[hn_throwaway_99]

I am honestly baffled what this whole shitstorm is about. Like why did Trump want to bash on Canada in the first place? None of his purported reasons pass the laugh test. Fentanyl trafficking? As has been widely reported, less than 1% of fentanyl that has been caught enters through the Canadian border. And if Trump cares so much about drug trafficking, why did he pardon the Silk Road founder, which did over $200 million of drug sales. And if anyone can have a beef about border security, it's Canada - look at all the contraband that enters Canada (especially guns) through the northern border.

The trade stuff makes no sense either. Just read Trump's own words about what an amazing deal the USMCA treaty (the NAFTA replacement that the Trump administration negotiated in 2020) was: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re....

So I get it, Trump flip flops all the time, but I'm just trying to find some rationale for the Canada ire. What especially makes me so angry about all of this is that it's just classic junior high bullying bullshit. A couple months ago basically nobody in the US had any bad thoughts about Canada at all. Then Trump went on his bizarro crusade, and now you see all this conservative commentary online bashing Canada, parroting his "51st state/governor Trudeau" nonsense. It's the same juvenile mean girl crap where the queen bee decides "Who are we going to destroy today", and then the queen bee randomly picks out some kid and basically makes everyone else treat this kid like a pariah, simply because she wants to show she can.

The whole thing is just beyond gross to me, but I still can't understand an iota of non-insane rationale behind it.

[creer]

One theory was to rant at everyone about everything in the hope of getting little random trade concessions from everyone. The squeeky wheel is the one that gets greased or something. The "what" didn't matter.

BUT the ranting is now at the stage where it has created chaos everywhere. And that has been costly everywhere, first of all in the US. Can the concessions make up for that cost? Is anyone in the mood for concessions by now? It's becoming doubtful. A little outrage would have been no big deal, but it seems we are already past that.

I can now see a second theory: if you see a stalemate you don't like - and your position is otherwise somewhat strong - you can kick major mayhem all around you and stand ready to grab what falls back down from people in a less strong situation. A mix of disruption and being bold when the others are fearful. In that situation, the cost of chaos may be acceptable because you believe you can survive that chaos while the others cannot.

[zeagle]

I think he is trying to set us up and also occupy the news cycle to distract. We retaliate with tariffs, he blames us for his domestic economic woes and increases tariffs, we retaliate with electricity and potash for leverage, public support for Canada slowly drops. Thus he slowly moves the goal posts eventually to seize these resources because they are of national importance. A stretch? Maybe but look at Panama, Greenland, Ukraine minerals actions.

There is no going back to the previous relationship because Canadians feel betrayed after years of big sibling adoration and blame pre-existing, worsening unrelated domestic issues on Trump’s actions. My honest take of public sentiment is it has taken such a dive at this point if 9/11 happened in this era the passengers landing in Canada could camp out on the runway huddling for warmth by barrels until busses home are arranged.

[fzeroracer]

I don't think there's a point in looking for a rationale. His mind is exceedingly addled and he's even less coherent than he was during his first term. Combined with delegating responsibility to a bunch of people high on various drugs constantly telling him to do X or Y or Z his policy is 'whoever talks to him first'.

[TylerE]

Important correction: It's whoever talked to him last. He has flipflopped (remember when THAT was enough to doom a political career?) on virtually every possible issue, most multiple times.

[pessimizer]

This is fantasy. The guy does endless interviews and explains why he's doing everything he's doing, at length, and negotiates in public. You can hate it, but if he's addled then Biden didn't even count as alive for his entire term.

The reason that he came out of the gate so hard is due to extensive planning, and he's the only person during your lifetime who was the president, had four years off to reflect on it, then became president again. He recorded weird little videos of all of his future policies a couple of years ago, and he's not deviating from them significantly.

He's the least confused guy in politics right now. Whether you like it is a different story, but I personally am thankful that the worst, covert elements of the government made an enemy of him in his first term. The obvious temptation when handed a dystopian nightmare of surveillance, censorship, front groups, fake science, and an infinite mandate to the executive from Congress would be to use them. Thank god Trump actually hates them personally, and is petty.

Economically, he's sincerely trying to keep the US from paying the piper for the trade deficit we've been running for 40 years. He obviously actually believes in this. It is also completely mainstream economic theory. I wish there was a political force that could oppose him on policy and say why things should be done a different way, but the "resistance" base is still announcing that the walls are closing in on orange Hitler any minute. Policy is like kryptonite to anti-Trumpers right now. They refuse to argue anything on the merits, because they all sound like Reagan Republicans when they do.

