That Which Didn't Kill Him Made Him Stronger

Here's something nobody's mentioned: in less than a year, for most of which he was out of office, Trump has defeated his main first-term adversaries. He beat Joe Biden so badly in the 2024 campaign that Biden had to withdraw before he was even nominated. But it was Nancy Pelosi, nominally out of leadership but clearly still in effective control, who pushed Biden out. Yet in doing this and endorsing Kamala Harris as his replacement, she left Biden and his allies embittered and damaged her own reputation when that whole new 2024 strategy proved a loser.

Now, by backing Jeffries and the failed House strategy over the continuing resolution and the shutdown threat, she's badly damaged Chuck Schumer's position as Senate Democrat leader, split the party, and put herself on the losing side of another issue with the battle cry, "Listen to the Women!" When the commentariat tsk-tsks over how the Democrats don't have a leader, they're talking about Pelosi.

As I noted yesterday, the 2025 confrontation over the continuing resolution and the government shutdown threat was a mirror image of the same episode in 2018, with a funding measure passing the House but facing a Senate filibuster. The same players then, Pelosi and Schumer, fought Trump and at that time forced him to a shutdown with an incomplete strategy. This time, Trump beat them. Here's a rare insightful take: Trump invented the shutdown vaccine: It turns out to be DOGE:

President Donald Trump appears to have found his leverage against congressional Democrats for the upcoming budget battles in the form of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Senate Democrats made an about face this week and supported a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at current levels until Sept. 30, despite its inclusion of $10 billion in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) funding and a $6 billion hike in defense spending.

. . . The turnaround came as Democrats voiced concerns over handing Trump too much power through a shutdown and as Elon Musk stoked fears that the government would simply permit a shutdown indefinitely to accomplish the goal of dramatically reducing the size of the government.

In other words, as long as Trump and Musk are around, any Democrat threat of forcing a shutdown is futile.

But this raises another question. We can say on one hand, boy, it sure was lucky that Trump hooked up with Musk on this DOGE business, huh? Where would we be if things hadn't fallen out that way? But that brings back the question that keeps coming up about Trump -- it's better to be lucky than good; Trump hasn't always been good, but he sure has been lucky, especially in the wake of the Butler business. But why is he so consistently lucky? I'm still struggling with an answer to that one.

Here's another question, the problem of the second-term curse:

The second-term curse is the perceived tendency of second terms of U.S. presidents to be less successful than their first terms.

According to the curse, the second terms of U.S. presidents have usually been plagued by a major scandal, policy inertia, some sort of catastrophe, or other problems. There have been twenty-one U.S. presidents who have served a second term, each of whom has faced difficulties attributed to the curse.

So far, Trump has on one hand articulated goals even more ambitious than in his first term, yet in at least the first weeks of his second term, he appears to have been more successful in achieving his second-term goals than he was in achieving his first-term goals in his first term -- a notable example is in the 2025 shutdown battle vs the 2018. Michael Goodwin has some insight here:

Compared to his first term, this is also a different Trump.

He has said the near-miss of the Pennsylvania shooter gives him a greater sense of gratitude and a belief in divine purpose.

He’s definitely calmer, more focused and less likely to get blown off course by criticism or resistance.

Also, his choice of a Cabinet and top aides are better reflections of him than his first-term team was.

. . . Then there’s the incomparable Elon Musk, who has turned the search for a more efficient government into an experience for the ages.

My view is that the four years where Trump was out of power made him better prepared to use that power effectively when he regained it.

This is the president he wanted to be.

I don't know if we'll ever get a good account of Trump's four years out of power, except to recognize that he was forced to fight political battles throughout that period, and unaccountably, he won every one that mattered. Something more than luck had to be involved. That which didn't kill him made him stronger.

Trump's Achievement

Thers's been little commentary anywhere on Trump's remarkable victories in both the House and Senate over the past week, culminating in Schumer's abject reversal on the continuing resolution, with nine Democrats and an Independent voting in favor of cloture and one Democrat and one Independent even voting in favor of the underlying CR. But Real Clear Politics had nothing on the story this morning, notwithstanding Schumer's reversal on the bill and cloture took place Thursday, which made the eventual outcome clear.

RCP's lead story, unbelievably, was Byron York on A reminder that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate from two days earlier. And I noted yesterday that Politico had characterized the White House strategy for the CR as "over-confidence bordering on arrogance". Nobody saw this coming, and it looks as though almost nobody, despite two days notice, had begun to draft any sort of reaction. It isn't just legacy media that's lazy and complacent.

