That there is so little pushback on this on X proves that American fans of American football have lost the testosterone which animates the game

Mad King Ludwig thinks he can re-name everything.

You know, like a man who thinks he can call himself a woman.

Same denial of reality disease, different expression. 

 

The world plays ‘football’ but the U.S. calls it ‘soccer’: Trump signaled that could change

 

... While the term “football” is widely used for the sport, especially in Europe and much of the world, the U.S., Canada and Australia generally use “soccer” to refer to the game. ...

 

 

 

Trump's stupid bullying of Jerome Powell is analogous to his stupid bullying of Canada's Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney

Jerome Powell doesn't set interest rates.

 

The Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates. That's why the release of the committee's prior meeting minutes is always keenly awaited and is by itself a major market mover. Powell's is one vote among many on the FOMC:

 

Where interest rates should be today, and when they should be reduced, is already a topic of debate inside the Fed, a decision, it should be noted, that cannot be made unilaterally by the chair. Powell’s leadership and professionalism does not appear to be a concern within the halls of the central bank. Certainly, none of his colleagues, present or past, have made the case that he is incompetent. 

 

 

Similarly the Canadian Prime Ministers' control over trade decisions is also muted, deferring as they must to provincial and territorial authorities.

 

Trump bullies people like this who cannot make unilateral changes to policy in order to make himself look like an assertive leader to his equally stupid followers.

 

That's why people like Larry Kudlow disgust me. He knows what I am writing is true, but he joins in on the pig pile nonetheless. 

 

Greater things are at stake in this than interest rate policy. Trump is playing with fire. 

  

The great impediment to a U. S. - Canada trade deal which most people in the U. S., including our dunce of a president, don't seem to understand is that it's not Mark Carney standing in the way, it's Canada's sovereign 10 provinces and 3 territories

 

Canada is today's poster child for America's bad old system of states' rights.

Canada does not have free trade with itself, let alone with the United States. Imagine not being able to drive an 18-wheeler cross country. 

 

 Is Canada now free of internal trade barriers? Not yet, says expert: Breaking down interprovincial trade barriers is still a work in progress, says expert

... When Carney made his campaign promise, he was talking about cutting red tape put up by the federal government — not the rules set by the provinces, which have the most authority in this area. ... 

There is no comprehensive list of existing internal trade barriers. Even some lobby groups have told parliamentarians they don't know how many barriers their own industries face.

There isn't even consensus on what all counts as a trade barrier. ...

Internal Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, who has repeatedly stated that most of the barriers are at the provincial level, testified to the Senate that she will meet with her provincial counterparts on July 8 to discuss next steps.

One major obstacle is in Freeland's crosshairs: Canada's patchwork of interprovincial trucking regulations.

"One of three areas that I will be putting on the agenda at that meeting is trucking," she said on June 16. "It should be a lot easier than it is to drive a truck from Halifax to Vancouver. We need to get rid of conflicting requirements."

 

 

Trump administration fails to intimidate Canada, goes Galt and ends trade talks

 

Trump ends all U.S. trade talks with Canada over digital services tax

 

 

 

 

 

 

... The first payments from Canada’s digital services tax, which was enacted last year and applies retroactively to 2022, are set to be collected Monday. The tax would hit both domestic and foreign tech companies, including U.S. giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said this month that they would not pause the digital services tax, despite ferocious opposition from the United States.

“Obviously, we think it’s patently unfair to do it retroactively,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said later Friday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

Bessent said the Trump administration was hoping that Carney’s government would “put a brake on” the tax “as a sign of goodwill.” ...

 

Trump's idea of good will is 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, 25% tariffs on autos, an overall 10% tariff on most everything else, and a 25% "fentanyl" tariff.

