Target boycott urged by American Federation of Teachers just as back-to-school season hits its stride

**Christy Strawser** (0:00)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else.
I'm Christy Strawser, you're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. Well, we're apparently really mad now at our neighbor to the north, Canada. And here's how you can tell, name-calling has escalated to rebranding threats. Here's WWJ in Detroit.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
The trade war developing between the US and Canada.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:26)
From the US side, the president claims that Canada wants the benefits of being a state without actually being one. From Canada side, they say that the Trump administration and President Trump specifically cannot be trusted. They're accusing the president of essentially pulling out the rug from underneath their feet in the final hours of these negotiations, throwing curveballs their way, and essentially trying to force them into a deal that they did not want to agree to.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:52)
ABC's Rachel Scott reporting there. Today we'll hear from Canadian officials in Ottawa. They are expected to impose 50 percent tariffs on the US and retaliation to President Trump's threats to add new 50 percent tariffs on their Canadian vehicles, auto parts and steel.
Meantime, President Trump claiming that he wants to rename Lake Ontario. So how do people feel about that? He wants to rename it Lake America. WWJ's Charlie Langton gathering more information and joins us live with details. Charlie.

**Charlie Langton** (1:20)
I'll tell you what, a lot of opinions on this one. That's the trade war escalates, it seems, between the US and Canada. Some say that the trade war is getting personal. Now President Donald Trump is, well, he's hinting that he's going to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Linda from Oak Park says, a name change? Oh, not again.

**Linda** (1:41)
Absolutely not.
Reason is because I'm from Texas, Louisiana area, and he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And I just can't get used to it.

**Charlie Langton** (1:59)
All right. President Trump says that they may not be doing a lot of business. They mean the United States may not be doing a lot of business with Ontario.

**Christy Strawser** (2:08)
President Donald Trump is at the center of this kerfuffle, but in the Democratic Party, socialist candidates and agendas are ascending. Is mainstream politics changing?
Here's Newell Normand in New Orleans.

**Newell Normand** (2:22)
There's an interesting phenomenon going across the election cycle at the present time relative to the Democratic Socialists of America. Pearson Cross, Director of the School of Behavior and Social Sciences and at the University of Louisiana, Monroe joins us. Pearson, welcome to the show.
I'm having a real difficult time figuring out or putting my finger on what is really contributing to this phenomenon, generating this energy around this thought process of almost really kind of dismantling major portions of our constitutional republic. Yeah.

**Pearson Cross** (3:02)
Well, I think we see this a lot on both sides. It's kind of a populist movement. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the way government in the United States is today. And this shows up, it showed up in the Republican Party with the movement for MAGA and Donald Trump. Certainly a strong reaction to the status quo, it's anti-status quo. And we've seen these kind of waves in the Democratic Party. Remember back to Occupy Wall Street and the election of some people who were about a validly socialist and now the Democratic Socialists of America.
So it just reflects a pretty broad revulsion at what's happening in American politics.

**Newell Normand** (3:44)
But, I mean, I get what you're talking about with MAGA, and even to a certain extent Occupy Wall Street, it wasn't really talking about dismantling, though, this traditional norms of a constitutional republic that we have grown accustomed to and have lived within and under for 250 years.

**Pearson Cross** (4:06)
Yeah. One of the things that, and I always talk about this in my classes, is that the founders designed the American Republic not to be very efficient or work very well because they built conflict into it, with the checks and balances in different institutions sharing power and all that kind of stuff. And it gets very, very frustrating. And for people who don't really understand that that's part of the deal that compromises part of the deal, that you're not going to get a whole loaf and those kind of things. You know, that's why we get these calls to reform government to do away with different things.
And it's always been there, but at times it appears less there.

**Newell Normand** (4:50)
I guess, is this about speed? Is this about efficiency? What else would be driving this, where they want to eliminate the Senate? They want to eliminate the Supreme Court? But it's almost as though we're throwing a lot of stuff on the wall, seeing what's going to stick.