The view from Trump’s America...

It’s hard to get more MAGA than the editor in chief of Breitbart. My conversation with Alex Marlow.

I think I first met Alex Marlow in 2012 when I was visiting Washington for CPAC. That’s not the cable channel in Canada; it’s the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee.

That was my first year going to CPAC and my introduction to the Breitbart world.

My producer was able to somehow convince Andrew Breitbart to sit down for an on-camera interview. It was a big get for an upstart television station in Canada that most Americans had never heard of before.

The interview went well, and Andrew invited me to drop by what they called back then “The Embassy” for a party they were throwing that night. I got to chat with Andrew, talk about his new hire Ben Shapiro, who was already a regular on my show, and I got to meet Alex.

Alex always reminds me that I was the first person to put him on TV. There has been no shortage of appearances since then on all kinds of TV networks.

We hadn’t chatted in a while, and I wanted to get his view on the “trade war” with the United States. My sense is that it isn’t registering with most Americans, and for the most part, Alex told me that’s about right.

You may not like everything you hear in this interview, but you will hear the American/MAGA perspective on what is happening. Trust me, Alex knows Canada, he knows his stuff, and he has some interesting takes on what is going on.

Since I know so many of you like to read rather than watch, I’ve posted a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below. It’s an auto-generated transcript, so while I’ve fixed some things, there are bound to be errors.

Brian: Canada’s relationship with the United States dominates our news coverage, our political chatter. It always has. Hi, I’m Brian Lilley, political columnist for the Toronto Sun. And the question I’m asking today is whether this same issue dominates or even penetrates through the US media coverage.

For that, I turn to Alex Marlow. He is the editor-in-chief at Breitbart, a fantastic website if you haven’t read it yet, and host of his own very own Alex Marlow show.

Alex, it’s been too long since we chatted, but I wanted to reach out and say, okay, what’s going on.

There’s never a day that goes by where our national TV newscasts and all of our big newspapers aren’t filled with stories about the trade war, as Mark Carney calls it, with the United States.

Donald Trump features heavily in our news as heavily as our own prime minister. I’m guessing Mark Carney doesn’t make the news every night when you know, if you ever sit down to watch TV news at your home in LA.

Alex: Yeah, I don’t sit down and watch T V news, I have to admit that, even though I appear on it from time to time.

Brian: Well you and I both.

Alex: It’s an interesting phenomenon at this moment in time though I’m aware it exists.

So this is interesting because I think probably the best analogy is when you think about trade with Canada. How I think about 75% of your trade is done with us, and I think something like 11, 12% of our trade is done with you. I think that’s about the right ratio of how much we’re thinking about Canada.

Canada does appear. I have a website that has a very strong international or international bureaus. We love covering international news. I just personally am a news junkie like you, Brian, and I just find the news to be the best reality TV show imaginable.

And so there were lots of interesting characters in Canada that we cover. And I do think that it is fascinating what you guys are doing to your country, but from a sort of MAGA America-first conservative perspective, it does seem like you guys are trying to do your best to do things that you know will ultimately hurt you just because of Mark Carney’s hatred of Trump and I assume he is channeling a lot of your Canadian voters.

But we also were on Sirius XM radio. So we speak to a lot of Canadians because of Sirius XM as the satellite hits Canada. So we love our Canadians. We only have the best Canadians. But it is probably more dominant in your news cycle, which has been a fascination for me because I’m observing Carney do things that seem illogical and it appears to be half political, half out of Trump hatred.

Brian: So I’m not sure about the Trump hatred because they seem to have a good relationship, or at least, you know, when they’re not fighting and Trump’s not posting memes, you know, knocking Carney down in a hockey game and things like that. Trump seems to genuinely like Mark Carney. And I’ve spoken to people who’ve been in the rooms with him. I spoke to your ambassador to Canada, Pete Hokestra, a while ago and and last October when they started restarted the negotiations.

Hoekstra said they’re having a great time in the lunch. And then Trump looks to Lutnick and Greer and says, I like this guy. Let’s get a deal with him. You know, so there’s been various times when you can see that they like each other, but definitely the Canadian public has no love for Donald Trump for the most part. There’s definitely some that do. And there’s a lot of overblown hatred for him. I don’t like what he’s doing with the tariffs. I understand it, unlike

most Canadians understand why he’s doing it and thinking because I I read Leitheiser and Greer and all that.

