What hasn't been sufficiently covered is how Trump's erratic communication style creates operational paralysis for multinational corporations and supply chain managers who need 18-24 month planning horizons to make capital allocation decisions.
Trump's late-night Truth Social post terminating all trade talks with Canada was riddled with typos and fragmented sentences—"TRADE NEGATIONS WITHADA AREEBYATED" and "TFFS VERY IMPORTANT THE NATIONAL AND EOMY"—suggesting it was an impulsive reaction rather than coordinated policy.
The trigger? An Ontario government TV ad featuring a 1987 Ronald Reagan radio address warning that "high tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation" and "millions of people lose their jobs".
This pattern is familiar. Trump threatened 35% universal tariffs on Canada in February, then exempted 85% of Canada-U.S. trade days later when Prime Minister Mark Carney negotiated.
He's threatened to dissolve Great Lakes water-sharing agreements, remove Canada from Five Eyes intelligence sharing, and annex Canada as the 51st state—then walked back or never followed through.
Canadian officials initially treated the annexation threats as jokes before realizing Trump might be serious about destabilizing the relationship.
But Carney's office has learned to wait out the volatile threats, expecting Trump to quietly restart talks within days.
For businesses, this creates an impossible environment. Companies making decisions about cross-border manufacturing, inventory positioning, supplier contracts, and capital investments need stable trade rules.
When the president can terminate negotiations via typo-filled social media posts at 11 PM over a $75,000 TV ad, rational planning becomes impossible.
More than C$3.6 billion in Canadian goods cross the border daily. Auto manufacturers, steel producers, lumber suppliers, and tech companies operate integrated North American supply chains built around the USMCA trade agreement that Trump himself negotiated.
Now he's threatening to blow it up over an advertisement.
The erratic pattern doesn't just create uncertainty—it destroys institutional credibility.
If trade policy can reverse within hours based on emotional reactions to TV ads, long-term commitments become unhedgeable risks. Companies can't price that volatility into contracts or feasibility studies.
Canada might simply ignore this latest outburst and wait for Trump to restart talks quietly next week, as he's done before.
But each cycle of threat-backdown-restart erodes the foundation for the $2.6 trillion bilateral trade relationship. Businesses need predictability. Trump's communication style makes that structurally impossible.
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