Vibes Check

Since we’re in a faster, faster disaster timeline, Cheryl Rofer is creating a weekly post about “what happened”. She believes that vibes shifted slightly last week. I also thought they did, too, certainly for Trump. He’s looking weaker, and Canada and Mexico helped.

It’s interesting to compare the quite different strategies taken by Canada and Mexico. Canada is mad, and people like Charlie Angus are basically on a war footing:

Today is the final day of the Liberal leadership election in Canada. Polls closed at 3 ET. Mark Carney, considered a consensus “centrist” candidate, is favored to win. Justin Trudeau is out with a very tough message about Tory leader Pierre Poilievre, asking why he’s the only party leader in Canada who won’t get a security clearance to review intelligence about foreign election interference. Christine Amanpour’s interview of Foreign Minister Melanie Joly has over 5 million views — it’s a very frank assessment of the US/Canada relationship from a rising star in the Liberal Party. The Liberals have gained a huge amount of political ground by fighting Trump and pointing out the bare fact that the Tories are MAGA-curious.

In sharp contrast to the way that Canada has responded to Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs — they basically have taken an “all or nothing” approach — Mexico is “ducking and weaving.” President Claudia Sheinbaum again was able to talk Trump off the ledge in a phone call, and the result is that the Mexican government believes that 90% of goods exported to the US will avoid tariffs — this week. This is from Mexico News Daily columnist Sara DeVries, a US expat living in Veracruz (here’s her Substack).

In both his interactions with Mexico and Canada, Trump’s table pounding, whining and threats got him nowhere. The thumbnail for this post is the massive rally in Zócalo, the main square in Mexico City. It was going to be a rally to announce Mexican retaliation. Instead, Claudia has turned it into a combination celebration rally for avoiding tariffs, and a time to discuss judicial reform, a key Morena initiative. Her popularity is record high. Trump has nothing but good things to say about her calls, which has to be considered weak by his misogynistic supporters.

Finally, tariffs are going over like a fart in church in the markets:

Josh Marshall makes the point that political power is unitary. You don’t gain it in foreign policy and lose it in domestic policy. My biggest “vibe check” was Trump’s last press conference of the week. I don’t even remember what it was about (I looked it up, it was some crypto wank and a strategic Bitcoin reserve). The DC press is no longer hanging on every word that Trump utters about tariffs because the story has jelled: Canada’s going to keep retaliating, and Mexico is going to get away with basically zero damage by doing something or other every so often.

What’s left to report on is the pain: the pain of folks who are getting a 25% increase in their electric rates, farmers who are getting the double whammy of Chinese retaliatory tariffs and tariffs on potash, a key fertilizer component. And let’s be real, nobody in the US likes to sacrifice, Trumpers were the biggest whiners about any sacrifice during COVID, and there’s a limit to the amount of spin that they can put on bad economic results.