Matt Gurney: The art of the yawn

Oh dear, the president is mad about a bridge. How unfortunate.

Cover image of Art of the Deal, by Random House.

By: Matt Gurney

Oh, look. We’ve just been art-of-the-dealed again.

Ho hum. Back to watching the Olympics.

Seriously, though. How many times can the president play the same old card before the world’s collective response morphs into something between an eyeroll and a yawn? Indeed, are we sure that Canada, at least, isn’t there already?

This is a question that officials in Washington and Ottawa both ought to be considering this week. A few days ago, in one of his trademark Truth Social posts, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would not allow the Gordie Howe Bridge, a new span linking Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, Mich., to open until ... well, who knows? It’s increasingly hard to tell. The president’s post is something of a grab bag of his grievances with Canada, so it’s not clear exactly what he wants, but he ends with this:

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve. We will start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY. With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset. The revenues generated because of the U.S. Market will be astronomical. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

You’re welcome, Mr. President!

So, before we try and try and analyze what the hell any of this means, let’s just put a few facts on the table. The new bridge is meant to relieve pressure on the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor and Detroit. The existing bridge is owned by Matthew Maroun, whose family has long links to Trump and which has been a sustained opponent of the publicly owned rival to the family asset. The New York Times has reported that Maroun met with U.S. commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday, and that Lutnick then called the president; it was just a few hours later that the president took to social media to make his demands.

It’s also worth noting, to the extent that pointing this stuff out even matters anymore, that a lot of what was said in the president’s post was just flat-out wrong. Canada doesn’t own both sides of the bridge — we funded the whole thing ourselves, to bypass efforts by Maroun to derail the project on Michigan’s end, but we also transferred half of the control to the state, despite having picked up the tab. U.S. workers took part, and U.S. materials were used — again, not what Trump had said.

These are not the hardest dots to connect here, is the thing. You know?

But, also, who cares? At a certain point, your intrepid columnist begins to feel like he’s screaming into a void. Fact checks are irrelevant to Trump, and I offer them above almost purely out of professional reflex. Old habits die hard or some such.

The part of this that is actually interesting is this — how much more juice can Trump squeeze out of his art-of-the-deal-style tactics before they just lose all effectiveness? We all recognize the play by now. Trump will make blustering statements, issue demands, and prep the stage for some later negotiation. He’ll grab a few concessions and crow about his victory. It’s gotten so bad there’s a whole acronym for it — TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out.

We haven’t gotten to that stage yet, but this time we might not even need to. When Trump sent out his statement, did anyone really care? Yes, yes, I know, the PM gave him a call and some local politicians griped. But the response seemed muted, and rightfully so. At a certain point, the increasingly addled president’s normal tactics just start to look predictable and banal. He’d probably forgotten about the bridge entirely until Lutnick called him and fired off his greatest-hits of anti-Canadian gripes (some of which I agree with!) before making an unreasonable demand.

Does anyone feel a sudden urge to bargain in good faith? Anyone?

It would appear not! The Canadian response so far, backed by Michigan’s response, has been basically on the money. Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke with the president, and later said that he’d reminded him of the actual facts of the bridge’s construction and ownership. And that he was confident there’d be a resolution. In Michigan, the response was similar. “This is the busiest trade crossing in North America. The Gordie Howe International Bridge is all about jobs,” said state press secretary Stacey LaRouche. “It’s going to open one way or another, and [Governor Gretchen Whitmer] looks forward to attending the ribbon cutting.”

Trump has had one move for his entire career. It’s as old as he is. It’s not even that it’s a bad move. The art of the deal sometimes works, and Canada has real vulnerabilities on the trade front. We haven’t done ourselves a lot of favours and shouldn’t be shocked that Trump keeps hitting us.

But this just isn’t effective. Trump has no real case here. We paid for it, gave half of it to Americans, and the Americans want it as much as we do. The only person who doesn’t want this is a guy who is transparently wielding political leverage over the president’s cabinet for the direct financial benefit of his already fabulously wealthy family. No one will believe otherwise. The bridge will open, and if Trump tries to find some pretext to block it, well, the hell with it. We should dump concrete across our end of it, or start dismantling the half that’s over Canadian territory. Let’s use the steel for new warships or something.

What we should absolutely not do is rush into new negotiations. There just isn’t a point. The president is always going to be one phone call away from proposing something ridiculous. We’ll have to deal with the Americans eventually to see what, if anything, can be salvaged of CUSMA, but in the meantime, the national interest of Canada is, to the maximum extent possible, ignoring the president until he gets distracted by whatever issue someone dumps in front of him next, while also working as rapidly as possible to uncouple ourselves not just from this administration, but from the country that elected the guy twice.

The deal to build and operate the bridge is actually, by coincidence, a model of how to actually respond. Canada signed the agreement to build and operate it with Michigan way back in 2012, and that now, with hindsight, seems like an excellent idea. We can probably work with Michigan. And other states. They might still be worth our time, especially if we can put a reasonable proposal in front of them. Our paying for the bridge and then handing half of it over to the Americans was already a recognition that our desire for a bridge was worth finding a way to bypass their political dysfunction. We should see in this bridge a way forward for dealing with the U.S. as a whole until they are able to sort their stuff out again.

But for now, we should basically just ignore it. It’s a wild place to be, but here we are. Let Michigan fight the White House on this one. We should keep right on doing what we’re doing.

With one exception — as I noted in a recent column, the Conservatives are going to need to figure out an answer to Trump, sooner or later. This latest incident is a classic example of why. Trump would do this to Pierre Poilievre with no more concern than he had when doing it to Mark Carney. The Conservatives thus far seem to think that they’re going to be able to coast through to the next election on their other policies (many of which I agree with), and some vague promise of simply doing better on Trump than Carney can.

And Trump himself is making the case for why that’s nuts. How many trips south can Jamil Jivani take? The U.S. president is erratically going against his own country’s interests — Michigan needs the bridge, too! — because a billionaire buddy gave him a call, and the Republican Party will fall in line behind him, as they always do, to laud his strategic genius.

That’s going to be as true for a Conservative Canadian government as it is currently for a Liberal one. Which is why I reiterate my advice to my friends in the CPC — adopt as your working assumption the notion that Trump won’t be magically more stable with you guys on the basis of your sheer true-blue stout hearts, and start thinking about how you’d be dealing with this kind of insanity, should you ever actually form a government again.

As for the rest of us, though? Tune it out. It’ll be some fresh nonsense in a day or a week or a month until and unless the American people themselves decide they have had enough. Until then, the bridge is Michigan’s problem. Have fun, friends!

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