The Truth About Trump’s Tariffs on Canada: Former Ambassador David L. Cohen Explains

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Ditch the clowns on the left.

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And the jokers on the right.

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And join Michael Smerconish right here, in the middle.

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This is The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:07)
David L. Cohen is the former United States Ambassador to Canada. And to our friends north of the 49th, I say, he's the one that you liked.
He's the one that you want back. He was President Biden's Ambassador to Canada. He's an old friend. He's had a distinguished career. Before his tenure in the State Department, Ambassador Cohen served as Senior Advisor to the CEO and Senior Executive Vice President of Comcast NBC Universal. He previously served as a partner and chair of the Philadelphia law firm of Ballard Spar and was the Chief of Staff to the Honorable Edward G. Rendell in his role as Mayor of the City of Philadelphia. I still think of him as the Mayor, by the way. And if I greet him, which is not as often as I should, because I'd love to spend more time with him, but I still refer to him as Mayor because it's an honorific.

**David L. Cohen** (2:01)
Yeah, well, I agree with you. It's hard for me not to think of him as the Mayor.

**Michael Smerconish** (2:06)
We say that because he's also been the Governor.

**David L. Cohen** (2:07)
Right, exactly. And it's an honorific to be the Governor. And normally, you'd go with the highest title that someone's achieved. But Mayor was the perfect job for Ed. And I think when people look at Ed, they still think of him as the Mayor. Just because you have more human contact as Mayor than you do as Governor.
But in any event, he's still struggling. He has Parkinson's, and he's struggling with that. But his mind is still all there.

**Michael Smerconish** (2:37)
And talk about mingling, like he was the mingler-in-chief.

**David L. Cohen** (2:40)
That is correct.

**Michael Smerconish** (2:41)
All right, let's talk about how we're going to approach this. Because first of all, we're privileged to have you. It's a great opportunity for POTUS listeners to learn about tariffs, which is a complicated subject. You were kind enough to share with me some notes. They were hard to follow, and that was the condensed version.
And we're also fortunate in that we reach most of Canada, and we get a lot of Canadian phone callers here on POTUS, and we're reaching the C-SPAN 2 audience. So that's why I'm so happy that you're here. How did this all begin? Like, why are we, in general terms, why are we talking about tariffs? I thought they were our closest ally.

**David L. Cohen** (3:19)
Yep. So where it begins should be there, which is that the United States has had no closer friend, partner or ally than Canada for over 100 years. And part of that's geographic proximity, part of it's cultural similarity, part of it is political similarity.
But the geographic proximity is a big deal. We share this 5,500-mile border. And when I say we're closest friends, partners and allies, that's from a trade perspective, which of course is where tariffs are implicated, but it's from a defense perspective, an intelligence perspective, a security perspective, and just a human perspective. You want to talk about mingling the number of Canadians who cross the border for vacations by car. And the same for the United States going to Canada. This has just been our closest relationship. Where it starts, and you know me, we've had these conversations, I have enormous, almost infinite respect for the office of the president. And as a diplomat, I would never criticize a president, past president or future. That's something I engaged in. And so I'm very careful talking about this, because President Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. And in our democracy, if you have a fair election and someone's elected, they're the president. And democracy works for respect for the outcome of elections. And as Joe Biden said, and I've copied it, you can't just respect the outcome of elections when you win.