This isn’t an endearing idiosyncrasy. It’s a mania, and it comes with costs.
Like a latent deviancy that emerges too late in life to be quirky or sympathetic, Donald Trump’s post-election fixation with American expansionism is just selfish.
The president and his administration have elevated childish antagonism toward Canada to a personality trait. His subordinates are trained to dismiss Canadian sovereignty as a historical accident. They jump naughtily from one side of the border to the other, just to taunt Canadian authorities. The president himself calls the Canadian head of state a mere “governor” in line with the country’s status as “the 51st state,” a line that is deployed too frequently to retain running joke status. He seems to mean it.
Whether that campaign of bullying is the primary reason why Canada’s conservatives lost this election or just a significant one, it doesn’t matter. Both Trump and Canada’s triumphant liberals want the president’s hectoring to be remembered as the decisive factor in this election.
The president’s attempt at Canadian electoral punditry proves the point: “You know, until I came along, remember that the conservative was leading by 25 points,” he admitted in an interview with The Atlantic. “Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call, right?” Right.
Maybe it was his browbeating in service to the Greater American Co-Prosperity Sphere. Perhaps it was his cherished but ill-considered conception of the trade deficit as a measure of wealth flowing out of the country and the below-market prices Canada charges the U.S. for energy exports that contribute to that deficit. Either way, because politics happens in other countries, too, Trump’s ceaseless insults to our neighbor’s dignity transformed Canada’s elections into a contest to see which party could demonstrate more independence from Washington.
“President Trump, stay out of our election,” said Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s conservative opposition leader, in one of his closing messages. “Canada will always be proud, sovereign, and independent, and we will NEVER be the 51st state.” Try as he might, Canada’s conservative party could never muster as much authentic opposition to Trump as Canada’s liberal party. On that message alone, Canada’s liberal party, which was at one point so forsaken that its leadership dissolved itself, resurrected its fortunes.
Mark Carney, the new liberal leader, also gave the president credit for his success at the polls. “We are over the shock over American betrayal. But we will never forget the lessons,” he said in his victory speech. “As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Carney continued. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.”
Not only has the president sacrificed the opportunity to have a cooperative and ideologically simpatico government in Ottawa in exchange for an uncooperative but politically useful foil, his aggression likely contributed to the sacrifice of Poilievre’s once promising career. Indeed, the conservative lawmaker appears to have lost even his own reelection bid — a seat he’s occupied since 2004 with a partisan composition that should be favorable to center-right politics. Such was the power of Trump’s intervention into Canada’s politics that it stole from us and prosperity one of the most talented expostulators of conservative ideas to emerge from the Canadian firmament in a generation.
In much the same way that Trump’s allies tried to retrofit a comprehensible rationale onto his global trade war, the MAGA movement is doing its best to assign a logic to the president’s behavior and the outcomes it produced. Trump will probably “get on with Carney,” the American Conservative magazine’s Curt Mills speculated. “Trump vibes with the smart, hyper-Machiavellian center left type,” he added. Trump gets along with centrist French President Emmanuel Macron and British Labour leader Keir Starmer, for example. “He isn’t actually friends with Boris Johnson,” Mills added. “Poilievre could have been Canuck DeSantis.”
There is an observable truth to this, although Mills declined to entertain the potential that Trump shares the ideological affinities of his center-left compatriots abroad. Let’s take at face value the notion that Trump seeks to establish a network of compatible personalities abroad that complement his own. What does that leave the populist movement that Trump has spent his political career building once he is gone? How are his fellow populists to recognize their allies in the absence of a set of fixed principles and a recognizably familiar governing program?
Ronald Reagan’s election would not have signaled the rise of Thatcherite conservatism in America if compatibility were the only harmonizing feature of their relationship. The two leaders came from very distinct backgrounds and entered office with divergent demeanors. They formed an alliance of shared ideologies and strategic imperatives that remade the world in their image, not just because they got along but because they had the same objectives. If Trump would rather have useful antitheses in command of foreign capitals with whom he can gladhand behind the scenes, that is useful only to him and his political brand. It doesn’t advance his grander goals for the legacy of achievement he hopes to leave behind.
Trump clearly derives psychological satisfaction from hectoring our allies, diminishing their achievements, insulting their national honor, and engendering hostility toward the United States abroad. It’s not at all clear what the rest of us are supposed to get out of this enterprise.
This wasn’t what Americans voted for. After all, Trump seemed perfectly comfortable with Danish, Panamanian, and Canadian sovereignty before November 5. Since then, he and his courtiers have convinced themselves that, even if it undermines conservatism’s ideological goals and American grand strategy, the president’s flights of fancy must be indulged. That tendency is not helping anyone.
This isn’t an endearing idiosyncrasy. It’s a mania, and it comes with costs. We’re all paying the price now. But what, exactly, is this sacrifice for?