 

 

Emmanuel Todd: The Trump "revolution" is a mixture of reason and nihilism headed toward decadence in a nation now missing the strengths of both ethnic cohesion and Protestant faith

 This is the full text of La révolution Trump by Emmanuel Todd in "From Russia With Love", translated by Arnaud Bertrand:

The Trump Revolution 

I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump Revolution. Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned. However, one striking thing in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats. The Russian revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat. Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, had been preceded in 1763 by France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the retreat from Afghanistan. I believe we must start from this notion of a defeat that brings about a revolution to understand the Trump revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we don't know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? It is in any case a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that turns on one hand against the allied-subjects, the Europeans, the Ukrainians, but which expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration. This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war. For the United States, it was fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not an all-power. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex. This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans. Europeans did not organize the war. Because they did not organize the war, they cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans therefore situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.  

 

Defeat and Cultural Crisis 

My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I have said, something important: the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.

 

The Reasonable in the Trump Administration 

I want to clarify that I had no principled hostility toward Trump at the start. During Trump's first election, in 2016, I was among those who admitted that America was sick, that its industrial and working heart was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policy of the Empire and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. In Trump's intuitions, there are very reasonable things. Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition. I am myself a protectionist. I wrote books about it long ago. I also consider that the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent. Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration's insistence on saying that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see there a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia but a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological evidence on which, moreover, science and the Church agree. There is reasonableness in the Trump revolution.

 

Nihilism in the Trump Revolution 

I must now say why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experience will fail. I will recall why I was optimistic for Russia from 2002 and why I am pessimistic for the United States in 2025. There is in the behavior of the Trump administration, a deficit of thought, an unpreparedness, a brutality, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism. I explain in The Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero state brings us back to the fundamental problem. What is it to be a man? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a phase of religious collapse, is nihilism. We pass from the anguish of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a will to destroy things, men, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious on the moral level but it is fundamental on the intellectual level because saying that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a will to destroy reality. This was, in association with cancel culture, with the preference for war, an element of the nihilism that predominated under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all that. However, what strikes me currently is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a will to destroy science and the university, black middle classes, or disordered violence in the application of American protectionist strategy. When, without thinking, Trump wants to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States, while the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see there a destructive impulse as much as protection. When I see Trump suddenly establishing protectionist tariffs against China while forgetting that the majority of American smartphones are manufactured in China, I tell myself that we cannot be content to consider this as stupidity. It is stupidity certainly, but it is perhaps also nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilist project. The fundamental contradiction of American policy, however, I will look for it on the side of protectionism. The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress. Worse: if we look for the motivation of the struggle against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realize that it is not even economic. Those who are familiar with American history know the capital role of the federal State in the emancipation of Blacks. Hatred of the federal state, in the United States, most often derives from anti-Black resentment. When one fights against the American federal State, one fights against the central administrations that have emancipated and that protect Blacks. A high proportion of black middle classes has found jobs in the federal administration. The struggle against the federal State therefore does not integrate into a general conception of economic and national reconstruction. If I think of the multiple and contradictory acts of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose direction we do not know very well.

 

Absolute Nuclear Family + Zero Religion = Atomization 

I am very pessimistic for the United States. I will return, to conclude this exploratory conference, to my fundamental concepts as historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this conference that the fundamental reason why I had believed, quite early, from 2002, in a return of Russia to stability, is because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's return to stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values of authority and equality, which moreover allows us to understand a little what the nation is in the Russian mind. There is indeed a relationship between the form of the family and the idea one has of the nation. To the community family corresponds a strong, compact idea of the nation or people. Such is Russia. In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we are in the inverse case. The model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American absolute nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation. The absolute nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations succeed each other by separating. The speed of adaptation of the United States or England, the plasticity of their social structures (which allowed the English industrial revolution and American takeoff) largely result from this absolute nuclear family structure. But beside or above this individualist family structure there was in England as in the United States the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor. I unfortunately now find only one additional negative factor, which appeared to me when reading a book by Amy Chua, a university professor at Yale who was J.D. Vance's mentor. Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) underlines, after many other texts, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded by the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values transcending ethnicity. Certainly. This was very early the official theory. But there was also in the United States a dominant white Protestant group, itself derived from a rather long and quite ethnic history at bottom. This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, really post-ethnic, a purely "civic" nation, in theory united by attachment to its constitution, to its values. Amy Chua's fear is that of a reversion of America to what she calls tribalism. A regressive pulverization. Each of the European nations is fundamentally, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its language, its culture, a people anchored in history. Each has a stable foundation. Russians have that, Germans have that, the French have that, even if they are a bit bizarre at the moment on these concepts. America no longer has that. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation but deprived of morality by the zero state of religion leaves one dreaming. It even gives one chills. My personal fear is that we are, not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a fall of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: even more than in an American empire, whether triumphant, or weakened, or destroyed, going toward things that we cannot imagine.

