Well, let's continue the conversation as our next guest has written and spoken out against the Trump tariffs. For over ten years, Steven Smith ran Republican campaigns and war rooms, including those for George W. Bush and John McCain's presidential bids. He has since left the Republican Party and has founded a sub stack called The Warning with Steve Schmidt. Steve Smith, thank you for joining us.
My pleasure, happy to be with you.
So as I said, you have written and essentially come to Canada's defense by criticizing Trump's languaging around making this country the fifty first state. Why did you decide to do that?
It's a moral outrage and every American should feel outraged by it. Canada is a charter member of the nations that rebuilt the world from the ashes. Canadian boys landed on Juno Beach next to American and Britain and French and Poles and Dutch and all of the members of the United Nations that together came to a redwood grove in Mere Woods outside of San Francisco to remember the life of Franklin Roosevelt, and the plaque there commemorates in his life a behalf of the United Nations that he
founded as an apostle of peace. Roosevelt and Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, late at night in the nineteen forty four nineteen forty five timeframe, are imagining the world to be, and Roosevelt says to him that he hopes it will endure for as long as everybody who is alive on the day the war is one is still alive.
The youngest of those people are eighty years old. Donald Trump is smashing is the Atlantic Charter, is the agreements in Quebec, in Tehran and Yalta that laid the foundation for the greatest period of prosperity in world history. And as an American, one of the great blessings we have is the great nation to our north that we are intertwined with by family, connection, by blood, connection by sacrifice.
And Canada, the oldest bilingual democracy in the world, the second largest land mass in the world, is a great force for good. And America is blessed to share the longest undefended boundary in world history with Canada. And the American people and American presidents all throughout our history have recognized this relationship and its dignity, and there are a lot of American to ours out raged as Canadians are about the attack upon it.
Why do you think Donald Trump is so obsessed with Canada and this languaging of aneking our country is Is there actually something he wants out of Canada or is this political distraction for what's going on in the United States.
I think Donald Trump's threat should be taken very seriously. He waited for two hours on a phone for Vladimir Putin to pick up. I can't explain to you what his fetish is, what it may be. I just know that Donald Trump admires every strong man in autocrat It seems to have fantasies that day together will divide up
the world. That he's some sort of Caesar, a new king, that Elon Musk is his duke, his prime minister, freed to roam the planet, spending hundreds of millions of dollars here and there to destabilize democracy, while delivering Hitler salutes that he says are not Hitler salutes, and so on and so forth. The reality is that Donald Trump is a predator who sees riches in Canada, does not see our shared values and ideals, He sees things. He looks at the ground, he sees gold, and he says, that's
what makes us rich. Not our ideals, not our values, not what Thomas Payne talked about. A quality that is celestially priced and priced high, indeed, which is freedom. Donald Trump doesn't understand the concept, doesn't appreciate it. When you talk about pluralism, you talk about democracy, when you talk about equality, he thinks those are weak and wishy, washy words. He's a man who looks at Vladimir Putin and he
sees strength, and he believes that might makes right. And he's a So he looks at Canada and he says, what can I take from our friend? Because he perceives Canada as weak and doesn't see the hidden beneath. The benign nature of the Canadian people is a great strength, and that strength is bound by the commitment to maintain freedom.
Now you say, in fact, that Canada needs to be a rattlesnake and strike back against Trump. What do you mean by that? What should Canada be doing right now?
Well, the rattlesnake is a great animal to use as a metaphor. The best way to avoid a snake bite is don't pick up the snake. This is a trillion dollar trading relationship. And if Canada is to be pushed into a recession by Donald Trump's madness, that what Canada needs to do is push America into recession. That the politician who seems most to understand Donald Trump in Canada is Premier Doug Ford, who appreciates that when a bully puts a finger in your chest, you break it. You
don't take a step backwards. And if it comes to it, the American people need to have the lights turned out on them by the Premiere of Ontario to get their attention that Donald Trump's economic war, and it is an economic war, will not be cost free for Americans, and so Donald Trump has to be stopped. And what stops Donald Trump is a quick cratering of the economy by people escalating and not being pushed around, not being jerked around, whim from erratic whim day to day, while forty million
people are made to feel anxious unsafe. Our democracies are bound together by what Roosevelt called the four freedoms freedom of speech, freedom of faith and religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. And Donald Trump is using fear as a weapon, and he's trying to destabilize the economy, to weaken Canada politically. And what I would say is to Canadians, do not spend a dollar in the United States. Do not go on vacation in the United States. It's
a twenty billion dollar part of the American economy. Take it away. What I say to Americans who are friends of Canada, go to Canada on vacation this summer, go skiing Canada this winter. Stand by Canada as Canada is under assault, an attack by an American president who seeks to obliterate what generations of Americans and Canadians built together, which is a for human dignity across a vast frontier. And so the answer to all of this is no,
thank you. We have to hold firm and we have to make clear that Donald Trump's White House understands both the American side of the border and the Canadian side of the border will not tolerate this insanity.
Steve Smith, I appreciate the time, thank you for the words. This evening
My pleasure