Jen Gerson: (this is real) I think we’ve reached the end of a real bilateral relationship with the United States. Friendship is over. Even a transactional alliance is pretty damn close to the brink.

Trump is not immortal. He is a storm that will pass for Canada, and when he’s gone, things will not and should not be the same as they were pre-2016, but they will be much better. Trump doesn’t understand commerce or trade on a fundamental level. If a company buys $100 million worth of Canadian aluminum, and uses it to make $200 million worth of goods to sell, in Trump’s mind, the company still “lost” $100 million. It’s still not clear if he understands what tariffs are and how they work, and he clearly doesn’t understand the impact they have on the US economy. But that makes him kind of unique.

Whoever replaces him, even if they are objectively worse in other ways, will probably understand that unnecessary trade wars with your biggest trading partner hurt your economy and undermine your long-term goals.

This is a storm, it will pass, and when it does, literally everyone will want to improve the relationship. The US has demonstrated that we can never trust them, and we can especially not trust their long-term commitments, but we still want to trade into business with them and it would be ridiculous to suggest that we’re not going to in the future.