Trump team lays groundwork as insidious blame game plan revealed

On Thursday, a new report revealed that President Donald Trump may be preparing a “blame Canada” approach to coping with Republican midterm losses. According to the Canadian outlet the National Post, Trump is expected to “lash out,” and there are already signs that he is teeing up the United States’ northern neighbor as his target.

“Last week, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro told Canadian lobbyists to ‘get the hell out of our country’ and warned that ‘if you interfere in our elections in Maine and Michigan, you will pay even more dearly,’” writes the Post. “Navarro’s approach? Blame Canada! We heard a similar accusation last year from Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, who equated Canada’s anti-tariff advertising in the U.S. to electoral meddling and warned of consequences.” With actions like this in mind, wonders the Post, “could Canada become a scapegoat for Republican losses?”

“It’s certainly the case that the administration will probably latch onto any sort of external cause to blame bad election results,” said Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington. He explained that while he doesn’t think it would be Trump’s “primary explanation... it’s not off the table that someone like Peter Navarro could go onto whatever news outlet he gets interviewed at these days and say that Canada is at fault.”

According to Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, Trump and his allies may try to cast hostility toward Canada through a partisan lens. “If Democrats do well but are nonetheless seen as the enemy, and Canada is associated with just one party,” he said, “then it becomes harder to have conversations with Republicans who you’ll need unless the Republicans are completely wiped out. That may be part of what the Trump administration’s hoping — to push Canada into a partisan alliance that it can then condemn Mark Carney with all the Democrats that they don’t like.”

Richard Stern, vice president of the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise at Advancing American Freedom, told the Post that Trump and the Republicans have been incentivized to shift blame onto Canada for their own policy failures. The U.S. administration has been frantic to paint the tariffs as a foreign policy tool that foreigners pay for when they are really “an offensive, aggressive tax that’s been levied on the American people,” he said, noting that politicians running for reelection “don’t want to tell voters, ‘I’ve done something terrible to you.’ They want to point the finger overseas and at other people.”

But according to Christopher Hernandez-Roy, acting director and senior fellow at the Americas Program of CSIS in Washington, efforts to blame Canada are unlikely to land with the broader American public. “I think President Trump lashing out in the face of a loss is … almost a certainty,” he said. “They can … try to blame Canada, but … I don’t see how that’s really gonna get much traction.” Stephen Nagy, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, predicts that whatever he targets, “I suspect Trump will do what he always does based on Roy Cohn’s rules of winning, taught to a young Donald Trump: center on relentless aggression, total denial and never admitting defeat.”