U.S. President Donald Trump stands in front of a painting of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The President has halted trade talks with Canada over an Ontario anti-tariff ad featuring clips of Reagan.Brian Snyder/Reuters
Because he can.
That is the best explanation for President Donald Trump’s astonishing out-of-nowhere decision to halt trade talks with Canada over a 60-second television advertisement.
That commercial, produced for the province of Ontario, has the cool production values of a classic presentation by Ronald Reagan, whose anti-tariff words form its centrepiece. Indeed, the ad sounded, appeared and felt like Mr. Reagan’s most famous campaign spot, a devastating 60 seconds that was broadcast in 1984 and that opened with “It’s morning again in America.” Narrated by ad executive Hal Riney, it was meant to tell Americans that the calm, soothing 40th president, who months later would win a historic 49-state re-election landslide, had brought prosperity back to a once-troubled country.
The result of Mr. Trump’s apparently impulsive decision was a far different kind of morning in Canada.
The news landed with a thump in Ottawa and around the country, crushing hopes for a resolution to the trade tensions between the two North American giants. And it happened to hit just as Canadians were girding for the Toronto Blue Jays to face the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series on Friday – a clash that has sparked part-playful and part-symbolic nationwide support for the country’s only Major League Baseball team.
The Government of Ontario released this TV ad which will be broadcast in the U.S. that uses a recording of Ronald Reagan to argue against tariffs.
Government of Ontario
“By now everybody understands that Trump can be narcissistic and very petty, but cancelling trade negations because he didn’t like a television ad crosses a new frontier even by the absurd standards of the Trump era,” said Graham Dodds, a Concordia University political scientist who is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. “It’s hard to imagine any previous president responding to a Canadian ad in the same way.”
Mr. Trump’s angry encore early Friday morning – he posted that Canada was attempting to “illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our Country” – was illuminating in several respects.
It underscored the American President’s provincialism, for he apparently fails to understand that Canada has separate, sometimes even antagonistic, governments at the national and provincial levels. It is as if Prime Minister Mark Carney were to explode in indignation over a commercial produced by the state of Idaho. All of Mr. Trump’s presidential predecessors, and surely all the governors of the 13 states that border Canada, comprehended this distinction.
Mr. Trump’s ignorance is even more stunning because the President, the conservatives who back him and a majority of jurists on the Supreme Court have reinforced the concept of federalism in the United States, with perhaps the most emotional and intractable political dispute of the age – abortion – having been rendered a state issue rather than one adjudicated at the national level.
The President’s declaration also demonstrates the unilateral decision-making that he has made a trademark of his second term.
Opinion: Where is Canada’s leverage in trade talks with Trump?
From tariffs (imposed despite Constitutional requirements that trade legislation originate from the House of Representatives in most cases) to the deployment of troops in Democratic cities (against the expressed, often passionate wishes of the mayors and governors of those jurisdictions), not to mention the mobilization of American military might in the Caribbean (undertaken without advance consultation or notice to Congress), Mr. Trump has frequently acted solely on his own, sometimes late at night or early in the morning.
This latest instance, involving trade negotiations with his country’s greatest historic economic partner, happened on the heels of another dramatic exercise of unilateral decision-making: the razing of the East Wing of the White House without the consultation of various entities that for decades have been architectural custodians of the most famous American residence.
This advert episode represents an unusual bow to Mr. Reagan, one of the former Republican presidents whose style and views Mr. Trump has repudiated. The White House leaned on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute to discredit the excerpts from Mr. Reagan’s 1987 radio address. Mr. Trump said the remarks were “fake,” but they are real – albeit chosen selectively and rearranged.
Both men were thrust to national attention as medial performers. Mr. Reagan was an actor known for the comforting hush of his voice and his identity as the Notre Dame football star George Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. Mr. Trump was a reality-television star known for his “You’re fired!” explosions on The Apprentice starting in 2004.
But Mr. Reagan was an ardent free trader, while Mr. Trump is an enthusiastic backer of tariffs (“the most beautiful word,” he has said). Mr. Reagan had a gentle, consoling style, while Mr. Trump prefers an aggressive, combative approach. Both were old men who breathed fresh air into conservatism and inspired young people to adopt their views and enter government and politics.
Steven F. Hayward, the former Ronald Reagan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy, once wrote that Mr. Reagan “would cringe with some in the GOP striving for purity, instead of the big tent party that he talked about.”
The result of this contretemps is to transform a $75-million Ontario trade advertisement into perhaps the most powerful television spot in history.
“We have a situation where a trade war has been reignited over a commercial,” said Tobe Berkovitz, an emeritus professor of advertising at Boston University and a media consultant. “Nobody down here even knew this ad was running.”