Keeping a straight face has been perhaps the greatest achievement of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s brief tenure as the Prime Minister of Canada. For months, Donald Trump has railed against Canada, threatening to turn America’s ungrateful northern neighbor into the 51st state, come what may, an achievement worthy of his visage gracing Mount Rushmore — in the same way Trump will annex Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, free Brazil’s corrupt former President Jair Bolsonaro, repeal the laws of climate change and gravity, and then impose tariffs on all of America’s nefarious trading partners, like the evil-doer Canada.
The only hitch, as the canny Carney has known all along: America has a thing called a “treaty” with Canada. Not one of Trump’s “deals,” the chaotic, almost certainly worthless and delusional transactions that involve the president imagining himself astride the world, TV remote in hand, a colossus of reactionary stupidity and cruelty finally delivering his promised revenge.
As a true crime writer, it’s long been evident to me that Trump has modeled himself on a Queens rich kid’s idea of a real New York City gangster, only the stupid variety, the version of a tough guy that fools like Vice President J.D. Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel and Texas Senator Ted Cruz co-splay as they genuflect to their dullard old man boss like the morons in Jimmy Breslin’s classic portrait of mafia idiocy The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
In the 2000’s, I wrote my first book about the worst crimes in the history of Brooklyn — The Brotherhood: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia. During the trial of two NYPD detectives for multiple murders as paid assassins for the mafia, Breslin sometimes sat next to me as we watched the most depraved and corrupt figures in the history of New York law enforcement finally face justice. Breslin was getting older and he occasionally caught a few winks on my shoulder as a parade of witnesses proved beyond doubt that “Gaspipe” Casso had indeed paid “Downtown Burt” Kaplan to slip money to the two detectives to whack gangsters suspected of snitching — until the idiot dirty detectives wound up gunning down the “wrong” Nicky Guido, murdering an innocent kid, not the flat-nosed gangster they were contracted to kill.
Stupidity, as Breslin knew all too well, is always lurking nearby when it comes to the mob — real and imaginary.
If he were alive today, Breslin would have Trump’s number, I’m sure, seeing through the fake bravado to reveal the chubby spoiled brat who has always relied on Daddy’s billions to live out his fantasy as a suave Fifth Avenue real estate genius and author of The Art of the Deal, when he’s really a bloated bald nepo baby boob.
Geopolitically, I feel sure Breslin would also be the first to laugh at the way Trump is trying to use tariffs to mercilessly leverage an American future with not a friend in the world — exactly like Trump himself. Decades-long strategic endeavors, like the burgeoning alliance with India, are being destroyed in the same penny ante way Trump has always ripped off contractors at his fifth-rate golf clubs and casinos. Starving children in Gaza and AIDS patients in Africa, research scientists, elite universities, hardworking immigrants suddenly treated like criminals, century-old mutually beneficial trade arrangements — all receive the same bully-boy, lawless disrespect Trump paid to the small family-owned businesses he stiffed for decades.
As America’s erstwhile closest friend, a relationship that means nothing to Trump, Canada seemed doomed to a similar fate — in fact, if you listen to Trump, Canada is already little more than a dependent vassal of the United States. When Canada announced last week that it would finally recognize the state of Palestine, in light of Israel’s unconscionable campaign of collective punishment and starvation in Gaza, the offended Trump declared that he would impose a mind-boggling and devastating 35 percent tariff on all goods from Canada — an apparently catastrophic blow to my homeland and yet another display of Trump’s all powerful global rule.
BUT THE DEVIL is in the details — only in this case, the details aren’t really details, they’re the sum and substance of the trade relationship between Canada and the United States. When Trump announced the new tariffs on Canada, along with a dizzying and seemingly random array of other countries, the American media noted the existence of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (the new name Trump gave to NAFTA in his first term), without pausing to consider the implications. The new tariffs seemed to fulfill one of Trump’s central campaign pledges, as he swept the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2024, promising to put America First. Always adopting the role of victim, Trump portrayed the rest of the world as predators feasting on the carcass of the poor lamb-like American working family — and Canada, of all places, was one of the most exploitative trading partners.
So it is that Trump’s 35 percent tariffs on Canada sounds like the revenge so many Americans seem to desire. But that isn’t how things work in the grown-up world that fake mob boss Trump has long pretended doesn’t exist — or at least doesn’t apply to him. The treaty with Canada isn’t a handshake or a shakedown or another of the extortionate deals that Trump is now imposing on the world. The USMCA is a treaty ratified by Congress, an agreement with the force of law — and a legally enforceable agreement that Canada will most certainly enforce if it is required to do so.
For months, Trump has given the impression that he can rip up any law, from habeas corpus and birthright citizenship to demanding thinly veiled bribes from supine media corporations, enabled by a cowardly and corrupt Supreme Court clearly afraid to confront the president. But the courts and more importantly the markets wouldn’t stand idly by if Trump attempted to unilaterally disregard a foundational, legally binding element of the North American economy like the USMCA — or at least that’s a dare that the president doesn’t seem willing to risk.
In other words, by calling his bluff and asserting an independent policy on Palestine, despite Trump’s threats, Canada has dared to speak in the only language Trump understands: leverage.
