It Begins

This is likely a week we will remember as the beginning of something truly awful. The only question, really, is how awful.

On Monday, the people of Canada, until recently our friends, voted into office a party — the Liberal Party — that they don’t much like and that a few weeks ago trailed the Conservatives, whom they do like, by 22 percent in the polls.

Why? Because they have come to believe — I think they’re wrong, but they have a case — that the Liberals will be more vigorous in the war against the United States.

Why do they think there is a war against the United States? Because the giant whoopie cushion serving, if that’s the word, as President of the United States has declared economic war against Canada. Why did he do that? Dunno. He doesn’t know, either. It appears that his resentment of people with whom he has done business (possibly because of their habit of suing him when he doesn’t pay them for the goods and services they supplied) applies to international relations as well. His wacky economic theory comes down to this: If you are building a house and therefore do a lot of business with the lumber yard, the lumber yard is cheating you and is your enemy.

I am not exaggerating.

So as punishment of Canada he has decided to make the American people pay 25 percent more for things (such as lumber) purchased from Canadian companies. In that we buy a lot of things from Canada, his making their products unattractively expensive did not go down well there. If this sounds to you like a mob boss demanding to “wet his beak” in a business transaction, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. He says the foreign countries and companies will absorb the loss. They won’t, which he finally admitted today.

When the Liberals won and Mark Carney was elected prime minister, Carney told his cheering victory party this: “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons.”

“As I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” he continued. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never — that will never, ever happen. But we also must recognize the reality that our world has fundamentally changed.” It has, and Trump brought about that change. Again, for no reason. No reason at all except to show he can, the way a troubled boy would knock down a bird’s nest full of baby birds so he could feel powerful.

Why would Mark Carney, who wouldn’t be our first choice for Canadian prime minister but who won because of Trump, say such things? Because that’s what Trump himself has been saying. “No more artificially drawn line from many years ago,” wrote His Flatulence about the U.S.-Canada border. “Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE! America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State.” And this was on Canada’s election day.

He’s been saying it for weeks, like a deranged man on the street corner speaking, as Dave Barry put it, “to someone from another dimension.” (As of noon today he had at least not ordered a wall to be built at the Canadian border. Possibly because he was busy listening to his cabinet ascribing Christ-like qualities to him, as each of them is required to do at every cabinet meeting. The attorney general actually said that Trump has “saved 258 million lives” from fentanyl. Do you think that if Trump hadn’t been elected, two-thirds of us would be dead from drug overdose? Our Trumpian-blonde attorney general says she does.)

Why has he been saying these things about Canada? Dunno. He doesn’t know. He’s like a kid playing matches, having grown bored with killing baby birds. Turns out that Biden’s senility isn’t the only form of mental illness available to presidents of the United States. He is obviously crazy, and he’s putting our lives and our country at risk. You’ve heard the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It actually means the condition under which people want to follow Trump despite all available evidence. It has happened before, with other obviously crazy people; the most famous example in modern history died 80 years ago today.

Maybe he got the idea of seizing Canada from his good pal Vladimir Putin, who likes invading other people’s land. If you watch Trump you’ll quickly get the sense that his very best friend forever is whoever he or his real estate lawyer Steve Witkoff talked to most recently. On Saturday he spoke briefly with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a genuine statesman and hero, before the funeral of the late pope. Before the day was over the headlines were all “Trump Turns on Putin.” But by yesterday the lovers’ quarrel was over and the betrayal of Ukraine was back on.

Also yesterday, a heartbreaking and disgusting story was released, a project worked on by many newspapers around the world. “Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured during the year she spent in Russian detention, and her body was returned to Ukraine with several organs missing, according to a joint investigation published on Tuesday,” wrote the independent Moscow Times.

“Roshchyna, 27, disappeared in the summer of 2023 while reporting on black site prisons in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. She died under unclear circumstances while being held at a Russian prison in September 2024. Her remains were returned in February 2025 as part of an exchange of bodies between Russia and Ukraine.” Before they sent what was left of her back to Ukraine, the Russians removed her eyes, her brain, and her throat. She had been so thoroughly tortured that DNA was necessary to identify what can literally be called her remains.

These are the people Trump praises and he and Witkoff smile at and laugh with. If Trump heard of the story — we can forget the notion that he was moved by it if he saw it — his reaction was probably envy of Putin’s ability to do such things, and fond anticipation of the day he can exercise such power himself.

