Trump knows exactly what he just triggered in Canada
The U.S. president has remarked on the staggering turnaround he provoked
Donald Trump is fully aware he provoked a political earthquake in Canada — just ask him.
On the day of Canada's election, the U.S. president was quoted in an interview voicing detailed knowledge of the historic plot-twist he triggered.
"You know, until I came along, remember that the Conservative was leading by 25 points," Trump told The Atlantic last week, in an interview published Monday.
"Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I've thrown the election into a close call, right?"
He was statistically dead-on, literally within the margin of error. In a rare example of Trump not taking liberties with numbers, Canada's Liberals were, in fact, down precisely 24 percentage points at their nadir on CBC's Poll Tracker, on Jan. 6, 2025.
Then a couple of things happened. That day, Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister. A day later, Trump suggested he could use economic force to annex Canada, escalating a campaign of disparagement that put him at the epicentre of the country's politics.
The ensuing phenomenon is now political history.
It's illustrated in the eye-popping public-opinion trend line. The graph of Conservative and Liberal support looks like a pair of garden shears, at first wide open, then swiftly snapping shut, finally splintering apart, with one end cracking past the other.
How it plays in U.S. politics
To the extent that Canada's election will make news in the U.S., it will be presented as a story about Donald Trump – as a personal repudiation on the eve of his 100th day in office.
An early example was the Monday night headline from The Daily Beast: "Trump's big mouth propels Canadian Liberals to victory."
The New York Times offered a less sensational variation on the theme: "Mark Carney wins full term as Canada's prime minister on anti-Trump platform."
Politico ran a feature in the final days of the campaign poring through numerous other subtleties of Canadian politics, including the collapsing NDP vote and retrenching Quebec nationalism, but the headline kept it simple: "Canada vs. Trump."
Reacting to Canada's results, American political actors invariably mentioned Trump. His domestic foes, in particular, delighted in his perceived rejection.
Anthony Scaramucci, who was briefly the president's communications director, now a nemesis, called Mark Carney's election win the best thing Trump has done in 100 days. A Democratic pollster called it an unprecedented shift, an early example of Trump's toxicity rewriting global politics.
A Democratic congressman who attended university with Carney expressed disbelief about the course of life events that led to Monday.
Jim Himes of Connecticut went to Harvard and then Oxford in the same period as Carney in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"If I had said to him, 'Mark, someday Donald Trump will be president of the United States, and he is single-handedly going to make you prime minister of Canada', he would have called campus security to take me home," Himes posted on X, formerly Twitter.
One conservative in Washington warned months ago that this could happen — writing that Trump's actions risked re-electing a liberal government in Canada.
A foreign-policy thinker at the American Enterprise Institute, Colin Dueck had an earlier read on the dynamic than most here: While he's lived in the U.S. for decades, he grew up in Canada.
"Obviously Trump's intervention was crucial. There's just no denying it," said Dueck, who has advised different Republican presidential campaigns.
"I think there will be a widespread feeling and awareness [here] that Trump had a lot to do with this outcome – even though of course he'll deny it and, you know, his most enthusiastic supporters will deny it."
What about the effect on Trump's Washington?
What Dueck means is some Americans will delight in mentioning Canada's anti-Trump backlash: liberals, and some conservatives unhappy with his conduct of foreign policy.
As for whether this result has any effect in Washington, Dueck expects none.
He can't see this damaging Trump politically. It might prompt some people around him to urge a less combative foreign policy. But even there, he says: Don't hold your breath.
"To be blunt … we know that most Americans don't care that much about Canadian election results," Dueck said in an interview Monday.
"What it might do – and what I hope what it might do – is to change the way the administration approaches the negotiations with some of its allies, including Canada. In other words, you can't go around insulting everybody and then expect them to meet you halfway. I mean, you have to show some minimum above-the-board respect for your allies."
"But you know, again, Trump does what he wants. And anybody who tries to make him do otherwise is gonna hit their head against a brick wall."
After all, Trump had an inkling this was coming, and never course-corrected.
In February, a right-wing interviewer told Trump his comments about Canada were useful to the Liberal campaign.
Trump's reply: Pierre Poilievre is "not a MAGA guy." Trump said he didn't like the way the Canadian Conservative leader was criticizing him.
Did Trump care? Doesn't look like it. For a few weeks, he avoided talking publicly about making Canada a state, but started up again, and then capped it with an extraordinary election-day post on social media seemingly suggesting Canadians should elect... him.
He won't be Canada's leader.
But he will negotiate new trade and security negotiations with Carney, the leader of the party he helped reanimate from the political dead.
In his victory speech, the prime minister referred to the U.S. president as an ongoing existential threat for the whole nation; he said Trump wants to break Canada so that he can own it.
That will never happen, Carney added. But what will happen, indeed what has already happened, he said, is a changed world, with U.S. integration no longer a given, and the U.S. betraying the global trading system it helped build.
The solution? Build new infrastructure within Canada, and new trading partnerships at home and abroad.
"These are tragedies," Carney said. "But it's also our new reality. We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
