Hillary Clinton says Republicans ‘secretly cheering’ for Mark Carney amid US-Canada trade negotiation

Hillary Clinton popping up to tell us what's really going on in the Republican Senate cloakroom is quite something. She's been out of office for a while now, but apparently she still has a direct line into the private thoughts of senators she doesn't work with, in a caucus she's never belonged to, about a trade fight she's not negotiating. That's not analysis. That's a guess dressed up as insider knowledge, delivered with the confidence of someone who used to be important and hasn't quite let go of the habit.

The actual policy question, whether tariff pressure on Canada makes sense or backfires, is worth arguing about. There are real trade-offs in a fight with our biggest trading partner, and reasonable people disagree on tactics. But that's not what Clinton offered. She skipped the argument and went straight to psychoanalyzing Republicans, telling the public that they secretly agree with her while publicly saying otherwise. It's a rhetorical trick as old as politics: don't debate the position, just claim the other side doesn't really believe it.

If there's genuine unease in the Senate about how the Canada talks are going, that's a fair thing to report and even fairer for those senators to say themselves. Plenty of them are perfectly capable of speaking up if they disagree with the administration's approach, and some have. What we don't need is a former cabinet secretary asserting she knows their private feelings better than they do, on a cable hit, as if that counts as evidence.

Trade fights get resolved by people willing to sit across a table and negotiate outcomes, not by cheerleading for a foreign prime minister from a studio in New York. Carney can defend Canada's interests. That's his job. Ours is to defend America's, and that requires actually engaging with the substance instead of guessing what Republicans supposedly whisper to each other when the cameras are off.