There’s been a blizzard of commentary about the breakdown of U.S.-Canadian trade talks. Friend of TPM Paul Krugman has a good rundown of just how dependent the U.S. is on key Canadian exports — oil, lumber, hydropower electricity in addition to many other commodities. Of course, the U.S. is a net exporter of oil. But that’s in aggregate. As Paul explains, the details aren’t that simple. The upper Midwest gets most of its oil from Canada while a lot of oil produced in Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast gets exported. These patterns could only be changed over many years and then at great expense. There are similar embedded dependencies on lumber and electricity. Then there are things like potash (for agriculture and some industrial production) where the U.S. gets almost all of its supply from Canada.

Of course, so far this is all hypothetical. Canada isn’t pulling these levers. The U.S. is conspicuously avoiding placing tariffs on these supplies on which it has a critical dependence. But that only highlights U.S. vulnerability. Nothing is stopping Canada from pulling those levers as Trump’s trade war of whim heats up.

A few more thoughts on the collapse of U.S.-Canadian trade negotiations and the over-the-top U.S. predation that led to it. (See my earlier post here.) Here’s a portion of an analysis piece from the Toronto Star …

Doing a deal under the conditions Carney described would clearly have undermined Canada’s pivot to new markets by putting Carney firmly under the thumb of the U.S.

As the prime minister described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

It does, however, jive with Trump’s repeated 51st state taunts when he returned to the White House.

And Trump’s National Security Strategy said of America’s neighbours in the Western Hemisphere: “We want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.”

As Donald Trump not so much dismantles the U.S.-backed global order as dynamites it, that destruction coupled with the rise of a more vocal and electorally prominent U.S. left has renewed the discussion of just what that U.S.-backed global order was. This passage and this whole U.S.-Canada breakdown illustrates a lot of it.

You’ve probably seen that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has walked away from trade talks with the U.S. That has led the U.S. to impose staggeringly large (and certainly illegal) tariffs on Canada, and Canada is responding in kind. It’s not clear precisely what demands the U.S. made that prompted Carney to do this. Given the pain this will cause Canada, at least in the near-term far more than the U.S., they must have been not only unacceptable but an affront to Canada’s sovereignty and national dignity.

As I understand it, negotiations appeared to be going well and productively. They began as an attempt to find an agreement to forestall Trump’s original threat of a new round of draconian and illegal tariffs. Indeed, they appeared to be so near completion that an article I saw mid-week referred to Mexico eyeing and looking to negotiate a deal with comparable contours. Point being, it was a measure not only of how well the negotiations appeared to be going but how close they seemed to completion. The broad outlines were known to other interested countries.

Then Carney abruptly ended them in response to new demands.

I wanted to follow up on my post about Pat Ruffini’s deep dive about the accuracy of Senate race polling in recent cycles and whether they’ve overstated Democrats’ strength. But since I wrote that post, I’ve also gotten a few emails from friends and TPM readers about polling generally. So I wanted to combine all of this together into some general comments on polling and whether we should care about it at all.

In the wake of the big apparent polling misses in Michigan and Wisconsin, we’re seeing another wave of discussion about a purported “crisis” in polling and what we should collectively do about it or what the polling industry should do about it. Mostly, the answer is there is no “crisis” — at least in the sense of one that any of us should care about as some problem for American democracy or elections or anything else. If you’re in the polling business, it may well be a problem. But if you’re not, who cares? There might be a crisis in Swiss cheese marketing too. But if I’m not a cheese monger, why do I care?

If you’ve been online in the last few days you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to Natalie Harp Discourse (NHD), the phenomenon surrounding a woman who has served since January 2025 as President Trump’s human emotional comfort blanket. Attention to Harp had been growing online over the last couple weeks. (Perhaps the canonical account on her role was published by the New York Times just after the 2024 election.) Even the TPM Editors’ Blog has been in on the action. But it kicked into high gear on Sunday when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) referenced her with a mere three words in a campaign speech which was then sliced and diced for maximum social media exposure. Let me quote the full sentence with the three words about Harp in italics: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

This may seem like fluff and frivolity to some. But among other things it brings to the surface a question that has hovered around the opposition to Trump ever since he entered the political scene more than a decade ago. I had been thinking about this in recent weeks because it becomes increasingly relevant, especially with the onset of the 2026 midterms.

In my last post I mentioned this data analysis GOP pollster and consultant Pat Ruffini has put together looking at Senate polling going back through the last four cycles, so 2018 through 2024. Ruffini is a very partisan Republican in all the meanings of that word. But I think of him as broadly reliable when it comes to compiling and analyzing hard data. His analysis, probably not surprisingly, shows that polling in aggregate over-estimated Democrats in each cycle. Needless to say, there’s a lot of “cope” in this analysis, reassuring fretful Republicans that it’s not as bad as it looks. But I was curious because this at least broadly matches with my observations. Not always but more often than not.

