'Walls closing in': Conservative Canadian leader says Trump’s 'turmoil' is nearing the end

President Donald Trump must accept that “the walls are closing in” on his tariff plans, declared a Canadian conservative official whose bellicose approach to right-wing politics is in many ways similar to Trump’s own.

“The walls are closing in,” said Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, in regard to the Supreme Court striking down many of Trump’s tariffs. During his public comments on Monday, Ford argued that Canada is in an “economic war” as a result of Trump’s unprovoked tariffs against his country. As a result, he said that no deal at all would be better than a deal with Trump.

“It’s very challenging right now,” Ford said. “I just sit back some days, and I am not the only one. Everyone in the world sits back. How can one person, one man, create so much turmoil around the world? Not just here in Canada but around the world. It is pretty staggering. So I can’t wait for the midterms.”

Ford’s comment about the midterms reflected on how Trump’s tariffs are hurting him in polls among the voters he needs in order to avoid losing control of Congress.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” conservative commentator Mona Charen wrote in The Bulwark. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

In response to these criticisms, a White House spokeswoman told AlterNet that Trump is only trying to protect American elections.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” Jackson told AlterNet. “The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting. Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

Until the midterm elections can occur and potentially put Democrats in charge of at least one chamber of Congress, Ford argued that nations attacked by Trump’s tariffs should take matters into their own hands. Countries like Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom have “rushed in to get a deal and all of a sudden, he turned on them,” Ford pointed out about trusting Trump. Therefore “we’re going to be cautious.”

Ford, who has described himself as “a street fighter in politics” and a “brawler with a reflex for combat,” warned last year in February that Trump’s tariffs would hurt Americans as much as Canadians.

"Every year, the Ontario government and its agencies spend $30 billion on procurement, alongside our $200 billion plan to build Ontario," Ford wrote at the time. "U.S.-based businesses will now lose out on tens of billions of dollars in new revenues. They only have President Trump to blame." By October, Ford’s Canadian province of Ontario paid for an ad that ran during a Toronto Blue Jays game with a narration “of one of Republican America’s all-time favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan. In the ad, Reagan was shown saying that “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. But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer.”