Trump The Disrupter

I want to look at a secondary example of Trump's role as a disrupter, which he clearly relishes. Most of the attention in recent news cycles has gone to Ukraine and DOGE, but it's important to remember what is almost a side project, Canada. As of late November last year, a few weeks after the election and almost two months before his inauguration, he singlehandedly caused a crisis in the Canadian government, not just the US:

The US president-elect said he would sign an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, after being inaugurated on 20 January 2025.

. . . Last year, more than 80% of Mexico's exports went to the US, while around 75% of Canada's went to its southern neighbour.

By early January, the threat alone, with Prime Minister Trudeau's flaccid response, forced Trudeau to announce his resignation:

Trudeau, 53, had faced growing calls to quit from inside his Liberal Party, which ramped up in December when deputy prime minister and long-time ally Chrystia Freeland abruptly resigned.

In a public resignation letter, Freeland cited US President-elect Donald Trump's threats of tariffs on Canadian goods, and accused Trudeau of not doing enough to address the "grave challenge" posed by Trump's proposals.

This brings me back to the business-school paper analyzing Trump's negotiating technique that I've been referring to all week. It says that as a negotiator, Trump assumes four roles, observer, performer, controller, and disrupter:

An analysis of Trump’s negotiation behavior reveals how he embodies each of these four roles. His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage (controller) as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options (performer). If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

His strategy with Canada is a perfect illustration of the point. He knows -- I have a feeling he's understood this for many years -- that Canada has no option vis-a-vis the US. Its economy, never strong, depends almost entirely on tariff disparities with the US, and if Trump threatens to disrupt these, it brings down the Canadian government. At the same time, Trump preemptively disparages any other option by characterizing Trudeau as the governor of the 51st state.

All of this is immensely entertaining -- The crisis forced Trudeau to travel to Mar-a-Lago to beg for mercy within days of the initial threat in November, which gave Trump an opportunity to seem magnanimous.

Speaking to reporters outside his hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday morning, Trudeau said his conversation with Trump was "excellent" but did not respond to any additional questions.

Trudeau also took to X on Saturday to thank Trump for dinner at Mar-a-Lago and added, "I look forward to the work we can do together, again."

But the subtext of the whole episode was inescapable: Canada in fact has no options other than to try to satisfy Trump in whatever face-saving way it can. This is a truth that most Canadians are deeply unwilling to face, and the various grandiose counterthreats Canadian politicians made in subsequent weeks reflect this. Chrystia Freeland, who had hoped to succeed Trudeau, just a week ago

warned that Trump poses a direct "threat" to Canada's sovereignty by saying that the country could potentially become the 51st U.S. state.

Trump has said that Canada is "not viable as a country" without U.S. trade.

Freeland proposed forming stronger defense ties with France and Britain, as their nuclear arsenals could aid Canada "at a time when the United States can pose a threat."

Freeland nevertheless lost badly to Mark Carney in the internal Liberal party vote to succeed Trudeau, I suspect because it was understood that this was in fact not a serious option. Trudeau himself used similar apocalyptically grandiose language:

Trudeau accused the US president of planning "a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us".

"That is never going to happen. We will never be the 51st state," he told reporters on Tuesday.

"This is a time to hit back hard and to demonstrate that a fight with Canada will have no winners."

The response from Trump the Performer was

[Y]our brilliant anthem, 'O Canada,' will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!

Ontario Premiuer Doug Ford resorted to similar ineffectual threats:

Trump has a message for Canada after Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatens to 'shut off electricity completely' to the US... pic.twitter.com/W1JtjqCogf

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 11, 2025

But Ford almost immediately backed down, while Trump was predictably "magnanimous":

Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced on Tuesday that he would suspend a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to Americans states and would meet with American officials to resolve a trade dispute that has roiled markets in recent days.

"Today, United States Secretary of Commerce [Howard Lutnick] and Premier of Ontario Doug Ford had a productive conversation about the economic relationship between the United States and Canada," the pair said in a joint statement.

UPDATE: It got worse for Ford:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is apologizing to the American people for the fallout from the ongoing trade negotiations between Canada and the United States — and calling for an end to the “chaos” to save “millions of jobs.”

Ford made assurances that a trade deal would be settled between the two North American nations prior to the April 2 deadline during an interview on WABC’s “Cats & Cosby” — and added a very Canadian “Sorry, eh,” directed toward US citizens.

“I want to apologize to the American people. I spent 20 years of my life in the US, in New Jersey, in Chicago. I love the American people. I absolutely love them,” Ford told hosts John Catsimitides and Rita Cosby.

This goes to another aspect of Trump's negotiating style discussed in the business-school link:

Most importantly, Trump the disrupter manages ambiguity – seeking to minimize it for himself and maximize it for others. He doesn’t like surprises: “Anticipating and preparing for problems will save you time and resources and stop surprises that could cost you a ton,” he advised in Trump 101 (Trump 2006: 19; also see Cook and Dawsey 2017).

But ambiguity has been an enduring part of Trump’s negotiation toolkit from his early days as a businessman to the present day as occupant of the Oval Office. Before running for president he wrote, “never let anyone know exactly where you’re coming from. Knowledge is power, so keep as much of it to yourself as possible” (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). “I want to be unpredictable,” Trump told the audience at one of his presidential campaign rallies (Trump 2016a). Indeed, he stressed in a campaign foreign policy speech that “we must as a nation be more unpredictable” (Trump 2016c, emphasis added).

Is Trump serious about making Canada the 51st state? Who knows? Certainly all the Canadian politicians across the spectrum are fanning national indignation over the prospect -- Canada is not for sale! We will never be the 51st state! This is a time to hit back hard! But is Trump really serious, or is he trolling? If he's just trolling, doesn't this make the feckless rage and threats north of the border all the more ridiculous? But if he's serious, down deep, doesn't he have a point?

It used to sound like a joke when President Donald Trump talked about making Canada the 51st US state, but to Canadian leaders it sounds like an increasingly serious threat and part of a plan.

“President Trump wants to put us into a state where we are much more weakened economically in order eventually to annex us,” Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last week.

. . . At the same time, he continues to bring up the prospect of the US absorbing Canada.

“The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear,” Trump said, mangling history during a standoff with Ontario’s premier that threatened to open a new front in the trade war Tuesday.

. . . That was the “good cop” post. Trump also issued threats in the period before Ford backed down from a threatened surcharge on electricity sold across the border to Americans in Minnesota, Michigan and New York.

Well, this is Trump, and the most we can say is that there are people who recognize this as a consistent -- and often successful -- strategy. It's also, in the meantime, immensely entertaining. "Canadians are reasonable and we are polite, but we will not back down from a fight, not when our country and the well being of everyone in it is at stake," says Trudeau.

There are few things as amusing as an enraged Canadian politely claiming he won't back down from a fight. Trump the performer's inner Groucho Marx instinctively recognizes this.