Reality TV Cabinet Secretary Has No Grasp of Reality
The Bulwark · C · trust 40/100
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(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) True North, Strong and Free by William Kristol
What do you do if you’re a second-tier official in Trump’s cabinet, basically a laughingstock, but very eager to curry favor from the boss? Well, the boss loves TV and has been desperate to find some kind of political win in the series of embarrassments and travesties with which he has marked America’s semiquincentennial. But the stunt you contributed—a televised Great American Road Trip for your family sponsored by companies regulated by your department—hasn’t worked out very well.
So Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, hurried over to the Fox booth at the IndyCar race in D.C. yesterday. He was asked about Trump’s feud with Canada—and as we’ve come to expect from a Trump administration official, he entered the fracas in a particularly stupid and offensive way.
The fight Duffy was so giddy to join began on Friday, when Trump renewed his trade war with Canada, our second-largest trading partner and the single largest purchaser of U.S. exports. On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful and well-received speech to his countrymen explaining that the Trump administration had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Carney stated emphatically that “We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked.”
This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page—normally happy enough to excuse Trump—put the blame squarely on the president in an editorial titled “ The Dumbest Trade War Revisited ,” with the subhed, “Trump’s decision to escalate a tariff brawl with Canada makes no economic or political sense.”
On TV yesterday, Duffy didn’t even try to defend Trump’s tariff war. Nor did he address Carney’s broader point about America under Trump: “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”
But Duffy vaguely knows that the Trump administration pretends to be pro-military and pro-social conservatism. So he launched a drive-by attack on Canada on those fronts.
Canada, Duffy claimed , is “a country that doesn’t have a military. . . . We provide their security for them, and they take advantage of us.”
As our friends in Quebec would say, c’est faux . Canada has fought alongside us in wars for over a century. In World War II, Canada suffered about 44,000 war deaths, about 0.4 percent of its population, a slightly higher per capita casualty rate than the United States. (They also joined the war in 1939, two years before the United States.) And of course a few miles down from Omaha Beach and the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was Juno Beach, where, as Ronald Reagan said in his speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the world saw “the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred.”
Half a century later, after the attacks on the United States on 9/11, Canada provided generous shelter to thousands of stranded Americans when our airspace was closed, led the effort to invoke NATO’s Article 5 on behalf of the United States, and then fought side by side with us in Afghanistan, losing 158 soldiers.
I suppose it would be too much to expect a Trump cabinet member to know any of this. Or if he knows it, to acknowledge it.
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But Duffy wasn’t finished aping the higher-profile members of the cabinet. Turning from mimicking macho Pete Hegseth to imitating sanctimonious JD Vance, Duffy also attacked Canada for its “record high euthanasia rates.” He was presumably referring to Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program, a more liberal assisted suicide policy than we have in the United States. Whatever the merits or demerits of that policy, one might point out that Canada in fact has a lower overall suicide rate than the United States, and for that matter a higher average life expectancy.
But it’s the culture war that matters to Duffy and to his audience—not Trump’s trade war, not any real wars, and not the actual well-being of Americans.
Meanwhile, it’s our neighbors to the north who see the situation clearly. As Canadian journalist Stephen Marche wrote this morning :
For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.
This description of the United States under Trump is sad but true. And while Duffy can insult Canada in his effort to suck up to Trump, his claim that “you’re gonna see Mark Carney come to the table very very quickly” is unlikely to be any more accurate than other claims this administration has made about victory in war.
Duffy’s comments yesterday are a useful reminder of the bottomless vulgarity and mendacity of Trumpism. Carney, on the other hand, has spoken truth to power. He has reminded us how free men and women should…
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