The Ugly American

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

 

“Trump just ‘Georgia-ed’ an entire country,” financier Clifford Asness declared this morning about the results of Canada’s parliamentary elections.

 

It’s funny ’cause it’s true. For those who have (mercifully) forgotten: In January 2021, the then-president visited Georgia to campaign for Republicans in two nailbiter runoff races that would determine control of the U.S. Senate. His pitch to voters: Not only had the recent presidential election been rigged against him, the Senate runoffs were also “illegal and invalid.”

 

MAGA diehards got the message and stayed home, not bothering to participate in our supposedly sham democracy. Democrats ended up winning both seats. Unable to contain his authoritarian impulses, the leader of the American right had needlessly sabotaged his own allies. And not for the last time, it turns out.

 

On Monday, Canada’s Liberal Party completed a political comeback that needs to be seen in graph form to be believed. Three months ago, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his party were about 25 points ahead, cruising toward a dominant parliamentary majority. Then Donald Trump took office, promptly slapped steep tariffs on Canadian imports, and told anyone who’d listen that his goal was nothing less than crippling that country’s economy until it begged to be annexed by the United States.

 

He was still barking about making Canada the 51^st state as recently as yesterday morning, as voters were headed to the polls.

 

About 12 hours later, the Georgia effect was complete. Liberals won the election, boosted by fears that a Conservative government wouldn’t be as willing to stand up to Trump. Poilievre, a member of parliament since 2004, lost his own seat. Unable to contain his authoritarian impulses, the leader of the American right had again needlessly sabotaged his own ideological allies.

 

Prime Minister Mark Carney was pugnacious in victory, warning the White House that his country has other economic and security partnership “options” besides America. “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” he told a crowd of supporters. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.”

 

“The American betrayal.” If I ever get tired of Boiling Frogs as the name of this newsletter, that’s what I’m switching to.

 

The Liberal resurgence, like the Senate elections in Georgia before it, has frustrated traditional conservatives here in the United States. “What concrete, useful, good-for-conservatism thing has Trump achieved with his ‘Canada should be the 51st state’ line?” an exasperated Charles Cooke of National Review vented yesterday afternoon, with Carney’s party poised to win. “Doing it would massively empower the American Left. Talking about it has massively empowered the Canadian Left. How is that winning?”

 

Trump and his movement have always seemed to me to be more concerned with vanquishing conservatism than with vanquishing progressivism. Wrecking conservatives, in fact, is sort of his specialty.

 

I’m afraid I don’t understand the question. Why would Donald Trump want to do something that’s good for conservatism?

 

Foils.

 

Partly it’s a matter of ideology. On policies as varied as tariffs, taxing the rich, and military interventions, the populist right has more in common with the populist left than it does with traditional conservatives.

 

Partly it’s a matter of political turf. Having toppled Reaganism as the GOP’s approach to government, Trump and his postliberal revolutionaries are keen to maintain their grip on the party by extinguishing alternate models of right-wing politics. Their conflict with the left is eternal, but they’ve won the war with conservatives and have spent years roaming the Republican battlefield, shooting the survivors.

 

Partly it’s a matter of authoritarian political dynamics. Conservatives offend Trump and other populists because the loyalty those conservatives feel toward their belief system exceeds the loyalty that, as members of the right, they’re supposed to feel towards him. They’re more likely to make political trouble for him than the average sycophantic modern Republican is.

 

And partly it’s a matter of demagogues requiring convenient foils. Trump is comfortable sparring with Democrats because right and left are traditional enemies. Sparring with conservatives is trickier because the criticism he receives from fellow right-wingers can’t be dismissed on tribal “Team Red/Team Blue” grounds. Which probably explains why MAGA invective about Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney always seems to carry more venom than invective about, say, Bernie Sanders does.

 

If the president were granted a wish to divide America between Trumpists and hostile progressives on the one hand or between Trumpists and hostile Reaganites on the other, I’d bet every dollar I own that he’d choose the former.

 

Is it surprising, then, that he’s sounded excited about Pierre Poilievre’s polling collapse in Canada?