Exactly what did Trump accomplish?

Tensions between prominent Democrat leaders grew Friday, as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebuked Senate Leader Chuck Schumer for caving on the Republican continuing resolution (CR). At the same time, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to comment on his future as a leader.

The striking remarks by Pelosi (D-CA) and the lack of response by Jeffries (D-NY) speak volumes about how disappointed they are with Schumer's actions. They also indicate that, like Schumer (D-NY) initially, they are strongly advocating for a government shutdown.

"America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People," Pelosi said in a statement.

The presumption is that, by contrast, Schumer did "buy into this false choice." It's also a shot at Schumer, implying that women in Congress are the true leaders on this matter.

Look at the difference between now and the last confrontation over a government shutdown in 2018-19:

The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump's demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall. In December 2018, the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without wall funding, and the bill appeared likely to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Trump. After Trump faced heavy criticism from some right-wing media outlets and pundits for appearing to back down on his campaign promise to "build the wall", he announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. As a result, the House passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster.

This led to an Oval Office meeting with Pelosi and Schumer on December 11:

For 17 awkward and tense minutes in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Donald Trump and his Democratic adversaries — Pelosi, the expected incoming House speaker, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader — clashed in spectacular fashion, with the cameras rolling and shocked reporters watching. White House aides who had given Trump concise talking points were equally blindsided.

In the end, Trump handed Democrats what they consider a massive gift: a direct and unqualified admission — on live TV, no less — that he will be responsible for a government shutdown.

. . . The confrontation spoke volumes about the new power dynamics in Washington that come with the arrival of a House Democratic majority in January.

All three leaders — Trump, Pelosi and Schumer — looked uncomfortable at times during the exchange. Schumer and Pelosi frequently looked straight ahead, not making eye contact with the president as they disputed him. Vice President Mike Pence didn’t speak at all.

. . . Responding to Pelosi’s calls to end the open-press portion of the meeting, Trump hit back with a thinly veiled swipe at the leadership tumult within her caucus.

“I also know that Nancy is in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now, and I understand that,” Trump said.

That set off Pelosi.

“Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory,” she said.

In his 2025 comeback, Trump has completely reversed the dynamic of the 2018 Oval Office meeting, dividing the Pelosi-Schumer united front and throwing Schumer's leadership position into question -- and although Pelosi is officially retired from leadership, the 2025 outcome is a blow to her remaining prestige. And in the 2025 confrontation, Schumer implicitly acknowledged that the Democrats would be responsible for a shutdown.

It's hard to avoid thinking that in his time out of office, Trump rethought this confrontation and recognized that a key resource was available to him in 2018 that he didn't use. As the Wikipedia link above puts it,

The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal departments or agencies from conducting non-essential operations without appropriations legislation in place. As a result, nine executive departments with around 800,000 employees had to shut down partially or in full, affecting about one-fourth of government activities and causing employees to be furloughed or required to work without being paid.

But the president is the one who determines what government operations are non-essential. Thus Trump had precisely the same resource available to him in 2018 as he had in 2025 -- if Schumer and Pelosi shut down the government then, the potential outcome could have been precisely what Trump threatened in 2025. You want to shut down the government? Go ahead, make my day!

Faced with a similar tactical situation, Trump appears to have had the opportunity to re-think the strengths and weaknesses of both sides and played the game with a completely different outcome -- and likely ended the careers of both Schumer and Pelosi.

So, Is Trump Trolling Canada?

President Trump: Canada can keep their national anthem when they become the 51st state pic.twitter.com/85aVHsRQ9v

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 13, 2025

I tend to stay away from Victor Davis Hanson; I find his views just a little too pre-digested and several days behind what's actually going on, but the YouTube post below gives me a basis on which to make a different point:

At 4:29. he says,

We don't want Canada as a 51st state, and Trump knows that, and The Art of the Deal, trolling style, he knows that. Canada is a very left-wing country, socialized medicine, state-run industries. Its GDP is not as great as similar-size California, which also has 40 million people, but its per capita income average is about like Mississippi. I don't think it's as large as Mississippi's per capita income. But more importantly, if it was a state, if the whole country was a state, it would get two left-wing Senators and probably 50 left-wing House of Representatives.

