By Philip Yeung
"The king of bankruptcies". That's Ontario premier Doug Ford's unforgettable nickname for Donald Trump. Pre-presidency, he had bankrupted everything he touched, from Trump Casino to Trump University. He is now about to inflict a similar fate on his own country, the richest and mightiest empire in human history.
What's wrong with Trump? He has a God-given knack for destroying relationships, especially close allies. The US-Canada relationship was once a seamlessly integrated economic partnership, boasting the longest undefended border between them. But Trump has ruptured it, irreparably, thanks to his pathological personality.
Big in the Trump toolbox is his unpredictability. In fact, being unpredictable is his trademark and tactic in managing relationships. Except it makes him predictably unreliable. No negotiating partner trusts him to honor his words. As changeable as the weather, Trump lets no contract bind him, neither curtailing his impulses nor stabilizing his mood swings. With zero credibility, diplomacy has died an early death. People believe that no good deal can come from dealing with a bad person.
Worse, when a mess is manufactured, like the Iran war, he doesn't know how to end it. He flipflops, alternating threats with peace offerings, wrestling with his unholy mess. Now running low on money and munitions, America's national debt is through the roof, and its armory is dangerously depleted.
At this pivotal moment, US checks and balances suffer a systemic failure. Congress is asleep, with the Supreme Court a Trump bedfellow. There is no mechanism for curbing his worst instincts.
American patriots are praying for the mid-term elections to rescue the country from utter chaos. But two months to November feels like an eternity, as Trump staggers from crisis to crisis. No one can predict how the Trump presidency will end or how the world will look when it does.
US-Canada ties, once the envy of the world, are now storm-tossed and in crisis mode. Bilateral trade negotiations have completely collapsed. While Canada is complaining that America is "asking too much and offering too little", America treats Canada like its de facto 51ststate. Trump makes no bones about an appetite for annexing his northern neighbor, accusing Canada of "wanting the benefits of being a state without being one."
Trump brutally tries to deny Canada's sovereign rights in building economic relations with other countries to reduce its economic dependency on the US.
Trump took a sledgehammer to the trade talks, slapping a brutal 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canada's US-bound exports. But Carney, the Canadian leader, is more than a match for the hot-headed bully, summoning home his negotiating team and swearing to match US tariffs "dollar for dollar" and rate for rate. An all-out, tit-for-tat tariff war is underway. US alcohol is already off supermarket shelves in 8 out of 10 Canadian provinces. Businesses on both sides of the border are beginning to feel the economic pain. At stake is a two-way trade worth north of $900 billion.
Trump's threats, instead of intimidating Canadians, have united them from coast to coast. Fully 76% of them now consider the US untrustworthy, with only 9% of Canadians believing otherwise. They are rallying behind their leader who is defying their bullying neighbor. Canada is not without its leverage and is unafraid to use it, provoking Trump and his Vice President into characterizing Canada as China-like in being the world's nastiest negotiators.
Comparing Canada to China is calculated to blackball the Canadians and arouse hostility against them. But the hard truth is that states that border Canada, like Michigan, New York and Minnesota, depend heavily on Canada for their energy supply. South-bound tourism, too, is nose-diving. Already, there are three million fewer visits by Canadians to New York state alone, with 51% of Canadians cancelling travel plans to the US. Nearly a quarter million Canadians have signed a petition calling for expulsion of US ambassador to Canada for his undiplomatic insult about annexing Canada as an American state. A former firm friend is now a hostile and disenchanted neighbor.
Carney is determined to double its non-US exports within the next decade to reduce Canadian reliance on the US market. China is already Canada's second-largest market and may soon become the largest buyer of Canadian oil and gas.
Trump is adding insult to tariff injury. Spitefully, like a jilted lover, he has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America, just as he has renamed Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America. Trump now threatens to similarly rechristen the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. A mad man is now redrawing the map over bodies of water, with just a stroke of his pen.
No one should be surprised when a mentally damaged bully sits unsupervised behind the command post of the world's mightiest military and economic machinery.
With huge stakes riding on the mid-term elections, November could be a watershed moment in human history—a forking of order and disaster. Will America and the world survive another two years of Trump's pathology?
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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