There was a bit of brouhaha stirred up yesterday and today between Trump and Canadian officials over trade deficits, which is perhaps most interesting not for the actual trade facts, but for the way it demonstrates the utter disdain of Trump and his minions for facts and for truth. They just simply don’t care about reality.
Some of the amazing highlights from that article:
In a speech in Missouri on Wednesday, Trump recounted a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau in which Trudeau told him that the US does not run a trade deficit with Canada. According to audio of that meeting obtained by the Washington Post, Trump contradicted him and said they did – just because that’s his favorite talking point about trade with all countries. In the Missouri speech yesterday Trump acknowledged that he just made it up: “I didn’t even know … I had no idea.”
When a staff member confirmed that the US actually runs a trade surplus with Canada, Trump doubled down and now claimed that if you compute the trade numbers differently, you get a deficit. This despite the Office of the US Trade Represenative confirming that “the U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016”.
It further turns out that the US trade surplus exists despite the fact that said Trade Representative, a Trump appointee named Robert Lighthizer, has been cooking the books by double counting goods that merely transit through Canada; that is, if, say, merchandise of Chinese origin arrives in a Canadian port and is then forwarded to the US, it is first counted as a trade deficit with China, and then deceptively counted again as a trade deficit with Canada.
It just totally amazes me that this is really the climate that Trump has created, and not some hilarious off-the-wall parody skit. It’s a world in which facts mean absolutely nothing, and Trump just says whatever sounds good to him, and whether it’s even remotely true never seems to matter.
Of course, Trump is hardly the only one. As someone who watches more FoxNews than is allowed by the Geneva Convention, I can assure you that all of those folks are strictly fact-free in their “reporting.”
To further the narrative of Trump’s looseness with the truth, Canada claims the meeting never happened, at least not as a face-to-face meeting as his story says.
Of course the guy is a serial liar. That isn’t news. The news, at least to me, is that Trump openly acknowledges his habitual lying as a praiseworthy aspect of his character and a sign of his shrewdness. To him, saying what he wants to believe, and saying what his delusional base wants to hear, is all that matters. Truth matters not at all, and he’s proud of it. In his mind it makes him unique, and it makes him great.
There’s a good editorial on the CNN site about how Trudeau deals with this. By extension, this must also be how every national leader in the world must deal with it, except most of them, lacking a 3000-mile border with the US and $2 billion a day in bilateral trade, don’t have it so much right in their face.
Apparently, he lied about lying. Canadian reporter asked the Canadian government about this meeting, and they have no idea what meeting Trump is talking about.
Wow. It’s like, to satisfy his base’s thirst for lies, Trump needs to lie (say) 1000 times a month…and he realized he hadn’t quite met his quota for last month, so he had to retroactively invent a lie from the time period.
So he lied about lying in a meeting that didn’t happen and used cherry picked numbers to make it look like he was actually right about this conversation that didn’t take place?
The most plausible take on the whole thing is that there probably was no such specific meeting, but Trump likely did say something resembling that in a phone conversation while clearly not knowing what he was talking about. And then he exaggerated and semi-fictionalized the event in a show of braggadocio to prove how wonderfully unconstrained he is by facts when discussing policy with foreign leaders. He then doubled down and continued to lie about the trade balance, contradicting statements from both the US Department of Commerce and the office of his own US Trade Representative on well-known and well established facts.
As the reporter said in the link cited upthread:
So… this Trump anecdote about making up a fact on an allegedly made up trade metric might have been slightly… made up. Behold, a matryoshka doll of tall-tales
It’s a fascinating insight into the mind of a true conman, and you have to admire the reporter’s metaphor of Trump as a Russian nesting doll of lies. One could hope for no better or more trusted leader to negotiate trade deals, peace in the Middle East, a nuclear deal with North Korea, and to Make America Great Again™ – all while being sued by a porn star and investigated for Russian collusion.
Meanwhile, the few career diplomats left at State shake their heads and try to figure out a) whether it’s worth it to weather the next three years until they have a president with something resembling credibility and, if so, b) what they’ll say to their foreign counterparts.
I should clarify a comment I made in the OP, in the first bullet point in which I said “According to audio of that meeting obtained by the Washington Post, …”. What the Washington Post had was audio of Trump’s comments in Missouri, not the alleged Trudeau meeting which, as has been noted, may never even have occurred. Or it may have been a phone call or some exaggerated semi-fictionalized account dredged up from some vague memory rattling around in Trump’s brain. The wonderful point is how he spins lying and bluster as a virtue, and his sycophantic followers love him for it.