But you mentioned something I want to follow up on though. That’s you said doing things to hurt Canada. What’s he doing to hurt Canada? What you know, because your view of it is going to be very different from a Canadian’s view. So what’s Carney doing that you think is hurting Canada’s economy?

Alex: Yeah, I think for starters, the United States buys a seventy-one point seven percent of Canada’s merchandise exports. This is last year’s data. And so that means that Canada is largely dependent on the United States. And it does seem like, based off of the rhetoric and based off of a lot of the diplomacy that goes on, that making hatred of America’s president is a big piece of what is discussed in Canada and the Canadian news, it sounds like in the Canadian Parliament and et cetera.

And I think that this is something that is very strange to America because we always kind of had an affection for Canada and Canadians, but we’re seeing certain things where we largely are supportive of Canada and yet we see things that, for example, the trade imbalance, and we would like some sort of a reset of this, and we find that concerning. I think a lot of Americans are very coached up on China and the threat of China.

Whereas Canada acts as though the US is a threat in a lot of ways, or at least Carney’s rhetoric is that way, and Israel is a big threat in a lot of ways. They’re starting to embrace more of the BDS atmosphere. It does appear from our vantage point that Carney is helping China get around sanctions from the United States. Like we’re trying to tear off and reset trade with China. And it appears as though Carney is offering avenues for China to trade with Canada and then dump a lot of what they’re trading with Canada into the United States because we have a more favorable policy towards Canada.

And we see that and we don’t like that sort of stuff. We also don’t love the widespread adoption of euthanasia. We find that sort of off-putting. Also, you guys are have a very low birth rate. It is the replacement rate, I think, is at, you know, 1.25%. I think it thinks about the lowest in the Western world.

Brian: We’re about 1.25, 1.3, whereas replacement rate is 2.1.

Alex: It’s 2.1, exactly. So we know what that means, especially people who are hip to what I I’m putting down at Breitbart News, the original sort of pro-Trump website, even though we we are often critical, but we’re by and large Trump supporters in the audience. That we know what happens next. What happens next is widespread immigration. We know the record of liberal governments in the West is they don’t encourage assimilation at all. And then before you know it, what is the West? Like, do we even have the West? And so that’s a lot of what we’re witnessing.

And we’re going, what’s going on? This is so curious that this is all happening very rapidly from our vantage point.

Brian: It’s interesting you brought up so many cultural things. I I wasn’t surprised you brought up the transshipment from China. I’ve been talking about that since the first Trump administration. And most of our media ignores that. I remember when it it was about a year. We had warnings for about a year starting in 2017. Hey, you got a lot of Chinese steel being dumped into your country. You better do something about that.

Alex: Yes.

Brian: and and stop it because it’s being dumped into Canada and then sold into the US as Canadian steel. If you don’t do something about that, we’re gonna have to tariff you.

So, you know, if you ask most Canadian politicians, they would tell you that, well, you know, we tariffed them on playing cards and bourbon, and that’s why we got rid of it. Yet there’s an actual signed agreement between both countries where Canada said, yes, we’ll stop the transshipment. Most Canadians don’t know that. But I was surprised that you leaned in so much on the on the cultural stuff. Is that penetrating through? You know, I I I I would understand that it would penetrate through with people like you at Breitbart and your readers. Does it penetrate the wider American public? And is that part of why there is a growing sentiment that Canada’s not really a friend when I look at the polling? I, you know, we have similar polling about America here. I don’t like it in either country, but is that part of what’s driving it?

Alex: Yeah, I I think you’re picking up on something I’m doing, which is the the laundry list that I put out is that I don’t I for me, for those are all things I’m covering on Breitbart News. We have a very large audience of people who are largely parts mostly parts of Trump’s America. And the public now is you know, Brian, with the widespread use of of internet and social media, et cetera, people are way more informed than you would give them credit for, not you, but I think a lot of people would give people are pretty informed on some of this stuff.

And so I gave that is that’s the menu of all the reasons why people who might be reading me and who might tend to like Canadians and believe in Canada in general, see all of these things. Is that are they doing one thing that’s helpful right now, especially with so much of the green capture that’s gone on within Canada, where it feels like it is easier for you guys to have a pipeline that starts in Canada and ends in America, than ends in one of your own provinces.

