I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
Are you new here? Get free emails to your inbox daily. Would you rather listen? You can find our podcast here.
Today's read: 14 minutes.
Cinderella Meets Next-Gen Tech – invest before the clock strikes midnight tonight!
Elf Labs won historic rights to iconic characters including, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid. Now they’re transforming the $2 trillion media industry by leveraging cutting-edge patented technology. Think VR — without headsets and AI-powered talking toys.
More exciting: they just announced the launch of their mobile platform adding a major revenue stream and backed by a telecom giant with over 35 million subscribers.
🔥 Fundraise just launched & is already 2/3 full
🔥 New industry-shifting product/partnership
🔥 Share price changes tonight
With 1,800+ investors already, spots are running out fast. If you invest by midnight tonight, you can earn a 20% bonus on your investment.
Starting tomorrow…
We’re going to join the chorus of news outlets reviewing Trump’s first 100 days. However, we’ll be doing it in typical Tangle fashion: evaluating how Trump has performed on key campaign promises, then running through the other aspects of his administration, sharing perspectives from the left and the right side-by-side, then offering our own analysis of his term so far.
Part 1 will be released tomorrow for all Tangle readers, and it will include a breakdown of Trump’s promises and whether he is on track to keep them. Part 2 will be released for members only on Friday, and it will include assessments from the left and right — then “My take.”
Quick hits.
- President Donald Trump signed a pair of orders intended to lessen the impact of his tariffs on imported auto parts, authorizing a mix of credits and relief from other levies on materials. (The orders)
- President Trump called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in response to a report that the e-commerce company would begin displaying the added costs of Trump’s tariffs next to products on its site. Amazon denied that it was considering this policy. (The report)
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court temporarily suspended Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan following her arrest for allegedly helping an unauthorized migrant evade immigration authorities. (The suspension)
- The U.S. gross domestic product fell at a 0.3% annualized pace in the first three months of 2025, the first quarter of negative growth since Q1 2022. (The numbers)
- A Harvard University task force released two separate reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, finding that antisemitism on campus had increased following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and that many Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, faculty, and staff felt isolated and uncomfortable in the community. (The reports)
Today's topic.
Canada’s election. On Monday, Canada held a federal election for members of the House of Commons to the 45th Parliament. The Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, won a plurality of seats, securing a fourth consecutive term in power. The Conservative Party placed second, and party leader Pierre Poilievre lost his seat, casting his political future into doubt. While the Liberals did not take enough seats to win a majority, as the party that received the most votes, Carney will retain his position as prime minister.
The Liberals’ victory marks a rapid turnaround from the start of 2025, when the Conservatives were heavily favored to win. The race shifted in early 2025, when President Donald Trump proposed tariffs on Canadian imports and comments about annexing Canada became a defining issue of the race.
Back up: In January, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as leader of the Liberal Party, which then elected Carney as his replacement. Shortly after becoming prime minister in March, Carney called for a snap election. The maximum time between federal elections in Canada is five years, but they can be held sooner if the prime minister asks the governor general to dissolve Parliament, prompting a snap election.
The four largest parties competing in Monday’s election were the Liberals, Conservatives, the New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Québécois (which only fields candidates in the province of Quebec). These parties compete for seats in 343 ridings — or electoral districts — across Canada, with each riding representing a seat in Parliament’s House of Commons. Before the Parliament’s dissolution in March, the Liberals held 153 seats, the Conservatives held 120, the Bloc Québécois held 33, and the NDP held 24.
As of Tuesday, the Liberal Party had won 169 ridings, the Conservatives 144, Bloc Québécois 22, and the NDP 7. 172 seats are required for a majority, so Liberals will now have to work with a minority party to elect Carney as prime minister and pass legislation.
Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader since 2022, built his campaign on affordability issues, tax cuts, and criticisms of Liberal Party rule under Trudeau. He also pushed back on President Trump’s calls to make Canada a U.S. state, pledging to “put Canada first” if elected, which drew a rebuke from Trump. Poilievre’s leadership guided Conservatives to a 24-point polling advantage before Trump’s inauguration, but that lead had dwindled and was nearly erased by the time Carney called for a snap election in March.
