Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Ronald Reagan's anti-tariff ad that irritated President Trump was “the best ad I've ever run.”
The television ad featured an edited edit of President Reagan's 1987 radio address in which he stated that tariffs only serve to “hurt every American” Trump was so irritated by the ad, which featured the man he likes to compare himself to against him, that he started a new trade war with Canada, announcing an additional 10 percent tariffs on its products over the weekend.
“Canada was caught red-handed running a fraudulent ad for Ronald Reagan's tariff speech,” Trump wrote on his blog. Truth Social to justify raising tariffs. The Reagan Foundation said they “created an advertising campaign using selective audio and video footage of President Ronald Reagan. The ad misrepresents the president's radio address,” and “permission was not sought or received to use or edit the statements. The Presidential Foundation and the Ronald Reagan Institute are considering their legal options in this matter.”
But Ontario's premier, who produced the ad in the first place, isn't concerned.
“You know why President Trump is so upset now? Because it was effective,” Ford said on Monday. “The only people who win in a tariff war are people around the world who don’t necessarily agree with us and with the United States.”
Ford says the ad received more than “a billion impressions worldwide.”
That shared animosity underscores the rift that Trump's retaliatory tariffs have caused in relations with some of America's closest allies.
“We cannot control the trade policies of the United States. We recognize that these policies have fundamentally changed from those of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and this is a situation where the United States is imposing tariffs on each of its trading partners,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said reporters last Friday when Trump first began complaining about the ad. “What we can control is how we build here at home… What we can also control, or at least greatly influence, is the development of new partnerships and opportunities, including with the economic giants of Asia, which is the purpose of this trip.”
