I recently received the following series of rhetorical exhortations from a friend who, like many Canadians, is unable to discuss President Donald Trump rationally. He wrote: “Imagine America deporting an academic from Columbia University for criticizing Israel. Imagine a President who repeats every morning that he is at war with Canada with the intent to achieve Anschluss. Imagine an American population that stands meekly by as its president acts as a dictator, internally and globally, no check, no balance, no accountability. Compare the quality of leadership in America with that of Russia and China these days.”
The accusation against the individual in question is that his espousal of the virtues of Hamas, his violation of his attested purpose of being in the United States, (he is a graduate and has nothing else to do with Columbia now), and some of his incitements in what appears to be a constant occupation of haranguing antisemitic malcontents, is a violation of the terms of his admission and entitles the U.S. government to remove him. The matter will be determined by the courts.
President Trump has never stated that he is at war with Canada and the invocation of Hitler’s seizure of Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, (which unfortunately was welcomed by most Austrians), is a defamatory and scurrilous outrage. It is perhaps the most imaginative adaptation of the entire Democratic Party 2024 campaign playbook of comparing Trump to Hitler, for which the Democrats were properly rewarded with a bone-crushing defeat. Anyone who imagines that there are any conceivable circumstances in which the United States would resort to military force against Canada is in desperate need of profound psychiatric counselling. Given the collapsed state of our public health-care system, (which the transitioning leaders of the federal Liberal party constantly tell us is indicative of our moral and practical superiority over the United States), it is hard to imagine that my febrile friend will find the medical attention he badly needs.
Donald Trump has been the subject of the greatest perversions of the Constitution of the United States and particularly the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Bill of Rights of any president in the history of that country. He has not in any respect exceeded the constitutional powers of the presidency. A number of his initiatives have been legally challenged and are working their way through the appeal process. The clause: “no check, no balance, no accountability” is a perfectly accurate description of the clangorous nonsense about Trump that this country has swallowed. Trump wants to adjust tariffs with this and other countries. His reference to the 51st state is designed to be annoying, but was caused by our failure to pay for our own defence for the past 30 years, our steady trade surplus (which Trump exaggerates but Justin Trudeau did not know enough to dispute), and because Trudeau suggested Canada would collapse if U.S. tariffs were raised. Of course it won’t and if necessary we will show Trump that. But can we please have the maturity not to compare him with Hitler? We’re talking about tariffs, not world war and millions of innocent victims of death camps.
It is hard to imagine that any rational adult Canadian believes that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are more capable and successful leaders than Trump. Putin unleashed an aggressive war, which has caused the displacement of more than 10 million people and probably at least 1.25 million casualties, most of them his own countrymen and most of those combat deaths. When some of the mercenaries that he has engaged defected from the front lines and marched on Moscow, they were greeted with enthusiasm by the Russian people. Putin routinely murders his domestic political opponents. Russia is suffering from acute economic hardship, chronic alcoholism, a steadily shrinking population, and its only geostrategic relevance to the world is the possibility of it becoming a basket of natural resources for the delectation of China. In defiance of all historic Russian nationalist logic, Putin is throwing his country into a desperate embrace with China. He has been reduced to dependence on the antediluvian tyrannies of Iran and North Korea and whatever happens, his war in Ukraine has been a disaster — Russia’s worst military fiasco since the Russo Japanese War (1905). He has conspicuously failed to subdue a vastly smaller and more vulnerable country that Russia had ruled for 300 years.
Chinese President Xi is now presiding over a country that is economically stagnant, debt-ridden and precarious. Where 10 years ago it was impossible to set foot out of doors without some passer-by telling you that China was about to surpass the United States as the world’s greatest economy, there is no suggestion of that now. The Chinese minister of defence, a number of prominent Chinese Communist Party grandees and financial magnates have abruptly disappeared over the last few years. China has alienated all of its neighbours and caused India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia to group together with Australia, New Zealand, and the United States in an informal revival of the Cold War containment strategy that was so successful opposite the Soviet Union.
Because there is such widespread ignorance of Asian history in the West it is assumed that ancient China has a sophisticated foreign policy, but under Xi, exactly the reverse is true. The famous Belt and Road Initiative, which the Sinophilic cheering section was touting as the wave of the future, has not created any prosperity for those who have participated in it and has squandered immense sums of money that the Chinese government does not have. The fact that Mark Carney has suggested the Chinese yuan could serve as a world reserve currency merely indicates the intellectual bankruptcy of the incoming prime minister, rather than any justified commendation of the totalitarian dictatorship of the so-called People’s Republic, which remains a largely command economy, is the world’s most authoritarian despotism and claims it can find anyone in the vast population in ten minutes because of its ubiquitous monitoring apparatus.
Can we please come to our senses and assure that the coming election is about the failure of the Trudeau government and the authoritarian socialist and irrational environmental opinions of Mark Carney? Donald Trump is a foreign leader and we will deal with him from a position of strength, provided we have a serious government.
National Post