But the headline of the same post is "THERE IS NO QUESTION CANADA IS DONE". Is this hyperbole? Do we really want a failed state on our northern border? Prof Hanson does offer a solution, assuming Canada is in fact a basket case, which is basically to rebuild its shipbuilding industry and reduce its tariffs on US goods. But will that really turn the country around? I haven't had the chance to ask him directly, but my experience of professors is that he won't have a good answer if I do.

Let's start with the professor's reading of Trump. His view of whether Trump actually wants Canada is a definite no. But the business-school analysis of Trump's style that I've been quoting for much of the past week points out that Trump relies heavily on ambiguity and uncertainty, delivered with bravado. Yesterday I linked a Politico piece that suggested the White House's position on the continuing resolution smacked of "over-confidence bordering on arrogance", but so far, it looks as though the White House's take has been absolutely spot on.

And let's recognize that in the week or so leading up to tonight's CR deadline, it looks as though the Democrats worked from the assumption that Johnson wouldn't be able to get enough Republicans in line to form a majority for the CR, the whole project would die in the House, and Schumer wouldn't have the dilemma he now faces. In this case, Trump's bravado helped to set up a situation where his opposition didn't take him seriously enough to work out a Plan B, and all of a sudden Trump's success came as a big surprise.

So I think it's dangerous to discount statements on how Canada can keep its national anthem when it becomes a state as just trolling. They're a recognized, and in fact highly successful, part of Trump's negotiating style.

But let's move to Prof Hanson's list of the specific disadvantages to Trump and the US if Canada should become a single state. It's a very liberal, even heavily socialized, country, and it would bring in two left-wing senators and maybe 50 left-wing House members. Canadians would be expecting their single-payer health plan to continue, and likely many other programs that would be unique to Canada, highly expensive, and a sudden new burden to the US federal budget.

On top of that, with only a few exceptions, the states that have entered the US after the 13 colonies have come in as basically unorganized frontier areas without pre-existing constitutions or legal systems, and their populations effectively grew de novo. The biggest exception up to now is Hawaii, which, however, became a US territory in 1900 as a result of US and European businessmen overthrowing the monarchy with the intent of fostering a US-style business environment -- and Hawaii only became a state after 60 years of US territorial administration.

It's worth noting that two US territories, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, became part of the US, but not states, at the same time as Hawaii and had existing constitutional and legal systems under Spain. The Philippines elected to become entirely independent, while Puerto Rico so far has not chosen to become a state. Again, the circumstances for Canada would have to be completely different.

How Canada would become a state would be via some procedure, and under specific circumstances, that nobody can easily predict right now, but would be completely unique. It would certainly be an obstacle that a certain amount of anti-Americanism has been part of the Canadian character, and as Prof Hanson suggests, Liberal politicians are using Trump's current bravado, taken as trolling, to inflame such passions in the runup to the coming election.

But if Trump is Trump -- or, if the necessary circumstances arise after he leaves office, but his successors continue with a Trumpian strategy -- the circumstances that would lead to Canada's admission to the Union would be those under which Canada would have few or no other options, just like the circumstances facing Sen Schumer over the CR. Such circumstances might involve collapse of the Canadian economy over tariff-related issues, which Prime Minister Trudeau has recently predicted.

They might involve a territorial incursion over some Arctic-related dispute, giving Canada no option but to allow the US military full rein to conduct its national defense under NATO Article 5. They might involve national bankruptcy over some issue other than tariffs, with the US electing to guarantee the Canadian national debt in return for statehood. In any such case, with a Trumpian conducting negotiations, Canada would simply have to have no other reasonable option.

But that would be the point -- it would be a situation where the US held the cards, and the US would be in a position to walk away if Canada didn't take the deal. On one hand, there are in fact plenty of conservative Canadians -- the various protests by truckers, religious people, and others during the COVID lockdowns give an indication of what an actual Canadian electorate working under US rules might look like. And if Canada had no other options, negotiations for entry into the Union could certainly include modifications or discontinuance of socialist policies and programs.

But then there's Hanson's other point -- why is Canada's per capita income little different from Mississippi's? Wouldn't policies oriented toward greater middle-class prosperity work to Canada's benefit? I wouldn't rule out the strength of this argument, either.

Given what we've been learning about Trump, I don't think he's trolling at all.

Schumer Shutdown?

