Has Canada found its Trump?

Jan 08, 2025

POLITICO'S West Wing Playbook: Transition of Power

By Ben Johansen, Eli Stokols, Lauren Egan, Lisa Kashinsky and Megan Messerly

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Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the preparations, personnel decisions and policy deliberations of Donald Trump’s transition. POLITICO Pro subscribers receive a version of this newsletter first.

DONALD TRUMP may be getting a doppelgänger up north. Or at least that’s what you may be led to believe.

PIERRE POILIEVRE — the firebrand leader of Canada’s Conservative Party — is likely to become prime minister in the coming months.

Although a member of JUSTIN TRUDEAU’s Liberal Party will temporarily replace the spry 50-something-year-old in coming weeks, Poilievre is the clear favorite to lead Canada following elections, which could take place as soon as this spring.

Poilievre, the 45-year-old smooth-talking Trudeau critic, has at times been compared to the president-elect for his pompous behavior and populist record. It’s a comparison that he has protested and, in light of the president-elect’s repeated promises to annex Canada, could be a liability for his own electoral prospects.

Like Trump, Poilievre is a long-time critic of the media. Two years ago, he proposed defunding the CBC, Canada’s well-respected public broadcaster. He’s peddled conspiracy theories that Trudeau, his political opponent, is in cahoots with the World Economic Forum. And both Poilievre and Trump have run campaigns focused on an “anti-woke” agenda, pushing back on cultural progressives.

He has the rhetorical flourish of a well-trained politician — he’s been in the conservative movement since his teen years — and he’s demonstrated proficiency with some commonly used Trump tactics. When Poilievre called Trudeau a “wacko” earlier last year at the House of Commons, Speaker GREG FERGUS called the comment “unparliamentary” and “unacceptable,” asking him four times to withdraw it — which he declined on every occasion. Oh, Canada.

“Stylistically, the overlap [between the two men] is really in their populism,” TED ALDEN, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told West Wing Playbook. “They both have run as representing ordinary people against the elites.”

DANIEL BÉLAND, a comparative politics professor at McGill University in Quebec, cited their rhetoric as a key similarity. “It’s about the way they frame things,” he said. “They are both blunt. They are not afraid of insulting their opponents.”

Opinions on Poilievre among Trump’s inner circle remain split.

Last month, Vice President-elect JD VANCE — sitting alongside the world’s richest man, ELON MUSK, at a dinner — cracked a joke at the Conservative leader’s expense.

“It’s not entirely clear it’s better for us to have a Mitt Romney with a French accent as prime minister,” Vance said, according to our Canadian colleagues.

Take that comment with a grain of salt — Vance does have ties to close Poilievre ally, JAMIL JIVANI, a member of the Canadian parliament and Vance’s contemporary at Yale Law School.

While Poilievre does not have a French accent, it’s true that his politics may be more aligned with MITT ROMNEY’s than Trump’s.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Although he has called for reducing the number of migrants Canada lets in, Poilievre is much more moderate than Trump on immigration.

“If he was a part of the United States, he would be what Republicans call a RINO,” Alden said.

Musk, in a departure from Vance, has tweeted out subtle support for the Canadian. “Great interview,” he wrote on X in response to a podcast appearance Poilievre had with far-right commentator JORDAN PETERSON.

In 2023, Poilievre went viral within conservative circles for his response to a journalist saying he was taking a page out of Trump’s book by running on populism.

“What are you talking about?” Poilievre said as he casually bit into an apple, making the journalist clearly uncomfortable.

Conservative pundits latched on. “Can we get him in our country?” former Fox News commentator MEGYN KELLY wrote on X. Musk shared the video on Tuesday, calling it a “masterpiece.”

This difference of opinion on Poilievre among key Trump allies “reflects a tension within Trump’s camp between the real MAGA, populist wing … and the more libertarian, tech bro side,” said GRAEME THOMPSON, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group. “Although Poilievre has the populist, anti-establishment approach, he is a much more economically libertarian figure than Trump.”

And any comparisons to Trump could backfire in Canada. The president-elect’s popularity in the Great White North remains low, and Trump’s repeated pledge to make Canada the 51st state has only forced Poilievre to separate himself further.

On Tuesday, Poilievre shot down Trump’s latest comments about annexing Canada through economic might. “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period,” he wrote on X. “We are a great and independent country.”

During the upcoming campaign, both Liberals and Conservatives are going to frame themselves as defenders of Canadian sovereignty and national interest against Trump, Thompson said.

“Trump, more than anyone in the last decade, more than any person or event, has suddenly rejuvenated a strong sense of Canadian patriotism, which had been a malaise in the country,” he added.

Alden believes that the U.S. president-elect’s demands will not only play a role in Canadian elections this year, but that they will deeply shape Poilievre’s campaign. “This is going to be the third Canadian election fought over the issue of effective annexation by the United States,” he said.

“It’s not what Poilievre wants to run the election on,” Alden added. “But it’s going to have to be what he runs on.”

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POTUS PUZZLER

Who did Queen VICTORIA allegedly call “the most handsome man” she ever met?

(Answer at bottom.)

Pro Exclusive

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Yellen praises Bessent’s financial market experience, via our MICHAEL STRATFORD

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Heads up, we're all transition all the time over on our live blog: Inside Congress Live: Transition of Power. Bookmark politico.com/transition to keep up with us.

THE BUREAUCRATS

FIRST IN WEST WING PLAYBOOK: TAMMY BRUCE, Trump’s pick to be State Department spokesperson, wrote in a 2003 book that the prohibition of the use of the n-word had gone too far in society, our DANIEL LIPPMAN writes in.