 

In an interview with The Atlantic this week, Trump himself, not the reporters, brought up the right’s tailspin in Canada. “You know, until I came along, remember that the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” he remarked, almost boastfully. Last month, with the Canadian left surging in the polls, he told Fox News that he’d “rather deal with a Liberal [as prime minister] than a Conservative.” When asked why, Trump explained: “The Conservative that’s running is, stupidly, no friend of mine. I don’t know him, but he said negative things. When he says negative things, I couldn’t care less.”

 

Poilievre failed every test that Trumpism requires conservatives to pass. His ideology is distinct from, and more traditional than, Trump’s nationalism. His victory in Canada would have offered the international right an alternate and potentially more successful model of right-wing governance than Trump’s. The outrage in Canada at Trump’s tariffs and his “51^st state” idiocy forced Poilievre into a confrontational stance with the White House, not “loyal” in doing Trump’s bidding. And Conservative leadership would have denied Trump the easy ideological scapegoat for lingering poor relations with Canada that he’ll now enjoy with Mark Carney and “the libs” in charge.

 

It may even be that, because the president views international relations (and everything else) as a zero-sum game, he regards “weak” left-wing leadership up north as necessarily better for him and the United States than “strong” right-wing leadership would be.

 

Whichever way you slice it, Donald Trump gives exactly zero craps about doing “concrete, useful, good-for-conservatism things.” To the contrary, with rare exceptions like Argentinian lib-owner extraordinaire Javier Milei—whom American populists seem not to realize has a view of trade roughly the opposite of Trump’s—the White House betrays precious little interest in seeing right-wingers succeed internationally unless they’re aligned with the president’s brand of postliberal authoritarianism.

 

And that’s probably for the best. The way things are going, right-wing victories abroad might soon be hard to come by.

 

International nationalism.

 

A few days ago, Bloomberg reported that some members of Australia’s center-right party greeted news of Trump’s reelection last fall by throwing parties in their offices, viewing it as the latest sign of a “global shift” to the right that would soon bring them to power in their home country.

 

Then “Liberation Day” happened.

 

Déjà vu: The ruling left-wing Labor Party began to climb in the polls. One-third of Australian voters said they were less likely to vote for right-wing leader Peter Dutton because of Trump; a separate survey found that trust in the United States had plummeted to its lowest point since the question was first asked. Recently, Dutton has begun reversing himself on some policy proposals, like forcing government employees to return to working in offices, because those policies would be too reminiscent of you-know-who.

 

We shouldn’t overinterpret a single election in Canada and a few polls in Australia as proof of a global, Trump-fueled, left-wing resurgence. But if you’re looking for evidence that an international political backlash to the dumbest trade war in history is in motion, it isn’t hard to find.

 

A recent Ipsos poll found that, in 29 countries surveyed, the inhabitants of 26 are now less likely to say that the U.S. is a positive influence in the world than said so last October. In Canada specifically, the share dropped from 52 percent to … 19. Averaged across all 29 nations, China—China—is now cited slightly more often as a force for good than America is. And the Ipsos poll was conducted mostly before “Liberation Day”; the numbers are surely worse, and possibly considerably worse, now.

 

Anecdotally, look around at international news and you’ll stumble across “the Trump effect” in one country after another. The United Kingdom is reportedly on the brink of signing a free trade agreement with the European Union in what’s being described unofficially as a post-Brexit “reset.” Vietnam, which was bludgeoned with a 46 percent “Liberation Day” tariff before the president announced his 90-day pause, recently signed a series of cooperation agreements with China. Some of the president’s best-known international toadies are also suddenly keen to rid themselves of the political baggage his trade war has saddled them with: Earlier this month, British nationalist Nigel Farage called the tariffs “too much, too soon” and begged his buddy Donald to ease off.

 

The big winner from the president’s first 100 days, though, is Xi Jinping. It’s worth your time to read this Bloomberg report—about how Trump’s belligerence on trade has rescued the Chinese leader at a moment when discontent with his economic stewardship was rising—in full:

 

Interviews with dozens of people in China across business and government circles, many who asked not to be named to speak freely about a sensitive topic, showed a solid consensus is emerging to fight back hard against Trump’s move to rapidly increase tariffs on many Chinese goods to 145%—a level that threatens to effectively wipe out trade between the world’s biggest economies.

 

Financial investors, manufacturers in China’s eastern coastal region, policymakers in a range of departments and even elite factions that have lost out from Xi’s power grab are all rallying behind him.

