How excited am I that President-elect Donald J. Trump is returning to the Oval Office? Extreme, and I bet this is true for any solemn political reporter. Unfortunately, as we discovered in the four years of Biden-Harris, there are very few solemn political reporters. If you’re a legitimate political reporter/analyst/commentator, you want to get information and insight from every politician, but especially your president, that you can analyze, comment on, and report on without having to resort to an outsized dose of stage management , spin and regurgitated lies.
Trump’s Tuesday morning press conference at Mar-a-Lago gave us a lot of information and a lot to analyze and comment on. We saw Trump resting but getting to the point and ready to go. However, the talking points that Trump reveals in advance are never the best. The best part is when he answers reporters’ questions and answers off the cuff and gives the most detailed information and insights into his thinking. Do you really want to know what he’s up to or thinking about? It is always articulated there.
Reporter, you’re talking to the (future) president. If he starts talking in the middle of your question, stop and let him talk. Then you get the good stuff. Stop interrupting him so you can make your stupid statements of protest disguised as journalism.
– Kira (@RealKiraDavis) January 7, 2025
After Trump had already spoken for a little more than an hour, he took questions. He was persuasive for 22 minutes. He had a few minutes of assist from businessman Steve Witkoff, whom Trump called his “negotiator” in the Middle East. The rest of the time he was alone. Trump talked about J6 and possible pardons, the Panama Canal, Greenland, Russia and Ukraine, and Elon Musk. After all this wealth of information, a reporter decided to question Trump whether he would utilize military force against Canada.
REPORTER: Are you solemn about making Canada the 51st state of the United States?[..]. The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada said: “Under no circumstances will Canada ever be the 51st nation.” He stated that there was no way this could happen.
TRUMP: Everything’s fine. Maybe he won’t win, but maybe he will.
This reporter could have followed Kira Davis’s good advice above and let Trump finish, but he wanted to prove something, so he added another question.
REPORTER: You are considering using military force to acquire Panama and Greenland, are you also considering using military force to annex and acquire Canada?
A typical activist journalist who assumes that Republicans and Trump only want to utilize military force when there is more than one way to skin a cat. Trump unleashed his keen knowledge and wit on this reporter, and he, along with the American and Canadian people, learned a few things.
TRUMP: No. economic power. Because Canada and the United States would really be something. Remove this artificially drawn line and see how it looks. And it would also be much better for national security. Remember, we fundamentally protect Canada. But here’s the thing about Canada: there are so many friends up there, I love Canadians, they’re great. But we spend hundreds of billions every year to protect it. We spend hundreds of billions each year to power Canada. We lose on trade deficits, we lose massively…we don’t need their cars. You know, they make 20 percent of our cars. We don’t need that, I’d rather do it in Detroit. We don’t need the cars. We don’t need their wood. We have huge fields of wood, we don’t need their wood. We need to lift their restrictions because stupid people impose restrictions, but I can do that with an executive order. We don’t need anything they have. We don’t need their dairy products, we have more than them. We don’t need anything. So why are we losing $200 billion or more every year to protect Canada?
That makes sense. Not just common sense, but also economic sense. And Trump is right: Certain states (if you look at California) could exploit timber and dairy products if they weren’t so busy destroying the timber through a lack of deforestation and the resulting wildfires, and destroying farmers’ ability to produce dairy products because of it of “climate change”.
Trump then pointed to soon-to-retire Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to Mar-a-Lago and made clear that economic ties with Canada are more beneficial to them than to us.
And this is what I said to Governor Trudeau, as I called him: Listen, what would happen if we didn’t subsidize you, if we didn’t…because we give them a lot of money. We assist them, for example by buying icebreakers. And Canada wants to join us in buying icebreakers. I said, you know, we don’t really want to have a partner in buying icebreakers. We don’t need a partner.
It was unclear whether the reporter said something about Canada having a right or that Trump was right. But being the master dealmaker that he is, Trump has clearly explained what this is about and what he plans to do for America…First.
No, no, right. No. No right. Here’s what we have: We now have the right to assist them with their financial difficulties because we too owe $36 trillion. We’re going to start getting there pretty quickly, but we’re going to get there because of energy and other things.
The reporter just couldn’t keep his mouth shut and interrupted him, but Trump deepened his point, breaking it down for him like he was a three-year-old.
No no no. No right. No, no, no, right. But why are we supporting a country with more than 200 billion people per year? Our military is at their disposal and all these other things. They should be a state.
That’s what I told Trudeau when he came down. I said: What would happen if we didn’t? He said, “Canada would disintegrate, Canada wouldn’t be able to function.” If we didn’t take 20 percent of our car market away from them. You know, we… they in turn send us hundreds of thousands of cars. This is how they make a lot of money. They send us many other things that we don’t need.
We don’t need their cars, and we don’t need the other products. We don’t need their milk. We got a lot of milk. We got a lot of everything. And we don’t need any of it. So I said to him, “Why are we doing this?” He said, “I don’t really know.” He couldn’t answer the question.
Boom. If anything shows that Trudeau was a useless leader, it is his inability to answer this fundamental question. In this regard, Trump was not lacking in his economic brilliance.
But I can answer it: we do it out of habit. And we do it because we like our neighbors and have been good neighbors. But we can’t do it forever and it costs a huge amount of money. And why should we have a $200 billion deficit and add to that a lot of other things that we give them in the form of subsidies? And I said, that’s fine if you’re a state. But if you are another country, we don’t want it. We won’t have it with the European Union either. The European Union has a trade deficit of $350 billion. They don’t take our cars. They don’t take our agricultural product. They don’t take anything. And that’s why we won’t have it with them.
This is why Americans trusted in another Trump presidency rather than an even worse (and worse) Kamala Harris presidency. A key reason for this is the ability to provide real and credible answers to our economic prospects and our future. Trump made clear why we must take these economic steps to not only address the country’s $36 trillion deficit, but also to maintain a forceful nation for our children.
Here’s the full, unscripted moment. Worth three minutes and 30 seconds. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would have melted down after a minute if they had even made it that far.
‘Canada and the United States, that would really be something’: Trump expands on tariff threat, saying Trudeau told him “Canada would disintegrate” if it faced economic pressure from the United States.
“Why are we supporting a country with more than $200 million a year? Our military is at its limit… pic.twitter.com/KAa6snPGtU
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) January 7, 2025
