Trump's maple leaf rag sounds increasingly discordant
Is the president simply psychologically unable to comprehend that Canadians are actual human beings with their own ideas about how they want to be governed?
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
I’ve been banging the drum about Donald Trump banging the drum about annexing Canada, not just because it’s a bizarre and fascinating story, but also because it represents a serious misstep by Donald Trump for which opponents can make him pay a steep price. In fact, the more he pursues this obsession, the more potential damage might be done to his presidency. Context is key — most people rightfully wonder why Trump is talking so much about Canada when he told voters his top priorities would be improving the economy and deporting immigrants. And at a basic level, his idée fixe has led him to say things that sound objectively loony (pun intended, thank you), in a way that lands more harshly than some of his other mad king pronouncements. To an ordinary listener, talking about taking over the sovereign country to our north sounds grandiose and crackpot. Here are a few of his recent choice remarks, in which sinister and stupid grapple clumsily for the upper hand:
“Visually, if you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S., just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago, and it makes no sense.”
“This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it—between Canada and the U.S.”
“When you take away that artificial line . . . and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that.”
"I deal with every country, indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
“Canada was meant to be the 51st state because we subsidize Canada by $200 billion a year.”
We’ll return shortly to the deeper meanings of Trump’s focus on the appearance of a united U.S. and Canada on a map, but for now let’s just appreciate his celebration of geographical aesthetics — as if the point of governing were not to improve the lives of human beings, but to create ginormous, cool-looking countries.
Towards Canada and Canadians, the president has offered a witches’ brew of sweet and sour, alternating overt enticement with overwrought threat. On the one hand, he seeks to lure Canadians with lower taxes and an improved defense, and will even speak words of sweet woo, as when he avers that Canada is “so perfect as a great and cherished state.” What vast northern land among us does not want to be cherished? On the other, he accuses Canada of depending on the United States for its very existence (“Without our subsidy, Canada, you know, doesn’t exist really. . . . Canada is totally reliant on us”), leading to the irrefutable conclusion that “Therefore, they should be a state.” And Trump has gone still further, saying that Canada isn’t just dependent: it’s an out-and-out freeloader (“We lose $250 billion a year on Canada”), or even a sinister rival, as when he claims that Canada stole the U.S.’s auto industry.
Thankfully, all of this nonsense appears to be landing on fallow ground where the U.S. public is concerned. No mainstream (or really any) politician has previously focused on Canadian perfidy as an existential threat to the U.S., or on the urgency of cleaving that fair country to our own — and recent polls indicate that Trump isn’t managing to move the needle in favor of adding a Maple Leaf state to our national scoreboard.
But the meaning of Trump’s northern dreams, and the potential political cost to him, goes beyond the superficial absurdity of his musings, however easy and necessary it is to mock them. For Trump has not only engaged in rhetorical warfare, but in economic warfare that fits with a strategy of pressuring Canada to trade its sovereignty for statehood. As Will Saletan observes in an interview on Greg Sargent’s The Daily Blast podcast, “Trump is absolutely on a regular basis [. . .] threatening Canada with economic consequences, saying, We can strangle you, we can cut you off at the knees, you have to become a state.” That is, Trump’s desire for Canada has arguably already passed into the realm of action, albeit still relatively low-key. This alone escalates the stakes for any Democrat who doesn’t understand the potential for turning Trump’s obsession into political pain for the president. If Trump is already employing U.S. power to force Canada to choose destruction or statehood (however ill-conceived and unlikely Canada’s dissolution presently seems), then the political opposition has even more incentive to make him pay a price for an aggression that is so very much against American interests.
This gets at another reason this story is so fascinating, and worth paying attention to: Trump is essentially forcing his opponents to engage in a debate about basic aspects of democratic politics — not because he has brilliantly led them into a trap, but because Trump is literally trying to return the country, and the world, to a dangerous state where might makes right, whether in relations between nations, or in relations between a president and the citizenry. In an illuminating article on Trump’s Canada obsession, Saletan points out the striking parallels between Donald Trump’s rhetoric towards Canada, and Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric toward Ukraine. Whether or not Trump has consciously mimicked Putin’s strategy, the overlap is in fact startling: both claim that the less powerful country has been unnaturally cut off from its superior, that ties of culture point to the naturalness of unity — and that the targeted land has earned the wrath of its better by ripping it off and free-riding off its dependency.
But when you get beyond the transparently self-serving justifications, a more baseline motive emerges: both Trump and Putin covet their neighbors because they simply see it as natural and desirable for the strong to rule the weak (particularly when they’re the leaders who get to do the actual ruling). In Putin’s case, the desire is heightened by his apparent goal to re-constitute the Soviet empire. In Trump’s case, I would hazard that the goal is more psychologically rooted; as evidence, I would point to his apparent hatred of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as his real estate lizard brain’s fascination with grabbing up territory, this time on a global scale. I think Saletan gets it right when he remarks that Trump, like Putin, stares at other countries with “the eyes of a predator,” salivating not only over Canada, but also Greenland, the Gaza Strip, and the Panama Canal.
But I’d also say that Trump arguably looks at the rest of the world through another pair of metaphorical eyes — those of a child, one who doesn’t understand why he can’t simply have what he covets. In the case of Canada, of course, this involves an apparent inability to consider the wishes of the tens of millions of Canadians who appear to be perfectly satisfied with their own country (particularly when they’ve been witness to the shit show to the south over the past couple months). But the capacity and willingness to view other people as independent actors in the world isn’t just the sign of a healthy psyche; the idea that other people have the right to self-determination and a say in how they are governed is foundational to any democracy. Whether due to his predatory nature or faulty mental wiring that short-circuits empathy, when Trump threatens the Canadians, he also threatens this baseline democratic morality.
I think this provides Democrats a fruitful opening for making Trump pay a steep price for his bullying of Canada — one that might well help lay the groundwork for further attacks on the president. Trump is essentially asserting that Canada should be part of the United States because it is weak and the U.S. is strong, and therefore Canada has no choice. This is a perfect opening for Democrats to lay out a basic argument that Canadians, like all people, have a right to self determination, and that they have made clear that they value their independence. They can also make the connection between Trump’s treatment of Canada and his authoritarian war on America, in which he’s attempting to substitute his will for the democratic give and take that is our birthright. The impulse that leads Trump to terrorize our long-time ally is deeply related to the one that drives him to aggrandize power and treat a majority of Americans as enemies (might we say, as if we were ungrateful Canadians)?
As for the Canadians — well, Trump’s deranged takeover talk has had a predictable effect, supercharging Canadian nationalism, spurring boycotts of American products, and fueling a comeback by the Liberal Party, which is taking a strong stand against Trump’s bullying. As Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, “President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen.” In other words, they’re acting like any self-respecting people would, asserting their dignity and working to protect their sovereignty against aggression. In a perverse twist, it feels far more patriotic for Americans to cheer Canadians on than to support Trump’s anti-democratic and self-defeating push to subjugate that country to his petty will.