[AlecSchueler]

> The guy does endless interviews and explains why he's doing everything he's doing, at length, and negotiates in public.

So answer the question of why he wanted to bash Canada in the first place given the points made by the person asking?

[SpicyLemonZest]

> Economically, he's sincerely trying to keep the US from paying the piper for the trade deficit we've been running for 40 years. He obviously actually believes in this.

But this is not what Trump stated. The fact sheet he published on March 3 (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...) doesn't mention anything about trade deficits; it says that the problem is cartel violence and fentanyl imports, and that the tariffs will remain only until "Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country".

(This is why, if you're curious, there's no political force that can oppose Trump on policy. Whenever anyone reads a Trump policy and develops an argument for why it's wrong, his lieutenants and supporters pop up to dunk on you for being so deranged as to think Trump was being serious.)

[kalleboo]

The most coherent explanation I've seen is that the only power the executive has to directly impose tariffs are from some "national security" law (intended for stuff like sanctions against war criminals), so even though he wants trade concessions, legally he has to dress it up as a national security issue.

That said, he doesn't seem to care about any other limits on the executive, and I don't even know how this strategy was meant to get the desired results (is he telling the other leaders his real requirements behind closed doors?)

[AlecSchueler]

If that's the case then OK but it contradicts the point being made that he explains everything he is doing in interviews and does all of his negotiations in public on the basis of what he claimed.

[SpicyLemonZest]

If he wants trade concessions, which I agree is plausible, delaying the tariffs on only USMCA-covered goods is a significant hint that there's real backchanneling going on. I was very surprised to learn there's so many non-USMCA-covered goods, and one way or another it's fair to presume Trump is intentionally drawing attention to that fact.

But the idea that Trump has deep strategic goals he's lying to the American people about is hardly a defense. And all the information that's leaked about negotiations thus far is that Mexico and Canada are just as confused as the general public about what Trump is asking for.

[card_zero]

What does "paying the piper for the trade deficit" mean? Fear of a service economy?

[archagon]

I feel like we're living in different realities. Whenever I try to watch Trump give a speech, I can hardly stomach more than a few minutes of it because the man seems incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together. (And no — despite his flaws, Biden did not talk like a four year old.) Outside of whatever executive orders the Project 2025 people dump on his desk, his public policy appears wildly aggressive and irrational, even to the point where leaders of neighboring countries are genuinely concerned about annexation[1]. And I'm not sure how you can claim with a straight face that the "dystopian nightmare of surveillance [and] censorship" isn't in effect with the DOJ threatening politicians for hosting webinars[2] and student visas being revoked via social media pattern matching[3]. (Just off the top of my head; there have been many other 1A transgressions over the past month.)

> Economically, he's sincerely trying to keep the US from paying the piper for the trade deficit we've been running for 40 years. He obviously actually believes in this.

Where is the evidence for this? "Obviously actually" are just weasel words. What's "obvious" to me over a decade of observation is that we have a pathological narcissist in power who cares (or thinks) little about anything other than himself and the things that directly enrich him. I seriously doubt he even knows what a trade deficit is.

(But yes, the people who prop up his signing hand certainly have a carefully constructed agenda, and they were never subtle about it.)

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/how-trumps-51st-st...

[2]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/02/28/congress/ao...

[3]: https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/us-deploys-ai-to-revoke-visas...

[afavour]

I think it's raw materials. Canada and Greenland both have a load of them. Trump could buy them, he'd rather just _have_ them.

I also think (and I realize this, uh, is not a nuanced, science-backed view) that he's senile and as a result collapses complex ideas into their simplest possible form, which is what we're seeing here. There's a level where examining his motivations in depth just comes up empty and I think that's... accurate?

[pastrami_panda]

> Like why did Trump want to bash on Canada in the first place?

Canada was a founding member of NATO, and it's very obvious Trump does not want a strong NATO alliance. Whatever the reason may be is up to speculation, but from an outside looking in it's quite jarring seeing clips of Hillary Clinton 8 years ago warn everyone that Trump was going to dismantle NATO. How any American is baffled by the current events is the only thing that is baffling to me.

