Americans have been deaden to it. The insanity is normal to them. They will still eat tomorrow.
I see this just fine. What I don’t see is where anyone is concluding that he must be planning to invade and conquer Canada, because at no point in his insane ramblings has he ever even suggested such a thing, and if he wanted to do it he’d be saying so.
He has no filter. Zero. If he were intending to invade Canada it wouldn’t be necessary to read between the lines and look for some secret meaning in his words, because he’d be saying “We’re going to do military, and it will be incredibly easy, perhaps the easiest war in our great history, it would take about two weeks, and there would be zero Americans affected from the standpoint of death”.
Okay. I’m not actually worried about what’s in Trump’s wizened little brain. I’m worried about how his many cowardly enablers are going to interpret his word salads. His power is that people find ways to interpret and carry out his mad ramblings.
Not true. But we’re more fucked than Canada is. We’ve already lost our country, you still have yours.
He is waging economic warfare.
If that doesn’t work, what comes next is speculative.
U.S. leadership has been waging economic warfare against Iran, for years, hoping it will cause the government there to collapse. AFAIK this has not led to U.S. attacks on Iranian territory, partly because we can instead bomb alleged proxies like the Houthis. Squinting, I could see a weaker NATO statelet like Greenland as a symbolic proxy in more direct danger than Canada.
I think the Iran policy is more justifiable than the Canada policy, but a good case can be made that sanctions have strengthened the Iranian state and military. If you think of tariffs against a government you wish to collapse as a sanction – and that’s reasonable – and you think of the Liberal Party of Canada as the Canadian state – which is partly true – then Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports have already backfired.
It requires no medical diagnosis of Donald Trump to say this.
Every time he says he wants it to become part of the US he’s “suggesting” it. All but announcing it in fact.
Trump doesn’t “suggest”. He says exactly what he’s thinking, all the time.
I was quoting you, don’t move the goalposts. Talk like Trump’s is standard dictator-speak for “I want to conquer those people”.
Trump is hardly a standard dictator. He’s far too chickenshit to pick a fight with anyone actually capable of punching back, for one.
Please, that’s the kind of nonsense people say before wars happen. It complete ignores that it takes zero courage to order other people to die in a war, while letting cowardly leaders to feel badass about themselves.
People said the same thing before Bush I’s attack on Iraq, and look how that turned out.
Lots of dictators do not start wars.
Since the Korean War, North Korea’s dictators have showed a big propensity to threaten, and a limited propensity to start wars. It’s true that right now his soldiers are dying in Ukraine, but that’s an exception.
Communist China dictators, again after the Korean War, have, with small safe exceptions, avoided war.
Franco, after gaining power, ruled Spain for almost fifty years without being particularly warlike.
A lot of dictators start out with a coup, and then invade no one..
I’m not sure there is such a thing as a standard dictator. But if there is, Trump would not be way out of the normal line.
And the backpedaling has begun;
It’s going to take a lot more than one civil tweet to convince Canadians.
“Great for both the US and Canada”?? Some imposter has kidnapped the president and hijacked his twitter account. The real Trump only negotiates so that he wins and you lose.
No that’s standard Trump-speak. A lot of what he says is positive and flattering. It adds credibility to his insults and models how he wants his supplicants to speak of him. His style of flattery is worthy of study and emulation.
“jsc and I had an extremely productive conversation. We agree on many things and will be working together to defeat Trump and the forces of evil. Great convo!”
My guess is that someone managed to beat into his skull that the Liberals are going to win bigly if he keeps insulting Canadian sovereignty.
He’ll completely forget this by next week, but it shows that, as usual, he’s all bluster and empty threats.
Is Trump trying to manipulate the outcome of the Canadian election, and will he succeed?
I’d say yes and no.
The damage has been done. If Trump would’ve kept the sabre rattling to a minimum until May 1st, Trudeau would likely have stayed on and Parliament would have fallen to a Non-confidence motion this week when The House returned from prorogation. PM PP would have walked away with it, decimating the Liberals and The Orange Menace would had a friendly compatriot in Ottawa.
If so, here’s one hypothesis:
Trump today got Carney to talk as if Trump wasn’t the enemy. Carney characterized his conversation with Trump as “positive, cordial, constructive — exactly what we want.” This seems like a possibly successful effort, from the American side, to manipulate Carney into looking weak.
I cannot find the full context of that quotation, so I may have mischaracterized it. But if a national U.S. Democratic Party leader was quoted saying that, the Democratic Party base, at least on the internet, would be outraged, regardless of context.
Are many Canadians maybe looking at it that way tonight? Or do almost all of them (wisely in my view) accept that measured and/or inconsistent responses to Trump’s bullying are in the Canadian national interest?