{"id":233510,"date":"2025-10-30T06:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T06:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/233510\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T06:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T06:59:07","slug":"trump-is-often-angry-but-rarely-hurt-yet-canada-has-managed-to-pull-it-off-emma-brockes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/233510\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is often angry but rarely hurt \u2013 yet Canada has managed to pull it off | Emma Brockes"},"content":{"rendered":"

One difficulty of a presidency as volatile as Donald Trump\u2019s is separating what makes him angry (almost everything) from what genuinely, revealingly enrages him \u2013 what sends him round the bend at the mineral level. For instance, he hates Letitia James<\/a>, the New York attorney general who in 2022 successfully brought a civil fraud case against him and whom he has since urged the justice department to pursue for mortgage fraud<\/a>. But that\u2019s just basic revenge \u2013 see also his pursuit of ex-FBI director James Comey<\/a>. More interesting are the fleeting, trivial things that set Trump off, including his meltdown last week over a TV commercial from Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the surface it didn\u2019t seem like a particularly big deal: a TV ad airing on US television, paid for by the Canadian province of Ontario, in which an audio clip of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs ran over inspiring footage of the American west and industry. In a folksy voice Reagan explains: \u201cWhen someone says: \u2018Let\u2019s impose tariffs on foreign imports\u2019, it looks like they\u2019re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works \u2013 but only for a short time.\u201d He then demolishes the premise of tariffs as anything but an instrument that \u201churts every American worker\u201d.<\/p>\n

Reagan\u2019s words were taken from a 1987 radio address, and both Trump and the Reagan foundation instantly attacked the ad \u2013 in which some of the former president\u2019s remarks were run out of chronological order \u2013 with Trump declaring it \u201cFAKE\u201d. (The sentiment of what Reagan said wasn\u2019t altered.) Clearly, however, it\u2019s not the edit that bent Trump so out of shape that, after the ad aired, he called off tariff talks with Canada<\/a> \u2013 the only G7 country that has yet to reach a trade deal with the US \u2013 then doubled down by announcing he was \u201cincreasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now\u201d. This was temper, pure and simple \u2013 an expression of pique far outweighing the apparent scale of the insult that had clearly struck some very particular nerve.<\/p>\n

When it comes to analysing Trump\u2019s overreactions, I always return to the delicious and staggering freakout he had at the New York Times columnist Gail Collins in 1992 when she referred to him as the \u201cfinancially embattled thousandaire\u201d. In the wasteland of Trump\u2019s interior life, \u201crich\u201d is probably the single most crucial pillar of his identity, and by suggesting that he had exaggerated his wealth, Collins cut as close to the marrow as it gets. Sure enough, Trump\u2019s response was, for bizarreness, up there with Elon Musk calling the Thai cave rescuer a \u201cpedo guy\u201d for criticising his dumb submarine: he sent a copy<\/a> of the column back to Collins with the words \u201cThe Face of a Dog!\u201d scrawled over the picture.<\/p>\n

Trump wasn\u2019t president then and had only harmless theatrics at his disposal. Obviously things are different now, and by threatening to raise tariffs to 60% on some Canadian goods<\/a>, Trump will probably hurt US consumers and workers for years to come, not least as Canada seeks to find alternative trade partners. What remains curious is what exactly in the ad so aggressively triggered him \u2013 and it has to do, I suspect, with the status of Ronald Reagan relative to the status of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

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To those of us who grew up outside the US and witnessed Reagan\u2019s presidency from afar, he often seemed at best a fairly preposterous leader. But in the years since his death, in the US Reagan has come to stand for unimpeachable political authority \u2013 and not just on the right \u2013 an American icon on a par with John Wayne and a symbol of the soul of the Republican party. At the end of the Ontario ad, a clip of Reagan recording the address shows him wearing a plaid cowboy shirt, and looking rugged and authentic.<\/p>\n

There is almost no point of comparison for Trump as far as this image is concerned. Burnished by exactly the nostalgia Trump has leveraged for his own political gain, Reagan\u2019s words and image in that ad pitch the current president\u2019s emptied-out, shiny-suited, barely Republican Maga movement against Reagan\u2019s \u201cMorning in America again<\/a>\u201d original \u2013 or at least against the modern spin on the original that has so much power today. Con artists are always aware, at some level, of their own fundamental fraudulence, which is why it can be so dangerous to confront them with the truth. I don\u2019t think Trump\u2019s excessive response at the weekend was down to a political disagreement about tariffs. Instead it was about a man suffering a brief, piercing and clearly quite painful collapse in his self-delusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One difficulty of a presidency as volatile as Donald Trump\u2019s is separating what makes him angry (almost everything)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-233510","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}