Read excerpts from Reagan’s 1987 speech on tariffs

Reagan comments the government of Ontario used actually came in the context of him levying new tariffs against Japan. (Credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via CNN Newsource)

U.S. President Donald Trump canceled trade talks with Canada on Thursday, citing a recent ad released by the government of Canada’s Ontario province that quoted former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s 1987 radio address to the nation on fair trade.

Trump said the ad, which aired in the U.S., was “fake,” though it was in fact edited using real clips from Reagan’s five-minute talk ahead of a meeting on trade with Japan’s prime minister.

CNN analyzed key excerpts from the speech below. Quotes from the ad are highlighted.

As you might notice, the Reagan comments the government of Ontario used actually came in the context of him levying new tariffs against Japan — rather than a general broadside against the concept of tariffs. This reinforces that Reagan did sometimes use tariffs. He emphasized not just free trade, but fair trade.

In this case, he accused Japan of failing to abide by a 1986 agreement and allowing for the dumping of semiconductor chips into the markets, which harmed American producers’ ability to compete. He levied 100 per cent tariffs on Japanese laptop computers, power tools and television sets, among other items. It was the first major trade retaliation against Japan since the Second World War.

Reagan’s remark that he is “loathe” to impose tariffs is where we start to get into the contrast with Trump’s approach, which has been to levy huge tariffs on many countries in the service of negotiating. Reagan White House officials repeatedly emphasized this was a step they didn’t want to take, but they had their hand forced. “Nobody wants a trade war, but nobody wants to be a patsy either,” Reagan White House chief of staff Howard Baker said shortly before the tariffs were announced.

This section is another notable difference from Trump. While Trump initially billed his tariffs as being about unfair trade policies, that justification quickly came into question. He’s justified his tariff threats using a multitude of reasons, including sometimes dubious claims of alleged drug-trafficking, Denmark refusing to sell Greenland to the United States, and most recently on Thursday, him being upset about an ad from the government of Ontario. The formula for Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs also, quite notably, was focused not on specific unfair trade policies, but rather trade imbalances.

The line about “free trade” and also “fair trade” was indeed a theme of Reagan’s presidency. But Reagan also frequently emphasized that his tendency was toward the free side of trade. He routinely derided the protectionism that Trump now hails.

“Today, protectionism is being used by some American politicians as a cheap form of nationalism,” he said in 1988, crediting Americans for rejecting “the siren song of protectionism.”

“So-called protectionism is almost always self-destructive, doing more harm than good even to those it’s supposed to be helping,” he said in 1985. And contrary to Trump’s posture about unequal trade, Reagan said in 1987 that “protectionism is not the way to resolve our trade imbalance.”

Reagan often railed against Smoot-Hawley, a package of large tariffs signed into law in 1930 that many historians indeed say worsened the Great Depression. Trump has taken the polar opposite view. He claimed in April that the depression “would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy. It would have been a much different story.”

This epitomizes the differences between Trump and Reagan on tariffs. Trump has hailed the power of tariffs and the impact they could have on American manufacturing. He has called tariffs the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Reagan, by contrast, generally cast tariffs as a necessary evil that sometimes needed to be invoked — and cast arguments that tariffs are pro-American as political pandering.

Reagan was clear that he viewed trade wars as bad and best to be avoided. Trump has said that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”

Trump is currently going much further than even many congressional Republicans seem comfortable with on his tariffs. But the situation with Reagan was often the opposite. Congress back then tried to go further than Reagan on tariffs, and he repeatedly vetoed bills he viewed as too protectionist.

If there’s some commonality between Reagan and Trump, it’s in how neither wanted to be constrained by Congress on this issue. Reagan here was referring to an effort in Congress that called for even tougher retaliation against countries like Japan. He later vetoed the legislation.