Trump tears up relationship with America's best friend
The humor in the song derived from the fact that blaming
Canada for anything seemed so absurd. They’re our kindly
northern neighbor, a more polite version of ourselves! They gave us Michael J.
Fox, and the Ryans Gosling and Reynolds, Bret “Hitman” Hart, and Shania Twain
and Celine Dion! How could we ever be mad at them?
Today, our president is blaming Canada, in an escalating
conflict driven by his most petty and vindictive impulses, doing nothing but
harm to the citizenry of both countries. It’s not a complete breakup with our
closest ally, but it’s drawing awfully close. And it isn’t hard to imagine it
getting progressively worse as we slog through the next three years.
On January 20 in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
gave a
remarkable speech in which he all but declared the end of the post-war
order that the United States and its allies created.
The “middle powers,” he went on, have no choice but to band
together for their mutual interest, free of the delusion that they can rely on
the great powers — or, more specifically, one great power. And rather than just
lamenting what Donald Trump is destroying, he argued that it was always
something of a lie.
“Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it
still functions as advertised,” he said. “Call it what it is: a system of
intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests
using economic integration as coercion.”
Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t take it well. The day after
Carney’s speech, he
said, “I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful —
they should be grateful to the US, Canada. Canada lives because of the United
States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Then Trump posted on social media that “the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining.” All Canadians were no doubt heartbroken.
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| Canada is a MAGA-free zone |
To that end, he recently traveled to China and announced a deal to allow the import of some Chinese electric vehicles at a very low tariff rate, while China will import more Canadian agricultural products.
Up until now, Canada has imposed the same 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars
that the US has, which it instituted at
the behest of the Biden administration. But now, the inexpensive,
desirable Chinese EVs that are rapidly
spreading around the world will start coming to North America.
Once again, Trump was not pleased. He lashed out on
Truth Social against “Governor Carney,” saying “If Canada makes a deal with
China, it will immediately be hit with a 100 percent tariff against all
Canadian goods and products coming into the USA, then continued to whine about
Canada all weekend. There’s no way to know if Trump’s threat will come to
fruition, since any tariff announcement Trump makes is usually followed by a
pullback, then a renewed threat, then another pullback.
One thing’s for sure: He certainly proved Carney’s point
about smaller countries not being able to rely on the US.
Even more despicably, Trump went on Fox News and belittled
the contributions Canada and other NATO allies made when they came to America’s
side after 9/11.
“We have never really asked anything of them,” he said.
“They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan and this or that. And they
did. They stayed a little back, off the front lines.”
Tell that to the families of the 158 Canadian soldiers who
died in Afghanistan, as did troops
from the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and many other nations that we used to
consider allies.
This is all of Trump’s making
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| Before Trump, we used to be friends. Marilyn Monroe with a Canadian Mounty, 1953 |
A year ago, then-PM Justin Trudeau had announced he would
resign from his position as leader of the Liberal Party and leave office as
soon as the party chose a successor. At the time, Conservative Party leader
Pierre Poilievre, who shares some similarities with Trump in style (including
an open
contempt for journalists), was leading in
the polls and seemed certain to become the next prime minister amid widespread
dissatisfaction with 12 years of Liberal rule. Had that happened, Poilievre
would have likely become one of Trump’s staunchest international allies.
Instead, Trump kneecapped Poilievre and his party just as
they were poised to take power after so long in the minority. By imposing
damaging tariffs and condescending to Canada by saying it should become the
“51st state,” Trump made opposition
to him and the US the top issue in the spring election. Adopting the
slogan “Elbows
Up” — a reference to hockey legend Gordie Howe’s style of play in which he
used his elbows to intimidated opponents, often smacking them in the face — the
Liberals won again.
In the time since, both countries have been harmed
economically by Trump’s tariffs, even if around
90 percent of the goods we import from Canada are exempt under the
US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. For the moment, the damage to the Canadian
economy has been contained,
but the EV deal shows the direction Carney wants to move: to diversify Canada’s
exports beyond the United States, where the vast majority of them still go.
That won’t be easy, since trade between our countries is so enormous — in 2024, over $900 billion in goods and services passed between us (though as a result of Trump’s trade war, that figure declined significantly in 2025).
Trump’s attack on Canadian identity
Whether Trump understands it or not, his policies and
rhetoric about Canada could not have been more perfectly designed to alienate
Canadians and shift its politics.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how offended Canadians
were by Trump’s needling talk of making Canada the 51st state. The country’s
inevitably subordinate relationship to the US lies at the heart of Canadian
identity — grappling with America, pushing against America, sometimes rejecting
it and sometimes embracing it, all while laboring to define Canadian-ness as
something unique and worthy of pride.
As a Canadian friend told me last weekend, “Americans come
here and say ‘You’re just like us!’, and they think they’re giving us a
compliment,” when in fact it’s anything but. By talking about America absorbing
Canada as though it would not just be easy but something Canadians should
obviously want, Trump struck at what is most important to the Canadian soul.
And he did it with a condescending smirk.
Not only that, he’s still doing it. As he does so often,
Trump takes what was implicit, makes it explicit, then turns it into something
vulgar. There’s no talk about a mutually beneficial relationship between
friends and allies for him; Canada, he says, is not even a vassal state. Its
very existence is dependent on the US, which for Trump means it is dependent on
him personally. “Canada lives because of the United States,” he says, like a
domestic abuser sneering You’re nothing without me.
As always, his lackeys are sent out to echo his contempt.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused Carney
of displaying “an arrogant kind of thought.” Even worse, Treasury Secretary
Scott Bessent seemed to encourage the right-wing separatist movement in
Alberta, which is basically the Texas of Canada, while on far-right conspiracy
theorist Jack Posobiec’s podcast.
A few days later, the Financial Times reported that
a key Alberta secessionist group has had three separate meetings with State
Department officials in Washington. The good news is that if anything, that
will make a potential referendum in Alberta on secession even less
popular, but it’s still a message that parts of Canada should be shorn off
to join the US.
Then, last Sunday, Bessent accused Carney
of “trying to virtue signal to his globalist friends at Davos.” And what virtue
was it that Bessent thinks Carney was insincerely signaling to the Je— pardon,
to the “globalists”? A belief in the values the Western alliance always said it
stood for, like democracy and human rights? Independence from the mad king in
the White House?
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| If it comes to a fight, Canadians "stand on guard" as always. Ladies demonstrating Bren guns they manufactured in 1944 during the Second World War. Liberty Village, Toronto, Canada. |
So when Carney implies that Canada just can’t trust America anymore, you can’t blame him. And it isn’t just Trump that Canada (and our other allies) can’t trust. It’s us, the American people.
Trump may have low approval ratings now, but his approval was even lower after he tried to overthrow the government on January 6, and less than four years later we returned him to office.
We could elect JD Vance or some other Republican who wants to continue Trump’s policies in 2028, or 2032. No one can have faith that if they just hunker down for the next three years, everything will go back to normal.
So Canada is pulling away, and our European allies may too.
The tricky part is figuring out what comes next. Whatever it is, it almost
certainly won’t be better for America than the relationships we had until a
year ago. But it might be better for everyone else.