Trump Embarrassed as Rupert Murdoch Calls Canada Trade War “Dumbest” in History

0:00Michael Popok:Do you know that there's a case that's literally called Trump versus Murdoch? And Rupert Murdoch has now gotten his revenge, as his Wall Street Journal just declared in an editorial opinion page article this morning that Donald Trump's war with Canada, his shooting himself in the foot, if not in other regions of his body, is the dumbest trade war revisited. And this is the revenge of Rupert Murdoch and his papers. He's winning the case in Florida in which Donald Trump sued Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal because they published articles about the now confirmed Epstein birthday book that had Donald Trump's submission pasted into it.

0:47Michael Popok:some bawdy pornographic outline of a woman 30 years ago to Epstein on his 50th birthday? Their win in that case, Judge Gales in Miami Southern District of Florida about to dismiss it, I'm sure with prejudice as being not defamatory. Putting that aside for a minute, you now have the trade war. This will go down in the annals of history as the dumbest, most deleterious, most destructive trade war in history created because Donald Trump wants to embarrass the Canadians. We are so intertwined as an economy that it is not being hyperbolic to say that Canada fuels the American economy without the fuel line between Canada and the United States.

1:39Michael Popok:I mean, literally the fuel line, whether it's electric power grid, hydroelectric power, coal, raw materials, rare earth minerals, steel, things that we need from the north. They literally, the Canadians, are the reason that we're able to reasonably cheaply run our own economy and create our own gross domestic product. No two ways about it. Let me read to you here on Legal AF to kick off Monday morning. We're doing the stories that we need to at the intersection of law, politics, and the economy to show. And the political aspect of it is Donald Trump has what the Wall Street Journal calls frigid poll numbers.

2:27Michael Popok:I think that's being kind. And he was hoping that the Canadians would give him a bailout, right? So he could be able to brag about, oh, they want to be the 51st state and all this other stuff to undermine their national pride. How's that working? Canada's Mark Carney prime minister strong. Donald Trump, feeble, weak, lashing out at people he should be moving to embrace. There is no trade deficit between the U.S. and Canada. Let me repeat that. There is no trade deficit. When you add in the service economy, we provide more service exports to Canada. They import our services, financial services, law firms, consulting firms, AI firms, technology firms, crypto firms, you name it.

3:16Michael Popok:We are net ahead. It's almost equal. Here's what the Wall Street Journal, no, well, here's what Rupert Murdoch says out loud about Donald Trump today. And if you don't think that voters for Donald Trump read the Wall Street Journal, then you don't understand the financial markets and people who invest. This is important. This is how they end the article, the opinion of the editorial board. Mr. Trump's latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials, and manufacturing components. Republicans are already getting pounded on the campaign trail over his tariffs and inflation.

3:55Michael Popok:One reason for Mr. Trump's frigid approval rating is that voters believe Mr. Trump is waging blunderbuss wars without a strategy. And on trade, they are right. Listen, I know somebody who's one degree separated from Steve Whitcoff, the special envoy to Iran, and one of Donald Trump's closest advisors and cryptocurrency partner. And this mutual friend said to Steve Whitcoff, so what's the plan? What's the plan for Iran? And he literally looked at his watch and said, it's Tuesday. There is no plan. The plan is it's Tuesday. What does that tell you? And you have the same problem on the economic side because you have lowlights and featherweights running the economic program for Donald Trump led by Donald Trump, who effectively operates as his own trade representative.

4:48Michael Popok:Let me continue from the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper. on his editorial opinions under the dumbest trade war revisited. Why it's revisited is because they wrote six months ago, eight months ago, about Donald Trump going after Mexico and Canada and finding that to be ridiculous. The best thing the Wall Street Journal said could ever have happened to Donald Trump, Donald Trump doesn't see it that way, is that the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs because it would give him some glimmer of hope of a successful economy. Well, we know that hasn't happened because Trump has tried to issue new tariffs.

5:28Michael Popok:Here's what the opinion piece says. To justify his new tariffs, Mr. Trump said Canada discriminated against the U.S. by retaliating against his national security tariffs on autos. He also claimed that Canada provinces had restricted sales of U.S. alcoholic beverages in response to his emergency tariffs last year. Yet U.S. distillers, the ones that make the alcohol, begged Mr. Trump to hold off on his new Section 338 tariffs. They know the longer Canada locks out American booze, the tougher it will be to regain market share in the future. And then in terms of who's winning the political war, it's Carney.

