Trump Is Plunging Us Into ‘War’ With Canada

What happened this weekend wasn’t just folly and ‘Idiocracy.’ It was a scandal – an imperialistic disgrace that’s been going on far too long. Donald Trump and his administration are waging a full-blown economic war on Canada. We are living in 2026 and in the real world, not in 1995 and in a poorly reviewed Michael Moore movie, or in 1999 in the ‘South Park’ movie. So why, then, is the U.S. at “war” with Canada? The simple but correct answer is that for the past year and a half, America has been ruled by an astonishingly violent airhead who likes starting wars that pretty much no one asked for – even if those wars mangle the U.S. economy. Almost right after he stepped back into the White House last year, the tariffs-obsessed Trump unleashed economic warfare on our longtime Canadian allies, for self-destructive and made-up reasons. Trump’s attempted strong-arming led to Canada’s leader declaring an end to the U.S.-led global order as we knew it. That warfare reached its latest, deranged state this past weekend, when trade talks imploded in spectacular fashion. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters on Saturday, after deciding to prepare a retaliatory tariff salvo on U.S. imports, set to commence on Sept. 8. Earlier, the Trump-Vance administration slapped a 50% tariff on a new roster of Canadian imports. Trump is doing this to punish Canada, but what he’s actually doing is slamming American consumers with more taxes, out of pure spite. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal grumbled about “the dumbest trade war revisited.” Trump’s former vice president told CNN that this is “the last thing we need right now.” The New York Times reported that “Some Republicans” are publicly very anxious that Trump’s escalated trade war with Canada will further batter the U.S. economy and his party’s chances in the midterm elections. “We need Trump’s head in the game to win the midterms,” Dan Eberhart, a well-connected big GOP donor, tells me. “Republicans are better off with Trump holding rallies and holding off on a trade war with Canada.” The following tidbit is anecdotal, and yet it doesn’t conflict with the data that’s out there. Every Canadian I spoke to over the weekend said the same thing: They’ve been boycotting American products or travel across the border since last year anyway. And they definitely don’t intend to stop now. It’s an unmitigated disaster, to be thrown atop the towering, rapidly accumulating heap of all of President Trump’s other disasters and atrocities. But Trump’s “war” on Canada is more than just a policy blunder and economic dick-stepping. It genuinely is a scandal, and should be treated as such by the media. It’s a scandal that our political class and Republicans in Congress have allowed Trump to do this for so long, to take his economic blitzkrieg on Canada this far, all based on justifications so often built on wild lies and fabrications that it almost makes the WMD case for war in Iraq look carefully manicured. And it’s an appalling scandal that President Trump is doing this while constantly dangling his buffoonish threats of territorial expansion and annexation – against one of our closest allies. The Trump administration is now going on TV to threaten “devastating” Canada, while insulting that country’s military and apparently suggesting that if Canadians don’t do what Trump wants, America may no longer protect Canada, a fellow founding NATO member. Concurrently, the president posted online Sunday morning: “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!” – re-centering his irrepressible desire to conquer Canada and redraw the map. Early last year, I wrote the following for Rolling Stone: The fact that the U.S. federal government is squawking in one loud, highly irritating voice – in your name and mine, and doing so on our taxpayers’ dime – that it would like to obliterate the national sovereignty of our longtime friend and ally to the north is in and of itself a scandal. Not a troll, or a joke, or mere bluster – a scandal … Will U.S. Marines be marching on Quebec next week? No, probably not. And yet, the damage is already done. Canadians are experiencing the same politics of extortion and harassment that Trump has unleashed on Ukraine. It is, or at least it should be, a damp stain on our national conscience, and your average outraged Canadian is responding rationally. If anything, it’s the American public that should be taking Trump’s depravity more seriously. We allowed this to happen. If anything, the situation has (somehow!) only deteriorated. And so much of the American media isn’t anywhere closer to treating this like the scandal that it is. This isn’t a gimmick or economic imprudence. It’s a diplomatic crisis, driven by the world’s most proudly clueless imperialist. And it’s yet another “war” of aggression that nobody asked for, that the U.S. government launched