Live Updates: Trump Cuts Off Trade Talks With Canada

“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

Mr. Trump claimed that the ad was fake and said that it had been placed “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” which is currently considering a legal challenge to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

But the quotes are drawn from a radio address that Mr. Reagan gave in April of 1987, in which he urged Congress not to pursue protectionist policies against Japan and gave a blistering critique of the economic effects of tariffs. Although quotes are taken from different parts of Mr. Reagan’s speech, there is no indication that they have been altered.

It was unclear if the president had spoken to Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada or anyone in the Canadian government before announcing that he was canceling trade talks. Mr. Carney’s office and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Trump’s Thursday missive was not the first indication that he had noticed the ad.

“I see foreign countries now, that we are doing really well with, taking ads, ‘Don’t go with tariffs,’” Mr. Trump told reporters in the White House on Tuesday. “They’re taking ads. I saw an ad last night from Canada.”

“If I was Canada I’d take that same ad also,” he added.

On Thursday, though, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute said in a statement posted on social media that the Ontario ad had used “selective” audio and video from Mr. Reagan’s address. “The ad misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address,” the statement said, without clarifying how.

It was that statement that apparently prompted Mr. Trump to post on Truth Social that he was ending the talks with Canada.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump has taken an aggressive stance toward Canada, which is a source of many U.S. imports and a destination for many American exports. He has imposed a 35 percent tariff on some of its most critical exports and has repeatedly suggested that Canada should be the 51st U.S. state.

Canadian sentiment toward the United States has soured drastically over the past several months because of the Trump administration’s moves. This latest development comes as the Toronto Blue Jays prepare to face off at home against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the World Series on Friday, a major moment of pride for Canadians rallying around their flag.

It is unclear where Mr. Trump’s latest statement leaves the two countries’ relationship. The United States, Canada and Mexico have been preparing for a review of their shared free trade agreement, which is scheduled to be completed by next summer.

Mr. Carney visited Mr. Trump at the White House earlier this month for the second time, but the cordial meeting yielded no breakthrough in talks. Mr. Carney, who has said that Canada’s old relationship with the United States is over, said in a major economic policy address this week that he wanted to double Canada’s exports to destinations other than the United States over the next decade.

The ad that Mr. Trump mentioned in his post was taken out by the government of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and a key nexus of economic cooperation with the United States.

The government of Ontario said it had spent 75 million Canadian dollars, about $53.5 million, to broadcast the ad. It began airing in the United States last week during a Blue Jays game against the Seattle Mariners, and it was scheduled to continue to air over the following two weeks.

“When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products,” Mr. Reagan is heard to say in the ad, over various images of economic activity. But, he warns, tariffs cause damage. “Markets shrink and collapse,” Mr. Reagan says, “industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Mr. Reagan gave the 1987 radio address from Camp David before a visit by the Japanese prime minister to Washington. At the time, anger had been growing in the United States over Japan’s ballooning trade surplus, but politicians like Mr. Reagan continued to believe in the benefits of free trade.

Mr. Reagan had just placed some tariffs on Japanese products in response to Japan’s failure to abide by a trade agreement over semiconductors. But he urged Congress not to restrict his options by issuing more protectionist measures. And he decried the economic effects of tariffs, saying that over time, they would make protected industries less competitive and set off trade wars that would destroy American jobs.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, introduced the ad on Oct. 16, writing in a Facebook post on his official page that “we’ll never stop making the case against American tariffs on Canada.”

In a speech two days earlier, talking about what had motivated him to take out the ad, Mr. Ford said he had listened to the Reagan speech and thought, “Let’s take Ronald Reagan’s words and let’s blast it to the American people.”

The dispute over the Reagan ad taken out by Canada’s most populous province is typical of Ford. He has previously taken out ads targeting U.S. audiences to oppose tariffs, and has sought publicity to promote his views. Early on in the trade dispute with the United States, for example, Ford pulled all U.S.-made liquor off the shelves of the Ontario government-owned liquor monopoly.

