One difficulty of a presidency as volatile as Donald Trump’s is separating what makes him angry (almost everything) from what genuinely, revealingly enrages him – what sends him round the bend at the mineral level. For instance, he hates Letitia James, the New York attorney general who in 2022 successfully brought a civil fraud case against him and whom he has since urged the justice department to pursue for mortgage fraud. But that’s just basic revenge – see also his pursuit of ex-FBI director James Comey. More interesting are the fleeting, trivial things that set Trump off, including his meltdown last week over a TV commercial from Canada.
On the surface it didn’t seem like a particularly big deal: a TV ad airing on US television, paid for by the Canadian province of Ontario, in which an audio clip of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs ran over inspiring footage of the American west and industry. In a folksy voice Reagan explains: “When someone says: ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports’, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works – but only for a short time.” He then demolishes the premise of tariffs as anything but an instrument that “hurts every American worker”.