For much of the past week, I've been looking at a business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style as it's manifested in both his business and political careers, looking mainly at the issue of Canadian tariffs. But all of a sudden, we're getting a new case study, the House's passage of a continuing resolution, which needed only a simple majority, but now it's moved to the Senate, which needs a 60-vote supermajority to pass a procedural vote.

Trump had a bare majority of Republicans in the House, which he was able to control for the vote. But while he has 53 Republicans in the Senate, he doesn't have the 60-vote supermajority he needs.

Following Tuesday night’s vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the lower chamber of Congress would recess until March 24, leaving Schumer with the option of accepting the House bill and keeping the federal lights on over the objection of progressive activists, or rejecting it and putting the nation’s capital on course for the 11th partial government shutdown since 1980.

In a statement after the lower chamber passed the funding bill, Johnson said it was “decision time for Senate Democrats: Cast a vote to keep the government open or be responsible for shutting it down.”

While Trump has so far left almost all the public statements on the negotiation to Speaker Johnson, the circumstances as they've developed have Trump's fingerprints all over them. First, as we've seen, Trump's preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options. The House passed the continuing resolution and then promptly adjourned, with the members going home. Per The Hill,

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) sent the House home after the chamber passed the GOP six-month CR mostly along party lines on Tuesday. The House isn’t slated to be back until March 24, leaving Senate Democrats few options beyond eating the GOP’s stopgap measure or allowing the government to shut down.

Neither is palatable to them.

With the shutdown deadline Friday midnight, there's no practical opportunity to call the House back to try to modify the continuing resolution, so the Democrats have only two choices, keep the government open under its terms or shut it down. At the New York Post link above,

Before the Senate convened for Wednesday business, Democrats huddled during a caucus lunch to plot the next steps forward.

. . . “I’ve gone back and forth on this thing three times because it is two horrible choices,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) admitted to reporters before the lunch.

“If you shut down the government, the president is the person who decides what is essential,” Hickenlooper explained. “He decides what part of the government stays open, so you are actually giving him even more power.”

As the business-school analysis points out, "the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable 'walk‐away' option (Trump 2016c)." In this case, as the Democrats acknowledge, Trump wins with either outcome, but he also has another benefit that he's known for exercising:

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).

According to The Hill at the link,

What also spooks members is the unknown of what comes after a shutdown starts. Trump is well known for being unpredictable, and how he handles a shutdown is giving Democrats heartburn.

A shutdown would put the Office of Management and Budget in charge of determining what personnel are considered essential and nonessential during its course. Senate Republicans could also hypothetically force vote after vote to reopen the government, giving them further headaches in the process.

“It’s the devil that we know against the devil that we don’t know,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

According to Politico,

Senate Democrats haven’t even surrendered yet on a government shutdown — but already White House officials are gloating about making them eat crow, almost taunting them to vote “no.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw down the gauntlet Wednesday, proclaiming that Republicans don’t have the 60 votes needed to keep the government open past Friday. But President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are increasingly confident Schumer will release enough centrists to put up the votes for passage, according to multiple White House officials I spoke to over the past 24 hours.

. . . In some ways, the White House’s posture smacks of over-confidence bordering on arrogance. During most face-offs like this — when an administration needs the votes of the opposition party for must-pass legislation — there’s typically some sort of outreach, even by the president himself.

Not so with Trump. Instead of extending an olive branch this week, the president used his Oval Office bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin to attack Schumer in vicious personal terms, saying he’s “no longer Jewish” and calling him a Palestinian.

And despite the fact that they need eight Senate Democrats to back this measure for passage, the White House hasn’t bothered to contact any so far.

Politico here seems to think this is something new or unusual, but the business-school analysis suggests that Trump is being consistent with strategies he's developed over his multiple careers. What's changed is that Trump now has Republican leadership in the House and Senate that he can work with. As Ed Kilgore put it in The Intelligencer,

Like most observers, I vacillate regularly as to whether House Speaker Mike Johnson is an unexpectedly shrewd legislative tactician or is instead Mr. Magoo, a bumbling backwoods pol who survives strictly by blind luck and subservience to Donald Trump. But as Congress moves this week toward a possible government shutdown, there are fresh signs that Johnson knows what he’s doing — or at least is listening to advisers or executive-branch paymasters who know what they are doing. He’s devising a trap for congressional Democrats that is leaving them irresolute and possibly more powerless than ever.

