The Trump-Trudeau Circus
Justin Trudeau learned the lesson "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" the hard way.
What are we to make of the laughable and embarrassing circus involving Donald Trump’s social media feed and Justin Trudeau’s disintegrating government? On one level, it is deathly serious business, as across the board 25% (or whatever rate Trump abruptly changes it to) American duties on all Canadian imports threaten to cause one third of the Canadian economy to implode as well as set off new waves of inflation in the United States. On another level, this has become a clear example of politics as an internet-driven spectacle, the reduction of political discourse to the purely performative, entirely separate from policy goals–until now, Trudeau’s own specialty.
Since the middle of the 20th century, political scientists have studied the evolution of politics as spectacle, considering how political figures have shifted away from government policy as the output of politics, a la David Easton, and instead made their performance itself the output. Hannah Arendt’s writing about totalitarianism noted the central role that Hitler’s rallies and Stalin’s parades played in maintaining their regimes. Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu led a number of French social scientists to study politics as spectacle. In recent years, the likes of Douglas Rushkoff and Jodi Dean have looked specifically at the ways the internet, especially social media, have made politics more performative. In the 2020s, political life has reached peak spectacle, especially over the past few weeks since Trump’s election.
Donald Trump’s decade in politics has been notable, among many things, for his obsession with microblogging, first on the former Twitter, and since 2021 on his proprietary network, Truth Social. He comments freely on seemingly any topic, even those unconnected to the offices he holds, and often on subjects on which he has no claim to expertise. These comments appear on personal accounts, and he appears to write most of them personally without review, an editor, or any clearance process. They often appear at strange times, especially overnight, when he may be sleep-deprived. Readers can only guess at which ones might represent policy, and which are ephemeral musings that will be forgotten quickly. As unofficial as they may be, when such statements come from a president, or president-elect, they have to be taken seriously. And such was the case for the Canadian government when Trump posted on November 25 that imports from Canada and Mexico would become subject to a blanket tariff of 25% (he had previously spoken of 10%) unless the two countries prevented undocumented migrants and the synthetic drug fentanyl from crossing their borders into the United States. The posting set off a panic in Ottawa, and in provincial capitals, as analysts predicted such tariffs would trigger a deep recession in the Canadian economy.
By November 29, Trudeau had already gone to Trump’s private Florida club for a dinner that Trump turned into a public spectacle seemingly designed to humiliate Trudeau, and during which Trump repeatedly taunted Trudeau before a sizable audience of advisers, in particular, suggesting that the United States annex Canada and make it “the 51st state,” of which he would allow Trudeau to remain governor. Trump used similar crude humor in his first term as president when he called for the United States to annex Greenland. When the Danish government objected to what seemed like a joke, it set off a series of exchanges that resulted in the cancellation of a scheduled state visit, in other words, where the performative leaked into policy. Once Trump’s remarks drew the attention of the Canadian media, Trump made repeated postings about annexing “The Great State of Canada” and keeping Trudeau as its governor. He posted a computer generated image of himself embracing the Canadian flag in front of a European mountain scene, and even insulted the freshly resigned Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, mocking her as “totally toxic,” largely because she was a skilled negotiator in the talks leading to the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement during the first Trump administration. Without any direct contact between Trump and the Canadians outside the dinner, Trump triggered a crisis in the Canadian government that has Trudeau facing calls to resign (which he already faced as he trails badly in polls and faces a general election in 2025) and the premiers of several provinces trying to set their own policies toward the United States while attempting to negotiate with Trump directly. He also spurred Canada to announce a $1.3 billion package of enhancements to border controls.
All of this begs the question of whether Trudeau erred in attempting to speak to Trump in person immediately after the first posting about the tariff, especially when it was not clear what Trump’s real goal was when he posted the first message. Trump has been fond of levying tariffs as president, and has taken advantage of his ability as president to impose them unilaterally. He also spoke of the border in specific regard to immigration and drug trafficking regularly during his campaign. Yet a social media posting is not a serious negotiating proposal, and Trump likely did not mean it as one. Was the post, and all the subsequent “51st state” messages, a negotiating strategy (as Christopher Sands argues), a ploy to force a disliked interlocutor from office (per John Bolton), or simply a social media troll at work, out to feed his own ego? Trump clearly had no intention of negotiating anything during his dinner with Trudeau. The point was to humiliate him, and to create a situation where Trump would appear dominant and be able to bully Trudeau over an extended period. The suggestion of annexation is not serious, unlike the talk of tariffs and border security. Trump knows enough 19th century American history to understand Manifest Destiny and its lingering impact on the Canadian imagination. Trump’s performative acts laid a trap into which Trudeau happily walked. Trudeau learned the lesson "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" the hard way.
While Trump’s threatened tariff would be disastrous for the Canadian economy, the threat could rapidly shift into something else, or simply remain a threat to coerce Ottawa into cooperation on any number of fronts. The larger lesson for Canada from this embarrassing circus is that it is unready to deal with a United States government that acts irrationally and for performative reasons that are not necessarily connected to policy goals, and that it likely cannot be ready when its domestic politics are in flux, in the middle of a lengthy transition to whatever government comes after Trudeau’s.
References:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle/uZcqEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf
https://monoskop.org/images/1/13/Bourdieu_Pierre_On_Television.pdf
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Arendt_Hannah_The_Human_Condition_2nd_1998.pdf
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/15161/oratiejodidean.pdf
https://thezeitgeistmovement.se/files/Lasch_Christopher_The_Culture_of_Narcissism.pdf
https://archive.org/details/systemsanalysiso00east/page/n5/mode/2up
https://fukuyama.stanford.edu/politicalorderandpoliticaldecay
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-bolton-trudeau-1.7409023