How thrilled am I to have President-elect Donald J. Trump going back to the Oval Office? Extremely, and I bet every legitimate political reporter is. Sadly, as we have discovered over four years of Biden-Harris, legitimate political reporters are few and far between. If you are a legitimate political reporter/analyst/commentator, what you want from any politician, but especially your president, is to be given information and insight that you can analyze, comment, and report on without a super-sized serving of stage management, spin, and regurgitated lies.
Trump’s Tuesday morning press conference from Mar-a-Lago gave us a bunch of information and much to analyze and comment upon. We saw Trump at rest but on point and rarin’ to go. However, the talking points Trump gives up front are never the best part. The best part is when he takes reporters’ questions and answers extemporaneously, off the cuff, and gives the most detailed information and insight into his thinking. You want to really know his agenda or what he is mulling over? It is always articulated there.
After Trump had already spoken for just over an hour, he took questions. For 22 minutes, he waxed eloquently. He had a few minutes of help from Businessman Steve Witkoff, who Trump called his “negotiator” in the Middle East. The rest of the time was all him. Trump discussed J6 and potential pardons, the Panama Canal, Greenland, Russia and Ukraine, and Elon Musk. After all that wealth of information, one reporter decided to challenge Trump about whether he would use military might against Canada.
REPORTER: Are you serious about making Canada the 51st state of the United States[..]. The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada said, ‘Under no circumstances will Canada ever be the 51st state.’ He stated that there is no way it would happen.
TRUMP: It’s all right. Maybe he won’t win, but maybe he will.
This reporter could have taken Kira Davis’ sound advice above and allowed Trump to finish, but he wanted to prove a point, so he inserted another question.
REPORTER: You are considering military force to acquire Panama and Greenland, are you also considering military force to annex and acquire Canada?
Typical activist journalist, assuming Republicans and Trump only want to use military might when there is more than one way to skin a cat. Trump unleashed his sharp knowledge and wit on this reporter, and he, along with the American and the Canadian people, learned some things.
TRUMP: No. Economic force. Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like. And it would also be much better for national security. Don’t forget, we basically protect Canada. But here’s the problem with Canada: So many friends up there, I love the Canadian people, they’re great. But, we’re spending hundreds of billions a year to protect it. We’re spending hundreds of billions a year to take care of Canada. We lose in trade deficits, we’re losing massive… we don’t need their cars. You know, they make 20 percent of our cars. We don’t need that, I’d rather make them in Detroit. We don’t need the cars. We don’t need their lumber. We have massive fields of lumber, we don’t need their lumber. We have to unrestrict them, because stupid people put restrictions on, but I can do that with an executive order. We don’t need anything they have. We don’t need their dairy products, we have more than they have. We don’t need anything. So why are we losing 200 billion dollars a year and more to protect Canada?
This makes sense. Not just common sense but economic sense. And Trump is right: Certain states (looking at you, California) could be exploiting lumber and dairy products if they weren’t so busy destroying the lumber through their lack of forest clearing and the resultant wildfires, and destroying the farmers’ ability to produce dairy products because of “climate change.”
Trump then referenced the soon-to-be-retired Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s visit to Mar-a-Lago and made it clear that the economic relationship with Canada is more to their advantage than it is to ours.
And I said that to, as I called him Governor Trudeau, I said, listen what would happen if we didn’t subsidize you, if we didn’t.. because we give them a lot of money. We help them, as an example, we’re buying icebreakers. And Canada wants to join us in the buying of icebreakers. I said, you know, we don’t really want to have a partner in the buying of icebreakers. We don’t need a partner.
It was unclear whether the reporter said something about Canada having a right or that Trump was right. But Trump being the master deal maker that he is, he clearly explained what was at stake and what he planned to do for America…first.
No, no right. Nope. No right. Here’s what we have: We have a right now to help them with their financial difficulties, because we owe 36 trillion dollars too. We’re going to start knocking it out pretty fast, but we’re going to be able to do it because of energy and other things too.
The reporter just couldn’t keep it quiet and interrupted, but Trump deepened his point, breaking it down for him like he was a three-year-old.
No, no, no. No right. No no, no right. But why are we supporting a country 200 billion-plus a year, our military is at their disposal, all of these other things. They should be a state.
That’s what I told Trudeau when he came down. I said, what would happen if we didn’t do it? He said, “Canada would dissolve, Canada wouldn’t be able to function.” If we didn’t take their 20 percent of our car market. You know we… again, they send us hundreds of thousand of cars. They make a lot of money with that. They send us a lot of other things we don’t need.
We don’t need their cars, and we don’t need the other products. We don’t need their milk. We got a lot of milk. We got a lot of everything. And we don’t need any of it. So, I said to him, “Well, why are we doing it?” He said, “I don’t really know.” He was unable to answer the question.
Boom. If anything illustrates that Trudeau was a useless head of state, his inability to answer this basic question does. Trump, in his economic brilliance, was not lacking in this regard.
But I can answer it: We’re doing it because of habit. And we’re doing it because we like our neighbors, and we’ve been good neighbors. But we can’t do it forever and it’s a tremendous amount of money. And, why should we have a 200 billion dollar deficit and add on to that many many other things that we give them in terms of subsidy. And I said, that’s okay to have if you’re a state. But if you’re another country, we don’t want to have it. We’re not going to have it with the European Union either. The European Union, we have a trade deficit of 350 billion dollars. They don’t take our cars. They don’t take our farm product. They don’t take anything. And, so, we’re not going to have it with them either.
This is why Americans trusted another Trump presidency instead of more of the same (and worse) with a Kamala Harris presidency. Being able to provide actual answers, not to mention credible ones, about our economic prospects and future is one major reason. Trump made clear why we need to take these economic steps in order to not only deal with the country’s 36 trillion dollar deficit, but to maintain a strong nation for our children.
Here’s the full, unscripted moment. Three minutes and 30 seconds worth. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would have melted down after a minute, if they were even able to make it that far.
Screw Canada
Agree