A big difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is that he no longer has to deal with Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, or Mitch McConnell. We still know very little about ju;st what Trump accomplished even when he was out of office.

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.

Is This The Best Case Against Trump's Ukraine Strategy?

Yesterday I linked to a comment by Michael McFaul, a Stanford Political Science professor, Obama advisor, and US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014. Wikipedia calls him "the architect of the so-called 'Russian reset policy'". He has been both a prestigious supporter and an architect of the Biden Ukraine policy. At Wikipedia,

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, McFaul and Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak headed an expert group called the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which developed an individual sanctions roadmap with plans to tighten sanctions against Russia.

McFaul debated the Russian invasion with John Mearsheimer in May 2022. McFaul has taken a position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine identifying Putin as a culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine against the position of Mearsheimer that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO.

While this post isn't about Mearsheimer, it's worth pointing out that Mearsheimer's views, which seemed even somewhat bizarre against the initial optimism over the war, have aged very well over the past few years. McFaul, on tne other hand, has continued to make the case for the foreign policy establishment, most recently at The Atlantic:

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

. . . Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort.

I'm frankly puzzled that he claims NATO expansion was "announced in 2002 and completed in 2004". NATO expansion began with the reunification of Germany in 1990, with the former DDR gaining NATO membership via the existing BRD membership, an expansion that was recognized and negotiated at the time. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004, which is apparently the "NATO expansion" McFaul feels was announced and completed -- but then Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, while Montenegro joined in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

For fairness, we'll leave out the accessions of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, after the start of the Ukraine war. But It's hard to avoid the impression that McFaul is somehow trying to minimize the fact of NATO expansion over more than three decades. I've already noted here that NATO apparently ceased to become a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991 and had effectively stopped exporting world revolution well before then. So why was NATO expanding? Prof Mearsheimer made this point in 2022:

Given the sad state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

So as far as I can read McFaul's argument in The Atlantic, he's trying to give the impression that NATO expansion has been minimal, it just took place over a two-year period, but Putin isn't concerned about that anyhow, he's just an enemy of democracy or something. Frankly, I think Mearsheimer has the stronger argument. McFaul stresses throughout that Putin's opposition to democracy is at the root of his own expansionism:

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule.

. . . In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

. . . Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world.

. . . After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world.

. . . Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

. . . After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe.

. . . The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

I think it's just as possible to argue that the "liberal West" is hardly a bastion of traditional democratic ideals -- in Canada, an unpopular prime minister "resigned" in a lengthy process by which he was replaced with a doctrinaire Eurocrat who never won an actual election. In NATO member Romania, following annulment of a 2024 wlection, the most popular candidate, a conservative, was banned from participating in the May rerun. In the US 2024 presidential election, the Democrat incumbent candidate was forced to withdraw via an extraconstitutional process and replaced with the vice president, who was never nominated as a candidate by any existing procedure.

Ukraine itself, of course, has indefinitely delayed its own elections. It's hardly a model for liberal democracy; in the very best case, it's simply a mirror image of a corrupt Russian oligarchy.

McFaul wants to repeat the losing 2016 and 2024 Democrat strategies by somehow claiming Trump is "undemocratic" and is doing Putin's bidding. But in the process, he seems to feel he can bypass any strategic reason for continuing the Ukraine stalemate. In effect, he's falling back on the idea that we should continue the war because Trump wants to end it, which is absurd.

But apparently this is the strongest case a member of the foreign policy establishment can make for continuing the war -- not doing it is a "threat to our democracy".

"They Have All The Cards"

Trump talked about who has the cards again on Friday:

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump urged Ukraine to "get on the ball and get a job done" as he expressed frustration over Kyiv's position over peace talks, saying he found it "more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine."

. . . "As you know, we're meeting in Saudi Arabia on, sometime next week, early, and we're talking - what I find that in terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards," Trump said.

When asked whether he believes Putin when the Russian leader says he wants peace, Trump responded, "Yeah... I believe him."

"I think he wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he's hitting them harder than he's been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now," Trump said.

He referred again to Ukraine, saying "They don’t have the cards", the same thing he said to Zelensky a week earlier, while he also said in February

he believes Russia has "the cards" in any peace talks to end the war in Ukraine because Russia has "taken a lot of territory".