This is a link to the original text (in French: https://emmanueltodd.substack.com/p/bons-baisers-de-russie) which is actually much longer than this, as it touches on more topics than the "Trump revolution".

I disagree with the premise that the United States has been defeated and that the Trump "revolution" is the result, but I do not doubt that she is in danger of defeat. Todd's other observations are salutary.

Such defeats as we have experienced have resulted from a failure of the will, primarily of the will to pay the financial costs of maintaining American leadership in the world. This failure of the will traces to the 1960s liberal social revolution, but was made bipartisan and supercharged as conservatism by the libertarian success of the Reagan Revolution in defeating the necessary role played by high ordinary income tax rates in the United States to fund it.

The word "tax" has been a four-letter word to Republicans ever since. But it is a myth that the taxpayers know best what to do with their money. The rich have hollowed out the country's capital strength and call it the land of opportunity. We have little to show for it since 1986.

The Trump revolution, for all its will to power, which is its main attraction in a country devoid of will, also refuses to pay, which is why it is not a true revolution and will not endure. The tax cut revolution of 1986 is not repeatable. That Trump would raise taxes on the rich to pay for his big, beautiful bill tells you that he knows what must be done, but as with immigration, he is a paper tiger and is not up to it. Trump is not the man demanded by the times, however much millions hope otherwise. He remains but a transitional figure.

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.

 

We've been liberated from Liberation Day by two Republicans (one appointed by Trump) and one Democrat on a court handpicked by Trump to adjudicate his tariffs lol

 

Federal trade court strikes down Trump’s reciprocal tariffs

The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked steep reciprocal tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump on scores of countries in April to correct what he said were persistent trade imbalances. ...

In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the Court of International Trade said that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs, does not authorize a president to levy universal duties on imports.

 

“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the judges wrote.

And separate, specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China related to drug trafficking “fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” the panel wrote.

Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval.

But Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency under IEEPA, which became law in 1977, and then using the purported emergency as justification for cutting Congress out of the process.

The panel not only ordered a permanent halt to the tariffs at issue in the case, but it also barred any future modifications to them.

The Trump administration was given 10 days to make the necessary changes to carry out the judges’ orders. ...

 

A week before the 60-day War Powers Act deadline, the Houthis conveniently cry uncle and pledge to halt attacks on US naval forces and Red Sea shipping

 

Israel wipes out the Houthi airport, fuel supplies, and concrete factory and then they finally cry uncle? 

Something doesn't add up here.

Trump announces US will stop bombing Houthis 

... Trump, ahead of a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said the halt would start immediately. The Houthis approached the administration on Monday night indicating “they want to stop the fighting,” he said. ...

Israel escalated strikes against the Houthis on Monday night with 20 fighter jets bombing the rebel-held port city of Hodeidah. Israeli forces were responding to a ballistic missile strike against the Jerusalem airport by the group. The Trump administration also labeled the Houthis a terror group in March, changing a Biden-era policy. ... Houthi strikes against the waterway have declined significantly in recent months, and the group hasn’t targeted a commercial vessel since late December. ... 

Israel's military says it has fully disabled Yemen's main airport with strikes... 

