Sometimes it's useful and I think healthy to imagine trying to explain the news of 2025 to the you of 2015.

Donald Trump is doing everything he can to ensure the Conservative Party will lose today’s election in Canada. [image or embed]

— Republicans Against Trumpism (@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 7:44 AM

It's really hard to overstate how hugely favored conservatives were up until two months ago. Here's the graph of Canadian polling between March 2023 and March 2025. (Reminder: blue is conservative.) Those are months and months of 20+ point leads for Tories. [image or embed]

— Taniel (@taniel.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 7:21 PM

Paul Krugman has a good take on the larger ramifications.

If Trump had merely made economic demands on our northern neighbor, Canada might have acquiesced, although it’s not clear what concessions it could have made. But by repeatedly insisting that Canada must become the 51^st state, he made any hint of Trumpiness toxic in Canadian politics. Hence the stunning defeat for Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader (who lost his own seat in Parliament.)

...

Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.

But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.

And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them. Bloomberg reports that

President Xi Jinping’s diplomats are fanning out across the world with a clear message for countries cutting deals with Donald Trump: The US is a bully that can’t be trusted.

Unfortunately, they’re right. And Trump’s repeated insistence that the Chinese are negotiating with him, when they say they aren’t, comes across as pathetic.