Carney ran as an outspoken critic of President Trump, promising to maintain Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports and diversify the country’s alliances and trade relationships. In his acceptance speech on Monday, the prime minister said, “As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country… President Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. That will never happen.” However, Carney also spoke with Trump in late March and said the two agreed to open talks on a new economic and security deal with whomever won the election. On Tuesday, Trump called Carney to congratulate him on his victory, and Carney’s office said the two agreed to work together “as independent, sovereign nations.”
Today, we’ll break down the election results and their implications, with perspectives from the right, left, and Canadian commentators. Then, my take.
What the left is saying.
- The left argues Trump’s unpopularity with Canadians propelled Liberals to victory.
- Some say Carney is the right leader to address Canada’s economic challenges.
In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore called Trump “a triple loser in Canada’s election.”
“Elections are rarely defined by a single issue, but there’s not much doubt north of the border that Trump personally turned a certain victory for his Conservative counterparts into a stunning win for the left-for-dead Liberals. The ruling party made mobilizing the country against Trump’s various provocations the successful formula for a fourth consecutive national win under the leadership of recently appointed prime minister Mark Carney,” Kilgore wrote. “Despite clear signals he was putting Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in an impossible spot, Trump never let up… [he] was essentially offering to displace the entire Canadian election system and extinguish that country’s sovereignty in exchange for his benevolent rule from Washington.”
“So Trump has produced a revived government in Ottawa with a distinct mandate to fight him tooth and nail. But that’s not the only way he was a loser on Monday. It’s not at all unusual for politicians to rally domestic support by picking a fight with other countries; it’s a jingoistic political tale as old as time. In this case, there is zero evidence (outside the hardest core of MAGA loyalists) that Americans have rallied to Trump’s Canada-bashing cause,” Kilgore said. “If that’s not enough, the president’s persistent bullying of Canada has drawn extra attention to his single most unpopular economic policy initiative: the on-again, off-again trade war that has unsettled markets everywhere.”
In Bloomberg, Robert Burgess wrote “Canada just got the crisis manager it desperately needed.”
“Trump’s provocations on tariffs and musings about making Canada the 51st US state probably would have been easier to laugh off if the country’s leaders had taken steps to shore up its woeful productivity,” Burgess said. “Productivity is Canada’s Achilles heel. It’s so bad that the 1.8% drop in labor productivity in 2023 was the worst among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development… The poor performance, which carried into 2024, erased all productivity growth since 2017.”
“Luckily for Canada, Carney is more economist than politician… Comments by Carney on the campaign trail suggest he understands the challenge, promising a capital spending budget that would allocate tens of billions of dollars to investments in productivity-boosting infrastructure,” Burgess wrote. “Carney can also help the cause by adopting a policy championed by Pierre Poilievre, head of the defeated Conservatives, to boost housing in a nation that doesn’t have enough supply by tying municipal grants to a requirement that cities increase home construction by 15% a year.”
What the right is saying.
- Some on the right worry about Trump’s disruptive influence on the election.
- Others say Canadian voters alone bear responsibility for the outcome.
National Review’s editors called it the “anti-Trump election.”
“Trump personally played an enormous role in returning an incompetent and ideologically bankrupt Liberal Party to power, after a campaign where Prime Minister Mark Carney made himself the anti-Trump and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre couldn’t adjust to Trump’s truly bizarre late intervention,” the editors wrote. “Conservatives flipped seats in Ontario near Toronto previously held by the Liberals and the NDP. That would ordinarily be a great sign for Conservatives’ chances of winning the most seats nationally. They romped in western Canada, winning almost every seat in Alberta and Saskatchewan, similar to the last few elections.
“What Donald Trump did more than anything was unify the Canadian left and elevate the issue of who the prime minister would be. In parliamentary systems, it can be common for voters to choose parties over leaders. NDP and BQ voters know their party leaders will not be prime minister, but they vote for those parties anyway because they support their party platforms or want to register a protest vote against the major parties,” the editors said. “Carney’s case to voters was that he was the guy to trust in tough times because he would stand up to Donald Trump. And that was just barely enough to get voters to overlook ten years of economic stagnation under Liberal governments and cast their ballots for Carney.”
In PJ Media, Matt Margolis argued “stop blaming Trump for how Canada votes.”