You might be wondering if I’m going overboard. I’m not.

Here’s a little tidbit from today’s New York Times: “President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. . . .

“Some federal workers have also been told that DOGE is using A.I. to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them). . . .Now, they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

“Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security.” That’s just a taste.

Would anyone be truly surprised to hear that those who loudly dislike Trump’s actions were being rounded up and sent to, oh, say, a prison in El Salvador? He’s said this is something he wants to do. The excuse is obvious to Trump and his functionaries: Trump equals America, so disliking Trump equals treason. Maybe one of his fly-by-night lawyers, if there are any who haven’t been disbarred — it’s dangerous to be a friend of Trump, and even more dangerous to expect his loyalty — will argue that the Sedition Act of 1798 didn’t really expire in 1800 after all and, oh, well, they’re in El Salvador so it’s too late now.

Trump didn’t levy tariffs on just Canada. He brought them against almost everyone (Russia and some of our bitterest enemies were inexplicably exempt, unless America’s enemies and Trump’s are different). This has, as it did with Canada, turned a world filled with friends into a world filled with countries that no longer like or trust the United States. He apparently got in a heated argument with Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon.com, on the rumor that the company planned to make the cost of the tariffs a line item at checkout, like sales tax or shipping. (Which Bezos and others should do.)

That would make it clear the tariffs will be paid by Americans, which of course they will. Even the great whoopie cushion was beginning to admit it today, when at the cabinet Trump-worship service he said that supplies will be limited and prices will be high.

“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he flatulized. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” Shortages and high prices. Again, for no reason except that he can.

It has been roundly predicted that his pointless destruction is likely to wreck economies, including ours. This morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the Gross Domestic Product was down by three-tenths of a percent the first quarter of 2025. That’s the first dip since we were hiding in our houses and wearing masks in 2022. Trump said it is all Joe Biden’s fault, perhaps forgetting that in the last quarter of 2024, the last three months of Biden’s term, the GDP went up 2.4 percent. You have to go back to the recession of 2008 to find another drop in GDP. I have a feeling you won’t have to wait that long for another one.

If it weren’t so serious it would have been funny, watching Fox Trump Business Channel this morning after the GDP figure was released. It was a row of women, resembling a Robert Plant video from the 1980s except they weren’t dancing, with Maria Bartoromo in the middle as a sort of madam figure. They were going on about how they don’t understand it, Trump is trying so hard. Over on Bloomberg, the head of the company that owns booking.com was saying that the bad news is maybe actually good news. That’s their respective jobs.

Trump will beat the dead-ish horse of Biden for at long as he can. Yesterday he held an anti-Biden campaign rally in Michigan, before an audience of autoworkers who applauded, as they damn well better applaud, because he will decide whether or not to lift tariffs on imported parts that are needed if they are to keep their jobs. One of the most odious aspects — they’re all odious, but this one is also corrupt — of tariffs is that they give one guy, His Gaseousness, live-or-die power over businesses.

You’d think that a well-thought-out government such as ours is wouldn’t make the mistake of placing such power in the hands of one man, and you’d be right, because it doesn’t. Levying tariffs is the job of Congress. The president took it, and Congress, afraid of Trump, won’t take it back. Rand Paul was trying today, but anything he accomplishes won’t be passed by the scurrying roaches in the House of Representatives.

It’s all pretty grim, isn’t it. But there is a little bit of hope, possibly. The president’s approval ratings are poor and their downward direction is picking up speed. The RealClear Politics meta poll has him down now by 7 percent. Fox News, which is Trump’s equivalent of Putin’s TASS, has him down by 11. Others have him even lower, and his score on the economy is lower still.

We may soon approach the point where Trump’s approval is not necessary for the Trumpian invertebrates in Congress and they may pretend to be Republicans — they’re not; Republicans have principles — again as they seek re-election next year. Just this week I got email from my congressional representative, who seems to have suddenly developed an interest in his district. His staff will be in town tomorrow to help constituents with whatever problems they’re having — a need for an expedited passport, that sort of thing. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing, and it suggests that re-election might require more than not being primaried by angry Trumpists.

It isn’t much to hang on to, but it beats despair.

So does prayer. If you don’t pray, now would be a good time to start.

Maybe the whoopie cushion fad can be made to go the way of the joy buzzer and, appropriately, Chinese handcuffs.

Otherwise, we’re in the last of the good old days. Don’t think it can’t happen here. It’s already happening.