Jim Antle, the magazine’s executive editor, brings to life the pages of the Washington Examiner’s magazine in the show Inside Scoop. Each episode features exclusive insight from the article authors and expert analysis.
In this week’s episode, Antle gives his take on why President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney are both to blame for the interruption of the U.S.-Canada friendship.
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“The problem is this is a disruption of what has long been a very productive economic, trade, and diplomatic relationship between these two important countries,” Antle said. “President Trump, in his first term, renegotiated NAFTA. Free trade with Canada has been a big part of our economy since the Reagan administration, and these tariffs have been sort of disruptive of the economy at a time when prices are still high, and American voters are very skeptical of the direction of the economy, especially on the cost of living.”
As neither is willing to back down and make a deal, Antle believes this is becoming a major issue in the midterm elections.
“A lot of battleground states, particularly for the Senate, are affected disproportionately by U.S. and Canada trade,” Antle said. “And, of course, these industries are all now so intertwined, making little things more expensive affects the bottom line even of American companies.”
Next in the show, Antle sits down with investigative journalist Hudson Crozier to ask: Did it pay off for deep-pocketed donors who flocked to the Southern Poverty Law Center to heal America’s divisions? Crozier explains that the SPLC, which once built its reputation taking on violent extremists like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, shifted its mission and methods as those overt organizations receded.
“As actual hate groups disappeared, from one could argue their effective work, they just expanded their definition of hate to put it through an increasingly left-leaning lens,” Crozier said. “So that it now includes transphobia and Christians who oppose homosexuality, or if you support restrictive immigration policies. And so, little by little, this so-called hate map of theirs just includes regular milquetoast conservative groups.”
He adds that this shift now compounds the serious federal allegations about the SPLC’s tactics and how donor money was deployed.
“[The DOJ] have alleged that the SPLC has literally funded members or infiltrators of hate groups, actual racist groups,” Crozier said. “Including someone who supposedly helped orchestrate the 2017 Charlottesville rally, at least in part, while not notifying donors that that’s what they were using the money for.”
In this week’s in-depth report, Donald Trump once made China his favorite foreign-policy target. But as Daniel DePetris explains, during Trump’s second go-around in the White House, his attention shifted much closer to home, to Mexico.
“Whether U.S. and Mexican policymakers can prevent political turmoil from undermining the relationship’s more functional side remains a long-term question,” DePetries writes. “We better hope they can, because the only winner otherwise are the cartels that continue killing in Mexico and running drugs in the U.S.”
Tune in each week at washingtonexaminer.com and across all our social media platforms to go behind the headlines in the Washington Examiner’s magazine show, Inside Scoop.
