Volatile President Donald Trump routinely swings between irritation and genuine, profound anger, but a recent TV commercial out of Canada triggered him into a raging fury, a columnist wrote Thursday.
The commercial, featuring Ronald Reagan's folksy critique of tariffs, contained a powerful quote: "When someone says: 'Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports,' it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works – but only for a short time." Reagan ultimately concluded that tariffs fundamentally "hurts every American worker."
Trump's reaction was immediate and disproportionate, wrote The Guardian columnist Emma Brockes. He declared the ad "fake" and responded by not only canceling tariff talks with Canada but also announcing he was "increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now."
The author described this as "temper, pure and simple – an expression of pique far outweighing the apparent scale of the insult".
This isn't the first time Trump has had an outsized reaction to a perceived slight, she wrote. The piece recalls a memorable 1992 incident where New York Times columnist Gail Collins referred to Trump as a "financially embattled thousandaire." In the "wasteland of Trump's interior life," wealth is "probably the single most crucial pillar of his identity."
Trump's response to Collins was extraordinary, wrote Brockes. He sent back her column with "The Face of a Dog!" scrawled over her picture.
The deeper analysis suggests Trump's reaction to the Reagan ad is fundamentally about image and status. Reagan has become an "unimpeachable political authority" and an "American icon," whereas Trump represents a "barely Republican MAGA movement" in a "shiny-suited" guise.
The crucial insight is that Trump's response wasn't about tariff policy, but about "a man suffering a brief, piercing and clearly quite painful collapse in his self-delusion". The ad, by showcasing Reagan's authentic, rugged image against Trump's manufactured persona, struck a nerve that goes far beyond mere policy disagreement.