Unpaid federal workers have been turning to gig work, like food delivery, to help cover costs. And many have been waiting in long lines at food banks around the country, according to news reports.

Among those working without pay is Pamela Ward, a telephone service representative for the Social Security Administration in Birmingham, Ala.

Ms. Ward said that she knew she would not be paid this week, but seeing a $0 paycheck was still a shock.

“It was a rough day today,” Ms. Ward, 52, said on Wednesday. “I think the roughest part is I’ve worked all my life. I’ve worked 27 years, and this is my first time ever receiving a paycheck when there was nothing on it.”

President Trump is dipping into other funds to pay the military and federal law enforcement during the shutdown.

The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that about 830,000 federal workers are still being paid because their offices are self-funded or there is other available money to use, including funds carried over from the last fiscal year.

By law, workers are to be paid back once the government reopens. But Mr. Trump has said he may not pay back everyone, regardless of the legal implications.

Rui Carlos Pereira de Sá, a biomedical engineer and physiologist at the National Institutes of Health’s division of Health Informatics Technologies, said he had been saving money over the past nine months because he was expecting to be fired like many of his co-workers had been this year in response to Mr. Trump’s demands to shrink the size of the government.

So when he was furloughed on Oct. 1, he said his family was already used to scaling back on spending.

“I am lucky, because my wife is not in government,” said Dr. de Sá, 50, who lives in Potomac, Md., a wealthy Washington suburb. His wife is a regional manager at a biotech company. “She makes more money than me, and that gives us a little bit of a privilege that others do not have.”

Dr. de Sá said he was working with a group to collect and distribute food on Saturdays to fellow furloughed federal workers in front of his agency’s Bethesda headquarters.

Ms. James has said the charges against her — one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement to a financial institution — are “baseless.” Her indictment, she has said, is “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.”

Ms. James stands accused of lying about her purpose in buying a house in Virginia in 2020. Prosecutors say that while she said the house would be a secondary residence, she in fact used it as a “rental investment property,” renting it to a family of three.

But Ms. James’s great-niece has lived in the house since 2020, and testified to a Norfolk grand jury that she does not pay rent. Ms. James has reported only $1,350 in rent from the property on her tax forms.

Career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who had reviewed the evidence had concluded it did not support criminal charges, but the president abruptly forced out the U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the office and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had no prosecutorial experience.

Soon after her appointment, Ms. Halligan secured a grand jury indictment against Ms. James and, in an unrelated case, false statement and obstruction charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Mr. Trump had publicly implored Justice Department officials to charge Ms. James and Mr. Comey with crimes, calling them “guilty as hell.” Both have been longtime antagonists of the president, and Ms. James had won a civil case for business fraud against him in New York.

Arraignments are generally brief proceedings for the defendant to enter a formal plea. But the day will also mark the beginning of Mr. Lowell’s efforts to persuade the judge to dismiss the case before it can go to trial.

On the eve of her court appearance, lawyers for Ms. James told the court that they intend to challenge the legality of Ms. Halligan’s appointment, as was already done by Mr. Comey’s legal team. The filing by Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, suggests both those efforts could be joined into a single case for a judge to hear.

Separately, Ms. James’s lawyer also asked the judge overseeing her case to warn Ms. Halligan about making any extrajudicial comments about the case. Earlier this month, Ms. Halligan sent a series of argumentative texts to a reporter at Lawfare, a national security website. In the texts, Ms. Halligan pushed back against some descriptions of the evidence, arguing that her case is stronger than some of the reporting would suggest.

“These extrajudicial statements and prejudicial disclosures by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. attorney, run afoul of and violate the federal rules of criminal procedure, the code of federal regulations, this court’s local rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility and D.O.J.’s justice manual,” Mr. Lowell wrote.

He urged the judge to intervene “to prevent any further disclosures by government attorneys and agents of investigative and case materials, and statements to the media and public.”

With the boat strikes, the U.S. government has provided no specifics on how it knew the vessels were carrying drugs, or on the nearly 40 people killed in the attacks.