In her book “The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds,” she wrote about how a Black high school student in California had been suspended for two days for calling another Black person the n-word. She said the student had defended his use of the term by saying he had said it in “a fun, friendly, affectionate way.” The deputy superintendent of the school district agreed that it was not a slur if a Black student had said it in such an innocent way, but that if white students used it, “it would be a racial slur.”

“It's not really the use of a term, it's what you're thinking when you use it," she wrote. "'We-can-say-it-because-we're-black' reveals an undeniable double standard, one for protected groups and another for everybody else. Could a white person say the word ‘n—--’ in a fun, friendly, and affectionate way? Oh Lord, no!” she wrote, spelling out the word.

“This kind of confused, hypocritical doublespeak is inevitable because our speech-code culture has effectively determined that words mean different things for different people,” she wrote.

Bruce, a former longtime Fox News contributor, and a spokesperson for the transition didn’t respond to requests for comment.

SNEAK PEAK: Attorney General MERRICK GARLAND intends to publicly release special counsel JACK SMITH’s final report detailing evidence that Trump criminally conspired to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and disenfranchise millions of voters, our KYLE CHENEY reports. But he won’t release the second volume of the report describing Smith’s case against Trump for mishandling classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

The Justice Department revealed Garland’s decision on Wednesday in a court filing opposing Trump’s efforts to block Smith from publicizing the report in its entirety.

SOUNDS LEGIT: The Trump team was given a heads up of what questions Fox News anchors would ask him at an Iowa town hall last January, according to our ALEX ISENSTADT’s new book, “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.”

Per excerpts Isenstadt shared with CNN, Trump's aides warned the then-candidate that hosts BRET BAIER and MARTHA MacCALLUM would hit him with tough questions. But Trump, Isenstadt writes, wasn’t “taking prep for the telecast seriously. He’d basically be winging it.”

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s--t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt continued.

"With the questions in hand” ahead of the telecast, the team “workshopped answers.”

A Fox spokesperson said the network doesn't have any evidence of the breach and is planning to investigate further.

TRAGER GOING IN: ERIC TRAGER, a staff member for the Senate Armed Services Committee, was tapped as senior director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council, our HAILEY FUCHS and PAUL McLEARY report. Trager will succeed BRETT McGURK, who was a special presidential envoy for the global coalition to combat ISIS during Trump’s first term but resigned following Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria in 2018.

Under the Biden administration, McGurk has been central in the U.S. response to the war raging in the Middle East. It’s not clear if Trager’s portfolio will be as expansive and influential.

LUKEWARM REVIEWS ALL AROUND: Sen. BILL CASSIDY (R-La.), the chair of the committee that oversees the Health and Human Services Department, is not quite sold on ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. as secretary.

Cassidy, a physician, hasn't yet endorsed the nominee. After a meeting with RFK on Wednesday, the senator wrote in a tepid social media post that they had a “frank” conversation, where they spoke “at length” about vaccines, our CHELSEA CIRRUZZO and DANIEL PAYNE report. He was more explicit during an interview on Fox News last Sunday, stating that he agreed with Kennedy’s concerns about ultra-processed foods but that the nominee is “dead wrong” on vaccines.

Kennedy told reporters the meeting was “good,” but declined further comment. He’s also meeting this week with members of the Democratic caucus on the committees that oversee HHS.

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Agenda Setting

POLITICIZING WILDFIRES! COOL. As wildfires rage through the Los Angeles area, Trump and Elon Musk are unloading on Democrats, blaming their policies for the flames that have caused tens of thousands to flee their homes, our CAMILLE VON KAENEL reports. Trump lashed out at California Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM (“Newscum,” according to the president-elect), calling the fires “virtually apocalyptic” in a Truth Social post and pointing a finger at state rules protecting endangered species for limiting the amount of water that gets sent south from Northern California.

Musk also piled on, retweeting a comment by Libs of Tiktok criticizing a delay in building dams and adding: “Crazy.”

Newsom clapped back at the president-elect, who — just a reminder — previously threatened to withhold disaster aid to California over its political leanings. “My message to the incoming administration ... is please don’t play any politics,” the governor said before praising JOE BIDEN for quickly approving federal assistance for two of the fires.

MAYBE WE SHOULD THINK THIS THROUGH … While the real estate opportunities abound, Canada becoming the 51st state would come at a major cost — to Republicans. Maybe a president who can’t run again wouldn’t care, but our JONATHAN LAI reports that annexing Canada, in political terms, would create “a second California, a massive blue state that would hold dozens of House seats and create a huge Democratic advantage in the Electoral College.”

What We're Reading

Delays fuel GOP blame game over Trump nominees (POLITICO’s Rachael Bade)

Sure, the Romans Were Smart. But They Could Have Been Smarter. (NYT’s Katherine Kornei)

The impact of Trump’s agenda will depend on the state you live in (POLITICO Staff)

In exclusive sit-down, Biden reveals his biggest regret and the compliment Trump gave him (USA TODAY’s Susan Page)

POTUS PUZZLER ANSWER

Her Majesty allegedly thought our 13th president, MILLARD FILLMORE, was quite the hunk. But some, including Millard Fillmore House Museum curator MARIE SCHNURR have cast doubt: “That statement is disputed,” Schnurr said, though she acknowledged that Fillmore was “considered a very handsome man."

A CALL OUT! Do you think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents, with a citation or sourcing, and we may feature it!

Edited by Jennifer Haberkorn and Rishika Dugyala

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