You can read the analysis here. You have to subscribe to his Substack to read the whole thing. But you can get the gist before you get to the paywall. I’ve reached out to several polling analysts whose judgment I trust to get their sense of the analysis. So perhaps I’ll have more to say based on responses.

In any case, here are the main takeaways.

Today I’m going to discuss two tidbits from the world of polling. In a second post I’m going to discuss an interesting and, for Democrats, somewhat chastening look at the last four cycles of Senate polling compiled by GOP pollster/consultant Pat Ruffini. But first some stunning news today about an out-of-nowhere polling outfit called Median Strategies. They polled a number of races but their survey showing DSA-backed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead got the most attention. Today the firm announced it is ceasing operations, says it is withdrawing all its previous polls and says they should not be treated as “genuine polling data.”

They then go on to make this almost unbelievable statement: “Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem wihtout independent verification.” They then follow with a “Thank you for your understanding.”

Here is an update on a story you may not yet have heard of. It manages to be at once fascinating, deeply disturbing and a perfect living metaphor of our age. AI models are vulnerable to something called “model collapse.” In the early days of LLM-based AI there was a seemingly limitless store of online content to train it on. But that’s mostly been used up. Meanwhile, a rapidly growing percentage of online content is produced by AI. If you try to train AI on the product of AI it’s a bit like locking a person in a sealed room and watching them slowly suffocate as they breath in the product of their cellular respiration (CO2) rather than the fuel (oxygen) that makes the body function. Not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. This has made the creators of AI increasingly desperate in their search for new artifacts of human intellection — a phrase I heard once from the great Chaucer scholar John V. Fleming who died this past May — to feed into large language model AI systems.

The solution? Physical books published before 2022. You can guarantee as a matter of absolute certainty that whatever their quality, their merits, whatever they’re about, they are the product of human minds.

It’s relatively easy to scan a book without damaging it. But if you’re doing it at scale the costs of scanning and digitizing a book’s contents without damaging it are vastly higher. So what AI companies appear to be doing is buying up books, cutting off the spines, feeding them into industrial scale scanners and then throwing away.

With the growing attention being given to Trump handler/confidante Natalie Harp, I looked up this November 2024 Times article which captures some of the relationship …

“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

At the White House, Ms. Harp is likely to serve a role unlike any presidential adviser in modern history.

Given that Natalie Harp is not only a conventionally attractive women but also Trump’s type, there’s an obvious and understandable inclination to imagine that they are involved in a sexual relationship. Perhaps they are. But my best guess is that the relationship is more akin to an emotional support pillow/blanket. If they are having an affair, mostly who cares? There are so many other higher priority dangers this rapidly-fading, degenerate man-child poses to our country and our future. If he’s receiving some kind of emotional soothing from Harp in whatever form better he get it there than from invading more countries.

The more public-relevant issue with Harp is that she appears, from pretty credible reporting, to be a key vector for Trump’s incoming and outgoing information. She notoriously carries with her a portable printer and batteries so she can print out flattering press coverage. If you’re familiar with Trump’s Truth Social feed it’s clear that he frequently bases new de facto policies, attacks, demands … what have you, on things that come from far-right sites or absurd Twitter threads. So like new claims of vandalism, justifications for his actions that need new rationales. There’s this feedback loop of randoms trying to come up with justifications, arguments, new forms of retaliation. Then Trump sees them adopts them as his own. They’re no less stupid or dangerous or absurd but like Frankenstein’s monster they become real, if no less disfigured, when he brings them to life and invests them with the power of the American presidency. Harp seems to be the vector for a lot of that. Reporting also suggests that when he fires off new demands or threats or whatever else it’s often Harp who is clicking “send”.

Needless to say there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of sycophantic idiots in the second Trump White House. She may simply have taken over some of the role once occupied by Dan Scavino who has now ascended to bigger things. So it’s not like she’s the problem. Perhaps more like she’s the current executor or actuator of the problem. In any case, she’s an important figure beyond just rumor and jokes.

I had a couple conversations today which turned on the role of private equity in today’s economy and the importance of business models that align with a company’s purpose. Both of them were relevant to our soon to be completed drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. In the new episode of the TPM Social Club podcast Joe Ragazzo and TPM head of product Derick Dirmaier talk about the impact of private equity on sports. This involves caricatures of course but I think of Venture Capital and Private Equity as sort of twin players, often with perverse and deleterious effects on the lives of companies, the first on the ascent of the rocket, the second on the descent. Both have had deeply negative impacts on the news and journalism industry. In both cases that’s because scale and market dominance don’t play the same role in the news business as they do for social media or the production of widgets and many other kinds of business. Most require being rooted in the lives of particular communities, often geographical communities, or having a more than transactional relationship with an audience.