The pervasive terror displayed by American institutions has disguised the fact that it is actually possible to stand up to a bully — as unassuming Canada just proved with its support for a Palestinian state. The truth is that under the terms of the USMCA, 95 percent of the goods and services that Canada exports to the United States arrive duty free, leaving a relatively small five percent subject to Trump’s imperial 35 percent tariff. But even that doesn’t capture the absurd reality. While Trump imposes across-the-board tariffs on countless countries, for reasons that escape any rational economic explanation, Canada is now perhaps the single most favored trading nation on earth. While scores of countries face Trump’s punitive tariffs, Canada largely trades tariff free with the United States because it doesn’t need a “deal” — it has a treaty.
Examined further, the truth is even more abject — or ridiculous depending on your point of view. Under the USMCA, Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum are outside the ambit of the trade agreement because of the fake national emergency Trump has conjured, falsely claiming that Canada is a cause of massive fentanyl imports — when illegal imports from Canada amount to at most one percent of the drug in the United States. But it turns out that even those specific tariffs are almost certain to be illusory as American industry requires huge amounts of Canadian materials to function — the very products that Trump claimed America didn’t need. To take the most recent example, Ford desperately needs Canadian aluminum to manufacture its F-150 pickup, but that material is subject to a crippling tariff of 50 percent, making Ford’s American production line uneconomical, and perhaps in danger of closing.
Nobel economist Paul Krugman pointed out an economic impact of Trump’s tariffs that is so obvious it is astounding no one in the White House had the cajónes to mention to the wannabe emperor the consequence of putting huge tariffs on parts like steel and aluminum used by American auto makers. Japanese and Korean vehicles are now subject to a 15 percent import tax, but that is small when compared to the 50 percent Trump vig American companies have to pay to import many of the components essential to any automobile — including Canadian steel and aluminum. It follows that Japanese and Korean cars enjoy a relative advantage because they don’t have to pay Trump’s tariff for their steel and aluminum — hardly the result the red cap-wearing throngs were promised.
The world is now being treated to a tutorial in Economics 101 at Trump University. While billionaires like Trump get a giant tax break, the consumption tax Trump has renamed “tariffs” will disproportionately fall on working-class voters. Despite the bluster, Trump’s supposed archenemy Canada now faces the lowest tariffs in the world and those that have been imposed are causing severe damage in America, making them self-destructive and likely to be quietly revoked.
CANADA’S PRIME MINISTER CARNEY possesses degrees in economics from Harvard and Oxford and they likely provided him with sufficient education to see the truth behind Trump’s nonsense — and ensure he has the social graces and political intelligence to not laugh out loud when the president imposes symbolic tariffs like a carnival barker. Leading the Bank of Canada during the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Bank of England through the Brexit catastrophe of 2016 certainly have endowed Carney with the fortitude to quietly keep an eye on the larger prize and persist through times of economic lunacy.
In recent months, Canada has come to occupy a unique place in the world. Sent as a canary into the coal mine of Donald Trump’s addled mind, Canada has emerged from the toxic subterranean atmosphere alive and with the urgent news that it is possible to survive the craziness that has besieged the American body politic. Lay low and say as little as possible is Canada’s message, denying Carney the cheap political thrill of telling Canadians how incredibly fortunate they are that Trump is so stupid — and risk riling the vengeful and easily humiliated Trump.
In Canada there’s a way of describing what is quickly becoming the global strategy for dealing with Donald Trump. In hockey, the term for what Carney is doing is called “ragging the puck.” The idea is simple: When you’re ahead, don’t give the other team any opportunity to win. Hold on to the puck, skate backwards away from the play, making it seem like you’re still playing the game when you’re really playing the clock. When the losing team realizes that the winning team is ragging the puck, it usually provokes an admixture of righteous fury followed by sullen submission, while the clock ticks down to the inexorable end — or 35 months and counting.
THE WHOLE WORLD is now following some form of Canada’s strategy, countries ragging the tariff puck and playing for time by agreeing to whatever unenforceable concessions Trump wants to announce to the gullible American media and the even more credulous public. A Democratic win in the midterm elections might bring a modicum of relief, perhaps, but the most important thing Canada is showing the world is to not laugh in the face of Trump’s idiocy — and to let the clock and his power run out.
On some level, Trump’s supporters seem to intuitively understand the nature of the deal the boss of the gang who couldn’t govern straight has struck for America. The great Jimmy Breslin of course had Trump’s measure all the way back in the early 90’s, when the would-be casino king was going bankrupt over and over again. Breslin wrote then that the seemingly indestructible Trump survived by dint of the little known “Corum’s Law.”
This obscure but telling insight into human nature comes from a New York sports columnist recruited in the 1950s to run the then notoriously sleazy Kentucky Derby. A keen observer of the self-harming psychology of compulsive gamblers, as well as an old-time, hard boiled New Yorker in the manner of Damon Runyan, Bill Corum understood that for some fools, getting ripped off was part of the allure of going to the louche Kentucky Derby.
The same seems to be true for his supporters in the age of Trump, with the president’s P.T. Barnum blarney and winking humor the attraction to his followers, even as he leads the economy off the cliff in pursuit of crackpot theories. Trump’s supporters have to know they’re getting fleeced by transparently idiotic scams like tariffs — but for true believers, the scam is part of the perverse pleasure of playing the game, as Corum observed decades ago.
“Because, gentlemen, this is the rule,” Breslin wrote, quoting Corum’s Law. “A sucker has to get screwed.”