On the other hand,

U.S. President Donald Trump is "giving away his cards" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

McFaul was an Obama advisor from 2008 to 2011 and Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 20l4. He has been generally aligned with Democrat establishment policy on Ukraine, and it isn't entirely clear what cards he thinks Trump holds. (Nor is it clear why McFaul resigned as ambassador in February 2014, concurrent with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.)

But this brings me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style, part of which I linked yesterday:

Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent” (Trump 2009b).

This advice reflects Trump’s belief that he is a keen interpersonal observer, unusually effective in assessing the power resources of his counterparts (Ferguson 2018). He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities. “Know thy adversary” may be a well‐accepted bargaining principle (e.g., Raiffa 1982), but Trump’s emphasis on this aspect of negotiation preparation is notable: “You’ve got to know what the other side wants and where they’re coming from,” he wrote in Why We Want You to Be Rich (Trump and Kiyosaki 2011: 148). And, Trump advised his earlier television audience regarding potential negotiation interlocutors, “when they’re on the other side of the table, that’s what they are – they are an opponent” (Trump 2009b, emphasis added). Competition is central to Trump’s conception of the negotiation process.

. . . Understanding one’s counterpart’s fundamental “interests” as opposed to their publicly stated “positions” in order to negotiate a deal based on achievement of mutual gains (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello 2000) is critical to cooperative negotiation approaches (e.g., integrative, interest‐based, principled, mutual‐gains). But Trump’s orientation is distinctly more coercive: “Learn your adversary’s strengths and weaknesses: Find out who your adversaries are, what resources they have, who is backing them, how much they want, why they want it, how much they will settle for, and how much they will pay or insist on receiving” (Trump 2006: 62). Trump does not empathize with his opponents; he sizes them up.

I think we can speculate on what Trump must see in Putin's position: he continues to occupy the parts of Ukraine that he seized in 2014, especially Crimea. He now occupies additional parts of eastern Ukraine, and the battle lines there are in stalemate. Ukraine has no prospect of regaining this territory, which the failed counteroffensives of 2023 demonstrated. These are several key cards.

Ukraine's best prospects are in continuing the stalemated war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, with compensatory incursions into neighboring Russia-aligned areas like Kursk, hoping this may somehow eventually force Putin to change his mind. However, the US is now unwilling to provide indefinite continuing support for the meat grinder or additional incursions and drone attacks into Russia, withdrawing targeting intellgence and curtailing weapons aid.

This is because Putin holds an additional card: he himself appears to be capable of feeding the meat grinder indefinitely, or at least for longer than the US is willing. However, there are some constraints: his initial objective in 2022 was to seize Kyiv quickly and take over the whole country, something he's unlikely to accomplish now under nearly any circumstance. Thus the cost-benefit of the meat grinder is marginal if all it will do is continue the current standoff.

What, in Trump's view, does he think Putin will settle for? Trump seems to think Putin is sending messages that if he can get a recognition that the territory Russia currently holds in Ukraine is effectively Russian, plus maybe more to sweeten the deal, the US will force Ukraine to stop the meat grinder and the incursions and drone attacks. Both countries then get to return to other business without the meat grinder.

Nevertheless, Putin's cards still include the territory he has, plus the ability to continue the meat grinder. Trump fully recognizes those are powerful cards -- as he put it, "I think probably anybody in that position would be [hitting them harder] right now". So he's teasing other possibilities:

President Trump suggested that Ukraine might not be able to survive against Russia even if the US forged ahead with full-blown support for its fight.

Trump’s remarks came while defending his decision to draw down support to Ukraine in the face of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s and others’ concerns that Europe lacks the might to prop up Kyiv without the US.

“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“We have some weaknesses with Russia,” Trump added. “It takes two. Look, it was not going to happen — that war and it happened. So now we’re stuck with this mess.”

As Trump currently sees it, Zelensky's wish, supported by the EU, to continue the meat grinder indefinitely in the hope that maybe Ukraine can outlast Putin is unrealistic, and Trump is now trying to convince them that there's a bigger downside: the meat grinder won't go on indefinitely, but Putin will last it out longer even if the US continues to support it -- and the outcome down the road could well be worse.

But, as former Ambassador McFaul put it, what cards does Trump have to give away so unwisely? As far as I can see, it's little more than maintaining an appearance that he's willing to support the meat grinder a little longer. But that's just another way of saying do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. Those aren't cards, that's insanity.