[quadragenarian]

My belief is partially his rationale is/was to try to extract "border concessions" and by that I mean ask Canada to give away some of its land to the US. It seems bonkers but when you compare Trump to Putin who's clearly trying to expand mother Russia, it's not that different than any strongman with a big army's approach.

[outrun86]

Canadian here, who is also not a Trump fan. It is true that Canada has extremely lax border controls and there are complex organized crime networks that exploit this inside of and through Canada.

The US security establishment is aware of this, as is the Canadian security establishment. The 1% fentanyl headline is indeed widely reported, it’s also a red herring. The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen. More info here, by one of Canada’s best investigative journalists:

https://www.thebureau.news/p/trade-based-money-laundering-is...

IMO Trump is, as the official white house press release says, trying to put pressure on Canada to address this. Are tariffs the best way to do that? A valid question, for sure. Does he have other, possibly irrational, motivations? Also an excellent question.

But I see much Canadian and US commentary that assumes there is nothing rational about this at all, and that there is no Canadian border/security issues, and I would say that’s incorrect.

[kalleboo]

> The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen

Wouldn't it be the US, on their side of the border, who is looking for what is coming into their country, not Canada looking at what is leaving their country? They seem to have a pretty good handle on how much is entering through the southern border.

[outrun86]

I think the heart of the issue is inflow through Canadian ports, as well as complex money laundering and trafficking schemes between Canada, China and Mexico. You can check the article I posted above for more info. There’s also some info about this in the Whitehouse press release I linked below. So it’s not strictly a border crossing problem.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I read the article, and also a lot of the other articles on that site. I'm going to take it with a grain of salt, because that "top investigative reporter" basically seems poised to report everything in the most conspiratorial manner possible.

That said, I'll still definitely grant you the following, especially after researching the issue and seeing information from other outlets: Canada has a serious problem with Chinese money laundering. Fine, but so does the United States: https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo.... None of this feels like anything more than an after-the-fact, invented rationale for the tariffs.

Like the other poster said, the fact that so little fentanyl comes in through the US is not a "red herring" because Canada "isn't looking for it" - you don't go through Customs upon leaving a country, you go through it on entering. And again, even if your argument is that Canada is just supporting the drug trade through its money laundering operations, you could literally point to any country and come up with a host of things that happen within their borders that are somehow bad for the US. You could certainly do it in reverse (shit that the US does that's bad for other countries) 3x. None of it rises to even a teeny bit of the level needed to throwaway a deep, mutually beneficial relationship that has existed for many, many decades.

[outrun86]

Sure, we’re all free to form opinions on who to trust.

If the claim is that Trump is simply throwing trade with Canada for no reason whatsoever, i.e. he’s simply an unhinged madman, that’s certainly a politically popular narrative. I’ve provided pointers to reasonable evidence for pressuring a neighbouring state to get its security issues under control, and based on years of hearing about that stuff it seems rational to me. You’re free to disagree, friend.

[card_zero]

Explain the problem with "inflow"? Of drugs, to Canada, and not to America?

[outrun86]

It’s in the article I linked.

[card_zero]

"This post is for paid subscribers".

[matthewdgreen]

Ordinarily when there's a really big problem, a President will go to some effort to explain to the public what the problem is, and how their actions will fix it. Apparently this problem is definitely motivation Trump and is also somehow so deeply hidden that we can only find out about it from random newsletter sites.

I'm not saying that this makes it BS. But I'm also saying if this doesn't ring your BS meter, you don't have one anymore.

[outrun86]

I follow what’s happening with Canadian drugs / money laundering pretty closely. The article I linked isn’t a random newsletter site, it’s from one of Canada’s top investigative journalists. Here’s the official white house statement from the Whitehouse website. I’ve heard Trump reference this multiple times:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...

[don_neufeld]

Not saying it’s true, but those behaviors make a lot more sense if you replace “Trump” with “Russian agent”, don’t they?

[billy99k]

Does putting sanctions on Russia make sense in your scenario?

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think it's clear that he's simply too old to understand what's going on. By his own account, when he talked with Trudeau yesterday, he was confused why Trudeau couldn't tell him when the next Canadian election was and concluded that he must be planning to "run again for Prime Minister". Because Trump has a reputation for dishonesty, people tend to assume he's lying when he says nonsensical things, but as you say it's hard to imagine what strategic value there could be to lying about this.