President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was terminating trade talks with Canada, threatening once again to upend the crucial economic relationship between the United States and its second-biggest trading partner.
Trump said he canceled the talks in response to an advertisement released last week by the government of Canada’s Ontario province, which featured audio from a speech by former US President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs on foreign goods.
In the 1987 speech, Reagan lambasted tariffs as hurting “every American worker and consumer” and “triggering fierce trade wars.”
After the ad aired, the Ronald Reagan Foundation claimed it “misrepresents” the speech, and that the Ontario government had not asked permission to use the clip.
While the ad edited the speech and lacked context, the theme of Reagan’s full five-minute speech, which the Reagan Library has published on YouTube, is full-throated support for free and fair trade.
Reagan delivered it from Camp David, where he was soon to meet the prime minister of Japan at a time when American sentiment for the country was eroding after its companies flooded America’s market with inexpensive cars and electronics.
Reagan had just placed higher tariffs on various Japanese products to try to stem the damage the imports of cheap Japanese semiconductors had done to US manufacturers. But Reagan was clear: he was “loath” to take that action and believed high tariffs had exacerbated the Great Depression.
Yet by Thursday night, Trump had taken to social media to blast the ad.
“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs,” he wrote on Truth Social.
He claimed the ad aimed to “interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts,” and defended tariffs as critical to the US economy and national security.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” he wrote.
In a separate Truth Social post Monday, Trump incorrectly stated that Reagan supported tariffs.