“Never Trumpers still want to believe they’re right about Trump. Because they blame everything on Trump, and they have no other strategy in their arsenal,” Margolis wrote. “The anti-Trump hysteria has become so unhinged that his critics are now abandoning common sense altogether. They’re more comfortable embracing the delusion that Trump somehow manipulated millions of Canadian voters than facing the obvious truth: Canadians voted based on their own interests and priorities. Blaming Trump for the outcome of Canada’s election is as absurd as blaming Justin Trudeau for Kamala Harris’s embarrassing defeat in 2024. Like it or not, Canada remains a center-left country, and no amount of finger-pointing will change that.
“Canadian voters are capable of making their own decisions. They don't need Trump's help to vote against their own interests. If they want to keep the same party in power that's been destroying their economy and freedoms, that's their choice. Blaming Trump for their electoral decisions is not just ridiculous; it's infantilizing an entire nation of voters,” Margolis said. “And hey, let them pay the price for their stupidity. The Liberal Party's continued grip on power means that Canadians can expect more of the same policies that drove Justin Trudeau from office.”
What Canadian writers are saying.
- Some Canadian commentators praise Carney for deftly navigating the challenge posed by Trump.
- Others say Trump hurt Poilievre, but suggest the country could come to regret keeping Liberals in power.
In The Toronto Star, Andrew Phillips said “Mark Carney needs to govern as if he won a majority.”
“It would have been better for the Liberals and, more importantly, the country if one party had an unambiguous majority to make it as strong as possible in the ongoing battle with Donald Trump,” Phillips wrote. “But the last thing Carney should do is treat his win as something tentative or unsure. He needs to act as if he had a majority. He and his government will never be as popular or powerful as it is now. It’s great to act with ‘humility,’ as Carney promised to do in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, but the times call for quick, decisive action no matter the seat count in the Commons.”
“The best way the Liberals can position themselves for the next election is to actually carry out what they said they would do – speed up resource development, wean the country off its dependence on the United States, work out a new arrangement with Trump, launch a massive program to tackle the housing shortage,” Phillips wrote. “Just as important, this is a personal victory for Carney much more than a win for the Liberal party. Carney put the bleeding Liberals on his back and carried them to the finish line. The election turned into a referendum on leadership – who was the best person to stand up to Trump. Carney resoundingly won that vote.”
In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya wrote “Canada’s Conservatives botched the election of a lifetime.”
“It’s impossible to discuss how the Conservatives lost without talking about President Donald Trump, who has riled up the Canadian electorate since his inauguration in January. Given how close the results ultimately were, and the fact that the Conservatives won more seats in parliament than expected, most Poilievre supporters will be blaming him for the loss,” Subramanya said. However, Trump’s comment “put Poilievre in a near-impossible position. Much of his base—including many of his MPs—admire Trump. But with Trump openly attacking Canada, and with Poilievre’s own anti-woke rhetoric and disdain for the mainstream media, he found himself trapped. Attempts to distance himself from Trump could alienate core supporters, while embracing the American president would push away everyone else.”
“The Liberals’ victory has reshaped Canada’s political landscape in ways few could have imagined just months ago. With Mark Carney now at the helm, the country enters a new chapter marked by economic uncertainty, stagnating incomes, high housing costs, cost of living expenses that have skyrocketed, immigration levels that are straining public services while creating a populist backlash, a rising separatist movement in the West, and a volatile relationship with its closest ally. We’ll see now if Carney is up to the task.”
My take.
Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.
- Like everyone else, I’ve been stunned to watch Poilievre and Conservatives lose the enormous polling advantage they had in January.
- I think there’s a way to view this election without Trump being the main character.
- Still, it’d be foolish to ignore the primary role Trump’s antagonistic policies played in this election.
Part of me sees what everyone else is seeing, and it’s an easy story to tell: The Conservative Party had a huge lead in the polls until January, when Trump started “joking” about annexing Canada and Justin Trudeau stepped down. Then, Trump started slapping tariffs on Canadian goods and continued talking about Canada as the “51st state,” and Liberals started steadily eating into Conservatives’ lead. This epic, 24-point collapse was based in large part on the Liberals unifying around an anti-Trump stance that never would have been there had Trump not been so confrontational with our northern ally.
A couple months ago, I watched some clips of Pierre Poilievre and genuinely thought I was looking at the future prime minister. He seemed made for the moment — not exactly a “Trump-like” leader (though many people describe him that way), but someone who was breathing a very specific kind of Canadian nationalism into the country. The last thing I expected was to be sitting here two months later talking about how Poilievre didn’t just fail to lead the Conservative Party to a majority, but also failed to defend his own seat in Parliament.
