia University student who helped to lead pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations last year. According to his lawyer, Mahmoud Khalil, whose Palestinian and Syrian was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents who said they were acting on orders from the State Department to revoke his green card. The spokeswoman for DHS said Khalil had led activities aligned to Hamas and that his arrest came quote, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.

The day before Khalil's detention, the Trump administration said it would cancel roughly $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Colombia. A State Department spokesperson didn't comment on the case, citing visa confidentiality laws. Chinese tariffs on American food and agricultural products will kick in today, Beijing's retaliation to an additional 10% U.S. levy on all Chinese goods.

American chicken, wheat, corn, and cotton products face an extra 15% duty, compared to 10% for soybeans, pork, beef, dairy products, and more. The moves will put pressure on the third largest agricultural export market for U.S. farmers, which was worth almost $25 billion last year. Pushed on Fox News whether his economic agenda could lead the U.S. economy to contract, President Trump offered the following on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. Look, I know that you inherited a mess, and you said that the other night.

I've only been here two, three months. But are you expecting a recession this year? I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we're doing is very big. We're bringing wealth back to America. That's a big thing. And there are always periods of... It takes a little time. Trump's cabinet officials have offered differing opinions on the economic outlook, with Commerce

Secretary Howard Ludnick ruling out a recession yesterday, while Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said last week the economy could be in for a rough patch. Coming up, the Democratic Party is torn over what its path back to power looks like. We've got that story after the break. Democrats need to fight back against President Trump, that much they can agree on. But how to do it is a question causing some of them to fight amongst themselves, as the party reckons with the options at its disposal given Trump's command of the national political debate and Republican control of Congress.

Journal reporter Aaron Zittner is in Washington. Aaron, it's great to have you back on the pod. I'm trying to think about the last Democrat that we mentioned here, and I believe it was Representative Al Green who was yelling at President Trump during his address to Congress last week and got himself censured for it. I take it that's maybe one of the strategies, confrontation, that Democrats think they should be embracing here? Well, that's right. Democrats have a very restive liberal base. We've seen people showing up at town hall meetings. In fact, so many that House Republican leaders said, hey, we don't want to have any more town hall meetings.

Too many angry people are showing up. Whether that's organic or driven by Democratic groups seems irrelevant. People are getting out of their houses and going to these town meetings. And they've been flooding the Hill, the members of Congress, with phone calls. But there are centrists in the party who say, wait a second, our path back to winning the House of Representatives and having any hope in the Senate depends on moving to the center and winning those swing voters who swung toward President Trump in 2024. And they don't like this performative stuff. They don't like partisan politics. In our last poll in January, Democrats had the worst image rating that we had

ever found in Wall Street Journal polling in three decades. This is a party that voters do not trust and it's not enough to protest. This is what the centrists say. Democrats have to make sure that voters understand what they would do with power And it's not enough to protest. This is what the centrists say. Democrats have to make sure that voters understand what they would do with power if they got it back. And the way to do that, they say, is not through protest. Instead focus on how you would handle power differently than President Trump if voters

gave power back to you. Just looking at the people you spoke to for this piece, Aaron, emotions really are running high. You've got the confrontationists feeling some true catharsis, it seems like, and getting out there and being vocal now, while those centrists really feel like a lack of discipline right now could make an already bad hand that much worse. Well, that's right. The confrontation crowd, they think they're having an effect.

They think that by showing up at all these town meetings and by showing that they have some fight, they've spooked Republican lawmakers. And now you're seeing Republican lawmakers push back in some ways against President Trump and saying, look, you got to rein in Elon Musk. You made us nominate all these cabinet members and we can't even go to these cabinet members to ask what's going on in our home districts and home states with these layoffs because you've created an alternative power center with Elon Musk and maybe these tariffs aren't such a good idea. You're seeing Republicans speak up a little more and the confrontational Democrats say that's partly they're doing. And also when you get someone to make a phone call when you get them to show up in a meeting They've taken an action. They've become engaged and if they're going to show up in a meeting

They're also likely to vote when it's time to vote and to get their friends to vote. So it's engagement one problem for Democrats is that Trump is doing so much stuff and Democrats risk putting out a kind of diffuse and unfocused message if they react to everything. Graham Emanuel was most recently ambassador to Japan which has a big USAID installation. He says I would not die on the hill of USAID. If you're gonna protest something go out and get the governors, Democratic governors, to hold a meeting about why eighth grade reading test scores are so low. Protest that.

Make it a contrast with Trump. You're not going to build housing in Gaza. We're going to build housing right here. So make sure that whatever you do comes back to pocketbook issues. Our final seconds, Aaron, obviously democratic rank and file. This is a, you know, how to proceed here is in many ways a decision they get to make individually. But have we seen any clues from Democratic leadership about the approach they'd prefer to take here? Democrats are gonna be a cacophony of voices for a few years.

The party will not really have a single voice guiding it until the next presidential election. But the question is, what should the party do in the interim? And we are seeing different points of view out there. Gavin Newsom very prominently said he thought that trans athletes should be barred from women's sports, breaking with the liberal wing of the party on that. And he criticized the use of terms like Latin X and defunding the police. That's part of the effort among some Democrats to show that they understand that voters don't want that liberal point of view and they want it to be more centrist. Alyssa Slotkin gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union and gave a very

centrist, Midwestern focused kind of meat and potatoes speech that was immigration, national security, basic economics. It was an unfancy statement of core values. Nations should be secure, the border should be secure, and we should focus on your pocketbook. That's what the centrists think is the way forward. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal reporter Aaron Zittner in Washington. Aaron, thanks so much. Good to be with you, Luke.

And we may not have to wait long to see how Democrats choose to fight back ahead of a showdown this week over a Trump-endorsed proposal to avoid a government shutdown and reduce spending, as well as what is shaping up to be a heated debate over a giant Republican-backed tax bill later this year. And that's what's news for this Monday morning. That clip of Mark Carney you heard the top of the show came from Reuters, courtesy of CPAC. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Kate Bullivant.

Christina Rocca and Sandra Kilhoff were our supervising producers. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.