6:07Michael Popok:Not by a little, by a lot. I said in a recent hot take that almost 70 % of Canadians have rallied around Carney because it's almost like time of war. It's a time of tariff war. They are uniting as a country. They were pretty united to begin with, but they are uniting as a country to fight off a common enemy of the United States. Almost 70 percent support Mark Carney against Donald Trump in the tariff war. Somebody wrote in one of my messages that they're Canadian. They've seen polling that says the people that live in Quebec, 85 percent support Mark Carney in this fight. Here's what the Wall Street Journal continues to say.

6:46Michael Popok:Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatened to retaliate dollar for dollar starting September 8. Both sides could still walk back from the ledge, though Mr. Trump's escalation could make this harder for Mr. Carney politically since Canadians don't like being bullied by Washington. Well, that is an understatement. Here's how they kicked off the opinion piece. President Trump took exception last year when we called his tariffs against Canada and Mexico the dumbest trade war in history. It got dumber this weekend as Mr. Trump escalated with another round of border taxes on Canadian imports a mere 10 weeks before the midterm elections.

7:27Michael Popok:Let's do back to back. Let's do Carney versus Trump. Play Carney. Play Prime Minister Carney. Canada will match Washington's new tariffs dollar for dollar in order to protect Canadian workers, farmers, families and businesses. In recent days, the United States proposed new terms that run economic, unfair and undermine the net benefits for Canada and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much and they offered too little. And here's the Trump side.

8:30that we will. Yeah. These are incredible headlines that just came out over the last 24 hours. It's probably easier if I show them to you.

8:41Michael Popok:This matters. We can't, I'm going to state the obvious. We cannot operate our economy as efficiently as we've had in the numbers that we've been able to generate without Canadian support. And the sooner we recognize that, And the sooner some economic negotiator representing the United States recognizes that, the better. We can't go it alone. As the ambassador to the United States from Canada recently said, it may be America first, but it can't be America only. I mean, that's not, we generate more services and goods than we as Americans can consume. We need markets outside of America. The easiest two because of borders, transportation, communications, a common history, Mexico and Canada.

9:40Michael Popok:Why are we at war with them? It's bad enough we're at a real war with Iran. Why are we at war with our allies about economics? Other than to feed Donald Trump's ego. What's going to happen? Whatever is going to happen, whether Mark Carney, and this is going to be on his timetable, whether Prime Minister Carney decides to bail out Donald Trump with a deal before the midterms of the United States is going to be up to Mark Carney. If I were him, I would wait. I would wait until Donald Trump has been cut down further in size because of a tremendous round of losses with the Democrats taking the House and maybe even the Senate.

10:21Michael Popok:If the Democrats pick up the 20 or 30 seats that are projected, maybe even more, and maybe flip four seats in the Senate to get control of the Senate, Donald Trump will be crippled. He'll be, I mean, he won't admit it. He'll talk tougher. But the reality politically is that he will be emasculated. And that's when, that's when the Canadians should come back to the table. when they're begged to come back to the table and then make the deal that they're entitled to make because of their importance in our own economy. That's how I would run things. If there was any chance that my negotiating with Trump would bolster his fortunes at the midterm, his party's fortunes, I would decline as long as Canada economically has braced for a long winter, which I believe that they have.

11:19Michael Popok:You know, he's doing all the right things, Carney. He's got a domestic support package for the provinces, giving them millions and millions and millions of dollars to get through a difficult winter. They are at war. It's unfortunate that they're at war with the American government, hopefully not the American people who are still traveling to Canada and trying to extend a hand, as I recently did when I went to Montreal for Father's Day. But this is a war and they have to be on war footing. And I believe that they're doing the right thing and we continue to support them. And the Canadian Midas, the Midas Canadians and the elbows up and the maple Midas and all of that stuff here on Legal AF.

12:01Michael Popok:Take a minute, got a full day of amazing programming for you right here on Legal AF. Take a minute, hit that free subscribe button Until my next report in about an hour, I'm Michael Popak.