Again: at a first read of this story, as an American politics reporter, it’s easy to see Trump as the single factor behind this election. The U.S. president promised to turn Canada into the 51st state (up to and including the day Canadians went to the polls) and instigated a trade war that has had real and immediate impacts for voters all across Canada.
However, there might be another story to tell about the Canadian election that does not make Trump the main character. This story is driven by the following beats:
1) This is the fourth consecutive term for Liberals, a rarity in Canadian government and a testament to the party’s staying power and the left-of-center politics held by most of the country. Yes, this election bucked the global trend against incumbents, but liberals still have home field advantage in Canada.
2) The turnaround in polling didn’t start with Trump’s annexation rhetoric or his Canadian tariffs, it started when Trudeau resigned. Candidates matter, and Carney’s entire image is built around him being an experienced policymaker and economist. He used to head Canada’s version of the Fed, and he’s never been a politician. Trump’s trade war played right into this strength, but he was made for the moment even without Trump; Carney was well suited to tackle Canada’s relatively stagnant economy and the dissatisfaction with Trudeau, whom he is very distinct from.
3) On the other side of candidates mattering, Poilievre focused a lot of his campaign on denouncing “radical woke ideology,” an obvious effort to inject some American conservatism into the lexicon up north. Trump impersonators notoriously flail, and pre-election polls showed Poilievre’s Trumpian promises to defund Canada’s national broadcaster and cut foreign aid hurt him with a lot of centrist voters.
4) We shouldn’t overstate this victory. Liberals did not attain a clean majority, and they lost several key seats in this election. Yes, this was a resounding and unexpected win, given where Liberals were three months ago — but, without a majority, it will be a messy governing coalition where plenty of power and influence will be held by smaller, left-leaning coalitions. The damage Trudeau did to the party, and the lack of trust that remains, is very real. It isn’t hard to imagine a near-future where Conservatives capitalize politically on whatever happens in the coming months.
The obvious take is that all of these things contributed in various ways. Just like it's incomplete to say inflation is the reason why Vice President Kamala Harris lost in 2024, I think it’s incomplete to say Trump is the reason Carney won. Carney was a better candidate, and Poilievre clearly veered too far outside what many Canadians wanted. But Trump made staring down the U.S. the primary story of the election, and it’d be foolish to ignore that basic fact.
Looking at it as an American, this election feels like a shot across the bow. Do you feel better about the tariff standoff with Canada now? I certainly don’t. I was struck by the tone of Carney’s acceptance speech: “America wants our land, our resources, our water,” he said. “President Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. That will never happen… We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons.” This does not sound like a man ready to acquiesce to Trump, and I think it’s safe to assume Canada’s relationship with the U.S. will never be the same.
We could feel the ripple effects through the Oval Office sooner rather than later. Oddly, Trump seems to have a more conciliatory attitude toward Carney than he ever did toward Trudeau — which is a reflection of how personal these political relationships are for Trump. In any case, the Trump administration will have to navigate a decidedly more econocentric power center as it tries to bend global trade to its will. I’m certain Carney isn’t the part-ally/part-foe Trump was hoping to navigate the trade war with, and I wonder how many other foreign leaders will try to follow a playbook Carney is now writing.
Take the survey: How large of a role do you think Trump played in the Canadian election? Let us know!
Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.
Your questions, answered.
Q: I'm curious how seriously you all take Trump's comments about not ruling out a 3rd term. Do you view that as a throw away statement or something more serious? Would it land in the "abhorrent" bucket that Isaac noted in his back from paternity leave publication or a less serious level?
—Tom from Minneapolis, MN
Tangle: At the beginning of Trump’s term, we were pretty dismissive of the idea that President Trump would run for a third term. The Constitution’s 22nd Amendment specifies that “no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice.” It seemed like an extreme overreaction from the left.
Then, in March, Steve Bannon went on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show and said (again) that he thinks Trump would win if he ran in 2028, adding “we’re working on a couple of alternatives” to solve the constitutional issue. A few days later, Trump told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that he is focused on the present but open to a third term, adding “there are methods which you could do it” and that he was “not joking.”
Welker asked Trump if he was considering sidestepping the 22nd Amendment by running as vice president to JD Vance (or another candidate), then have Vance resign and assume the office. “That’s one” method, Trump told Welker, but he did not describe any others.