Which is just very strange that it’s like that because you guys have such rich natural resources. It feels like there’s a reluctance to use those because of green politics, because of far left politics, which is largely being abandoned, I think in a lot of places throughout the world that are understanding that the promises made by the green movement never materialize. So again, I’m just adding to the laundry list of all sorts of things you could pick and choose why we feel like directionally the trajectory of what’s happening in Canada is not great.

Which is interesting because Trudeau was much more of a punching bag for us as a media figure. And so we we love making fun of him. and we still do, by the way, and we always will.

Brian: Katy Perry? What did you say? Katy Perry?

Alex: Yeah, it’s it’s a that’s the it’s a it’s funny because she was always a character on my podcast because I find her to be so absurd and silly. And the fact that he’s now in her TikTok videos. It just couldn’t be more delish from a news curation perspective.

But yeah, it just feels like all the trajectory, all this is going the wrong direction. And one thing that I hadn’t brought up that I do think is worth throwing out there. And this will definitely, when we do our home and home, Brian, you come on my show, I’m gonna ask you what what you think of this. But that deal where it sounded like they were on the verge of a deal, and then all of a sudden there was no deal and Carney backed out and we never really got an explanation of what happened and we still haven’t. And when I knew it was coming on with you, I looked this up yesterday, like, did we ever get that explanation? And I can’t find one. I can’t find an explanation.

Brian: I can give you the explanation. I talked to people on both sides of the border, six different provincial governments here, the federal government. The short version for here, and I’ll explain more on your show another time, is it was the trucks. The trucks, the 25% on medium and heavy duty trucks, the Lariat three F 350s and things like that. Ford’s retooling their plant here to make those, and it would effectively shut it down. Multi-billion dollar retool by Ford, Ford motor car company, not our premier Doug Ford, said, Can you exempt this? Can you put it down to 15 like the other stuff? They said no.

Carney just jumped on everything else. I’ll give you the long list of that, you know, saying, they’re trying to, you know, stop us from protecting French and all of this. He did that for political reasons, but really it was the trucks. They could have gone back and done it. He decided, let’s play politics. Now everyone’s playing politics. I think Trump’s leaning into this for the midterms.

Gotta ask you quickly before I let you go, Carney’s in Europe right now. The EU Commission president just announced, hey, we want to make Canada an associate member of the European Union. Carney said we walked away from that deal we were just discussing over sovereignty concerns that America would take over our sovereignty. Apparently no one’s looked at what you have to give up to the EU to get deep trade access with them. They they basically run your country. How do you think Canada getting that close to the EU is gonna play out with the Trump administration?

Alex: Yeah, I think what’s fascinating about that is the fact that it feels like this just adds to the anti-Trump nature of the sentiment Carney’s putting down, even though despite the fact that it feels like he on a personality basis could connect with Trump, it seems like they’re both good business people. They’re both potentially good deal makers. And Trump is always negotiating. This is one of the things the Art of the Deal is is not a joke. I mean, it wasn’t just a slogan or a book title.

If you’ve been in the room with President Trump for more than a few minutes, you start understanding that all of his rhetoric, he’s always play he’s always doing negotiation. It’s constant and he lives for it. And so people talk about him tacoing where he chickens out or he caves on stuff. That’s actually not true. Is it just all them rebranding the Art of the Deal? He’s always trying to cut a deal. And so when you see Canada cutting deals with the EU, which is a lot of we don’t like the EU.

In a general level people from Trump’s America, the people who are running the US government right now, were a lot of people who were very supportive of Brexit, you know, 10, 11 years ago. And so now we’re seeing the adding Canada, which is not European, it just does seem it just seems like the effort to run towards parts of the country, parts of, I’m sorry, parts of the world that are increasingly hostile towards America, that’s what Canada’s doing, being favorable towards China, being favorable towards Europe,

Which again, Europe. Europe’s on our good side ever, but they’re a case study and how not to handle migration, a mass migration. But also there’s a lot of yeah, there’s a lot of bitterness over their inability to fund their military and to help out with the Iran war. And even Italy, which maybe is our strongest ally in the country right now, wouldn’t even let us use the bases. And whether whatever you think of the Iran war, and I have a lot of concerns about the war itself, is that when we ask for a favor and we essentially protect the world and almost no one else pays their fair share into NATO. And we’re trying to get people to do this. And then in the meantime, you can’t let us use our bases. There’s just so much that feels like a lot of it’s rooted in just anti Trump animosity across the board. And that’s the perception.