As a result, the details of the intelligence behind the strikes remain murky. Here is what we know.

What has the Trump administration said about the evidence?

President Trump said on Thursday his administration had “incredible intelligence” that drugs were being smuggled on the boats.

In earlier comments, he has spoken more expansively about the intelligence.

“We have recorded proof and evidence,” Mr. Trump said last month. “We know what time they were leaving, when they were leaving, what they had, and all of the other things that you’d like to have.”

He went on to say that the cargo was “spattered all over the ocean.”

“Big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” he added.

(Any drugs floating in the water and spotted by aircraft after a strike would probably be cocaine, or a bulkier drug. Fentanyl, which largely comes from Mexico, not Colombia or Venezuela, is highly concentrated and transported in very small packages, one of the reasons it is hard to intercept.)

Mr. Trump’s comments suggest he was referring to intercepted communications and overhead imagery. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, has reinforced the perception that the United States knows who is on the boats, where they are coming from and what they carry. “We track them from the very beginning,” he said this month.

Officials briefed on the strikes said that intercepted “signals intelligence” suggesting the boats were carrying drugs is the strongest intelligence collected.

Signals intelligence could mean radio traffic from the boats, or information from mobile phones. Officials have not specified, probably to protect their ability to collect information in the future.

How reliable are intercepted communications?

At first glance, signals intelligence can appear very strong. Such information can show a mobile phone associated with a drug trafficker has boarded a specific boat. It can also reveal text messages or radio traffic from a boat believed to be carrying drugs.

But signals intelligence alone can be misleading. Drug dealers, like terrorists, tend to speak in code. No one sends a message that says: “I have loaded up the cocaine, and we are ready to take it to Trinidad for transport to Europe.”

Sometimes drug dealers talking in code are not nearly as clever as they think. Other times, it is easy to read an elliptical conversation as proof positive, when it is not.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, played excerpts from recordings of Iraqi military officers talking about a “modified vehicle” and “forbidden ammo.” As presented by Mr. Powell, it sounded like evidence that Iraq was hiding chemical weapons from international inspectors. As we now know, it was a grave misreading of those conversations. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Former spies say the best use of signal intelligence is to combine it with other information, like satellite imagery and reports from informants in other countries.

What are America’s intelligence capabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Mr. Trump has dramatically reprioritized national security threats in his first months in office, pushing counternarcotics efforts to near the top of his list.

But intelligence collection on counternarcotics is not new. Gina Haspel, a C.I.A. director in Mr. Trump’s first term, began increasing collection on cartels, work that expanded under her successor, William J. Burns, the Biden administration’s C.I.A. director.

Those efforts have helped improve intelligence collection about trafficking routes and cartel operations.

Officials, have said the military, not the C.I.A., has collected the intelligence leading to the strikes. The military includes the National Security Agency, which oversees the collection of signals intelligence for the entire government.

The government has also collected an extensive amount of visual imagery from satellites and intercepted important communications about narcotics trafficking, allowing intelligence agencies to track drug dealers.

Some people briefed on the collection say they do not doubt the boats struck by the U.S. military are carrying drugs. But officials acknowledge that intelligence on Latin America is imperfect.

U.S. officials say they do not know as much as they would like about Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang. Mr. Trump has said the gang is controlled by the Venezuelan government, an assertion contradicted by the available evidence.

What is missing from the intelligence picture?

When the United States does a counterterrorism strike, officials collect information about targets and their movements. They also collect information about who else might be killed in an airstrike or special operations raid.

While the administration has spoken confidently about the drugs on the boats, it has not provided information about who else might be on the boats.

Some boats have been crowded, suggesting they could have been moving migrants as well as drugs. Some of the people on the boats have been from multiple countries, not just Venezuela, contradicting the administration’s assertions that officials knew all about the smuggling operations.

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has said a strike in mid-September killed a fisherman, and amounted to murder. U.S. officials have said there were Colombians aboard at least one other boat that was hit in strikes that were meant to target Venezuelan traffickers.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.