Now, we no longer think it’s a 10/10 deranged theory. More like an 8/10.
First, and most importantly, that workaround of the 22nd Amendment runs straight into the 12th Amendment, which ends by saying “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
Second, you can’t take what Steve Bannon says as Trump dogma — remember, this is a person Trump fired during his first administration, who admits he loves flooding the zone with nonsense, and who quite obviously enjoys nothing more than trolling the media. Third, you also can’t take what Trump says today as dogma; that can obviously lead people into dismissing the wrong statements (see: tariffs), but this idea feels more akin to Trump saying he’ll put Hillary Clinton in prison (something he quite obviously never tried to do). Fourth, Republican congressional leaders Rep. Steve Scalise (LA) and Sen. John Thune (SD) — not known as people who regularly oppose the president — said, respectively, that Trump was likely just getting people talking and “having some fun” with the media.
The only ways Trump could serve a third term without amending the Constitution rely on some creative legal arguments and pretty outlandish alternative pathways. This is, of course, is to say nothing of Trump being 82 at the end of this term and all the very obvious backlash that would come if he even attempted this (I know many Republicans are acquiescing to him right now, but this is a bright red line I’m certain many wouldn't cross).
In sum, no, I don’t take it seriously — I think he’s trolling the media, and Republicans like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (who just suggested Trump could also be pope) are enjoying everyone’s reactions. Though I certainly wish he’d stop talking about it.
Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.
Under the radar.
On Tuesday, Pakistan said its army shot down a drone controlled by India that was allegedly trying to violate its airspace in disputed Kashmiri territory, heightening tensions between the countries after a string of incidents in the past week. India has accused Pakistan of supporting militants who carried out a mass shooting in the town of Pahalgam on April 22. In response to that incident, India threatened to cut Pakistan's water supply. Additionally, Indian and Pakistani forces have increasingly fired along the Line of Control, which marks the de facto border in Kashmir, and Pakistan's defense minister said he believes an Indian attack could be “imminent.” The incidents have renewed fears of nuclear conflict between the adversaries. Newsweek has the story.
Numbers.
- 8,565,379. The total number of votes received by the Liberal Party in Canada’s federal election, as of Wednesday morning.
- 8,089,721. The total number of votes received by the Conservative Party.
- +11.1%. The percent change in the Liberal Party’s share of the vote from the federal election in 2021.
- +7.5%. The percent change in the Conservative Party’s share of the vote from the federal election in 2021.
- –11.5%. The percent change in the New Democratic Party’s share of the vote from the federal election in 2021.
- 63% and 69%. The percentage of registered Canadian voters who voted in the federal elections in 2021 and 2025, respectively.
- 12. The margin of victory for the winning candidate in Terra Nova-The Peninsulas riding as of Tuesday night.
- 35. The margin of victory for the winning candidate in Terrebonne riding as of Tuesday night.
- 14% and 75%. The percentage of Canadians with a favorable and unfavorable view of President Donald Trump, respectively, according to an April 2025 POLITICO/Focaldata poll.
The extras.
- One year ago today we covered the NPR controversy.
- The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the link to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance.
- Nothing to do with politics: The Bronx Zoo is using a time-tested technique to feed its vulture chicks: a sock puppet.
- Yesterday’s survey: 3,015 readers answered our survey on policies to raise fertility rates with 71% supporting subsidized childcare. “Childcare or loss of one income are by far the biggest factor in an expensive world where both parents need to work to make ends meet,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
A two-year-old boy went missing on April 14 in Seligman, Arizona; but after 16 hours of searching by dozens of search-and-rescue personnel and law enforcement, a ranch dog seven miles away brought the boy back to safety. Tracks show Buford, the dog hero, walking with the boy for a mile to bring him to the ranch. “He got a 2-pound rib-eye last night,” Buford’s owner said. The boy was reported safe with only a few scratches. NBC News has the story.
Don't forget...
📣 Share Tangle on Twitter here, Facebook here, or LinkedIn here.
🎧 We have a podcast you can listen to here.
🎥 Follow us on Instagram here or subscribe to our YouTube channel here
💵 If you like our newsletter, drop some love in our tip jar.
🎉 Want to reach 370,000+ people? Fill out this form to advertise with us.
📫 Forward this to a friend and tell them to subscribe (hint: it's here).
🛍 Love clothes, stickers and mugs? Go to our merch store!
Member comments