The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute is facing fierce backlash and praise for a Canadian government ad airing in the U.S. that misrepresents the 40th president’s comments criticizing President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
It’s unclear how the California-based Reagan Foundation decided to join the fray. advertise, The document was purchased by Ontario Premier Doug Ford and used portions of a 1987 Reagan trade speech in which he questioned the wisdom of using tariffs as economic policy. But soon after, the foundation took to social media to say the ad was abusive. “Selective Audio” Trump invoked the former president’s name in his own social media criticism when he threatened to halt all trade with the U.S.’s northern neighbor and condemned the ad as excessive interference in U.S. politics.
The foundation’s statement appears to align free-trade champion Reagan with protectionist Trump, who has disdained decades of U.S. policy of imposing high border taxes, including on goods from major U.S. trading partners. The foundation, which helps support the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, also suggested legal action could be taken against the Ontario government for sponsoring the ad.
Reagan’s speeches are included in millions of government records governed by the Presidential Records Act signed in 1981 by his predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. The law places the president’s words in the public domain, meaning anyone must seek permission from the president’s foundation or library to redistribute them.
Ford said on Friday This ad will be phased out This would allow the U.S. and Canadian governments to resume trade negotiations. He said the ad has achieved its goals but will continue to air during the first two games of the World Series.
‘It’s easy to be intimidated by a call from the White House’
The backlash on social media was explosive, direct and far from unanimous.
“Incredibly cynical and betrayal of Reagan,” Dartmouth College economist Paul Novosad wrote in The Reagan Foundation. X. Nowosad said anyone who follows the foundation’s advice and listens to Reagan’s full speech “will see that he said exactly what the Ontario ad claimed.”
Jason Kenney, a former cabinet minister in Canada’s Conservative government, questioned the Reagan Foundation’s leadership on X. He said the entity was “vulnerable to intimidation calls from the White House, another sign of Trump’s huge corrosive influence on the American conservative movement.”
Trump supporters pushed back on social media, echoing the president’s claims and accusations that Canada is interfering in U.S. politics.
Foundation staff did not respond to questions from The Associated Press about how the matter was handled. But a board member said in a brief interview that he knew nothing about the statement and was not asked to participate in any deliberations before it was released.
“There may have been discussions about it, but I wasn’t involved in it,” private equity executive Bradford Freeman told The Associated Press.
White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt also did not immediately respond when asked via email whether the White House or anyone on behalf of the president had asked the Reagan Foundation to intervene.
Several other board members also did not respond to inquiries from The Associated Press.
The atypical role of the President’s Foundation
At the very least, these developments represent an unusually intense application of the foundation’s typical mission, which is to support Reagan’s legacy. The situation also highlights that the foundation is the latest US establishment institution to be embroiled in the controversy of Trump’s aggressive second administration.
Trump has previously triggered Many U.S. universities make policy concessionsincluding elite public and private schools, after withholding or threatening to withhold federal funds. The presidents of Columbia University and the University of Virginia are resigning as the Trump administration pressures them.
Some U.S. companies voluntarily Undo diversity initiatives. Recently, high-profile companies include Amazon, apple, Coin Library, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin and meta platform After ordering the demolition of the East Wing, they agreed to fund Trump’s planned White House ballroom. many those companies There was regulatory business before the Trump administration.
On “Truth Society,” Trump called the Canadian ad “fake,” even though the TV spot featured clear Audio excerpt Beginning with Reagan on April 25, 1987, radio address.
“Canada was scammed and Caught!! They deceptively ran a big buy ad saying Ronald Reagan didn’t like tariffs when in fact he loved our country’s tariffs, and national security,” he posted on Friday.
In a radio address, Reagan explained why he had imposed targeted tariffs on certain Japanese products as leverage in the two countries’ trade dispute over computer chips.
That gives Trump and his supporters reason to argue that Reagan might not oppose at least some of the current president’s moves on trade. However, the tariffs imposed by Trump have often been unusually high and far broader than those imposed by Reagan and other recent U.S. administrations. Even when explaining his Japan policy, Reagan spent much of his 1987 speech (less than 10 minutes long) emphasizing that he remained an opponent of tariffs, a trait the Ontario ad seemed to accurately reflect.
Reagan’s speech affirmed his broad opposition to tariffs
“The world is increasingly recognizing that the path to prosperity for all nations is to reject protectionist legislation and promote fair and free competition,” Reagan said.
He elaborated:
“You see, in the beginning, when someone says, ‘Let’s put tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. Sometimes it works for a short period of time — but only a short period of time.
“What ends up happening is this: first, local industries start to rely on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes needed to succeed in world markets. Then, while all this is happening, something worse happens. High tariffs inevitably lead to foreign retaliation, triggering fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less product.” Competition.
“So, very quickly, because of tariffs that artificially inflate prices, and subsidies that are inefficient and mismanaged, people stop buying. And then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries collapse; and millions of people lose their jobs.”
The Reagan Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, provides funding for his library, which is part of the National Archives and Records Administration. As part of its tax-exempt status, the foundation is prohibited from supporting political candidates and, generally, its activities must be nonpartisan.
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Barrow reported from Atlanta and Beatty reported from New York.