 

…

 

“Most of the things that the Chinese government would have to justify or explain in terms of hard economic conditions, it’s possible they could now blame them on the imposition of tariffs,” said Rana Mitter, ST Lee chair in US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Even if in reality tariffs don’t have that much to do with it.”

 

The phrase “Comrade Trump builds China” has reportedly become common on the Chinese internet.

 

In other words, from Canada to Australia to Beijing, Trump’s decision to threaten America’s trade partners with economic ruin has sparked surges of nationalism—and unusually, because it’s grounded in antipathy to a right-wing U.S. leader, that nationalism has tended to be left-coded. It’s too soon to guess how that might affect the prospects of the far-right Marine Le Pen faction in France or the AfD in Germany, but one would think that the more hardship a crazed America gratuitously inflicts on the rest of the world, the less likely it is that the president’s closest political cousins in other nations will be trusted by voters with power.

 

Once international relations become consumed with solving “the Trump problem,” the last people anyone should want in charge of managing the crisis are those perceived as fellow Trumpists. Right, Pierre?

 

‘Clown-show fascism.’

 

To return to Charles Cooke’s question of what Trump hoped to accomplish with his “51^st state” gambit, I see two possibilities.

 

One is that he didn’t intend to accomplish anything. He so relished taunting a smaller, weaker neighbor that he couldn’t resist doing so even as evidence mounted that he was alienating, well, everyone: Carney and Poilievre, Canadian voters, U.S. allies who are anxious about being menaced next, even most of the American public.

 

There’s no strategy. He’s a bully and a troll, so that’s how he behaves. To paraphrase his favorite lyrics, it’s in his nature.

 

But the second possibility is more probable: He thought it would work. He earnestly believed that, with a big enough stick in the form of tariffs and a big enough carrot in the form of admission to the United States, Canadians really might be bullied into shedding centuries of national pride and hastily joining the union. “I run the country and the world,” he told The Atlantic this week, which isn’t quite true but certainly helps explain why he expected America’s neighbor to kneel before him.

 

In fairness, a sociopath who feels no allegiance except to his own self-interest might honestly struggle to grasp why Canada wouldn’t take the deal he’s offering. But if that doesn’t explain his behavior here, then another explanation is unavoidable: He’s tremendously stupid.

 

And that’s the big problem for postliberal ideologues right now in trying to spread their movement internationally. It’s not that the president is ruthless, as both the left and right abroad have traditionally had a high—and I mean high—tolerance for ruthlessness in politics. It’s that his ruthlessness is so often deployed to plainly idiotic ends.

 

“Clown-show fascism” is how The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky described the first 100 days of an administration “marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence.” The last thing a person who takes up fascist politics wants to feel is silly. In fact, I suspect most people become fascists because they already feel silly for one reason or another and revel in the fantasy of ruthlessly terrorizing those who made them feel that way.

 

But the fantasy is spoiled when the leader of the movement is transparently an idiot. Turning your neighbor to the north into an enemy with a “51^st state” delusion that won’t work and that practically no one supports is stupid. Declaring a trade war on every country in the world all at once, then backing off the moment markets get rattled, is stupid. Placing ridiculous blowhards like Pete Hegseth in positions of immense power and opting to let them embarrass you rather than hand the media “a scalp” is stupid. Straining relations with Europe and the Far East so that you can impress the chuds in charge of “sh-thole countries” like Russia and El Salvador is stupid.

 

Trump is discrediting right-wing nationalism internationally because the movement is now led by a glowering dope who plainly doesn’t know what he’s doing even with respect to his highest policy priorities, like trade. With Vladimir Putin, postliberals had an ideological icon who at least created a compelling illusion of strategic competence until his army went belly-up in Ukraine. But with the president of the United States now unofficially the face of global authoritarianism, there are no more pretenses that adults are leading the war against liberalism. Signing up for fascism means signing up to be a clown at a circus that grows more ridiculous every day.

 

The “ugly American,” a post-war stereotype of boorish U.S. imperiousness, has been fully realized in the ugly figure of Trump—and right-wing movements across the planet may soon need to answer for it at the polls. How’s that as a recruiting message for nationalism?