... “We indirectly informed the Americans that the continued escalation will affect the criminal Trump’s visit to the region, and we have not informed them of anything else,” said Mahdi al-Mashat, head of the Houthi’s supreme political council, in a statement carried by the rebel-controlled SABA news agency early Wednesday. Trump is due to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates next week. ...

Resolution by Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul to scrap Trump's craziest tariffs fails 49-49

 Senate resolution to scrap Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs fails despite some GOP support 

A Senate vote to scrap President Trump’s wide-ranging “Liberation Day” tariffs narrowly failed on Wednesday, sparing Republicans a second consecutive blow as the president’s trade policy continues to face opposition. 

Three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — voted in favor of the resolution alongside every present Senate Democrat. 

But Democrats ran into attendance problems. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was absent, along with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had voted in favor of a similar bill reversing tariffs on Canada earlier this month.

The final tally was 49-49.

McConnell and Whitehouse had both missed the two votes earlier in the day. One Senate GOP member told The Hill that McConnell was sick and unable to vote. ...

Popular support for Canada's Conservatives was actually tops in 2021 at 5.7 million votes, but in 2025 falls to second place at 8.06 million

In neither case however did Conservatives gain enough seats to form a government.

The Conservative Pierre Poilievre loses this election to the Liberal Mark Carney.

After Liberal Justin Trudeau resigned as PM in January, Carney became Liberal Party leader and PM in March, and promptly eliminated the consumer carbon tax ahead of this election, taking away a key issue of the Conservatives.

That, and Trump's hostility toward Canada, made this election outcome a fait accompli.

 

Globalist Rod Dreher draws a red line in Canada lol, America's just chopped liver

Rod Dreher, world citizen.

 

Canada stopped exports of hydroelectric power to New England on March 6th

On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England. ...

Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England, known as the Phase II line, stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect. Last March, by comparison, anywhere from a few hundred megawatts to more than 1,200 MW flowed along the line at any given time, making up between 5% and 10% of the region’s electricity use on average, Turner estimated. ... 

Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hours of power traveled into the region over the Phase II line, less than half the amount exported in 2022. ...

More.

Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January

But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.

Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.

Republicans are angry, too.

Has Ed been living under a rock?

Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":

... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in. 

The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.

I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.

The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.

No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.

Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.

And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.

461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.

Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.

People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.

Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.

American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.

Who knows what's next?

Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.

 

The United States consumed 20.25 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, 3.88 million of which come from Canada and 3.38 million from Alberta lol

 

  What could possibly go wrong?

... Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and Alberta is the country’s biggest producer. Some 97% of the country’s 4 million bpd of oil exports went to the U.S. in 2023 with several European nations and Hong Kong taking the remainder, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Alberta supplied 87% of the oil exported from Canada to the U.S. in 2023. ...

[Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith said Canada is looking at three different pipeline proposals to its West Coast, at least one pipeline into the Northwest Territories, one into Manitoba, one to the Hudson Bay, and one into Eastern Canada.

“Those are conversations we were not having three months ago,” [provincial energy minister Brian] Jean said of the pipelines. ...

More.

Newly renamed Gulf of Second Place Hockey Teams renamed yet again after Starship Test Flight 8's upper stage fails to reach sub-orbital altitude on March 6th

 

Mad King Ludwig escalates trade war with Canada, imposes 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum

 Trump raises Canadian steel, aluminum tariffs to 50% in retaliation for Ontario energy duties

Ontario's Doug Ford slaps 25% tariff on electricity bound for Minnesota, Michigan, and New York, threatens total cut-off

 

Ontario slaps 25% tax increase on electricity exports to U.S. in response to Trump’s trade war 

 

... “I will not hesitate to increase this charge. If the United State escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference in Toronto. “Believe me when I say I do not want to do this. I feel terrible for the American people who didn’t start this trade war. It’s one person who is responsible, it’s President Trump.” ...

Quebec is also considering taking similar measures with electricity exports to the U.S. ...

Ford estimated it will add about CA$100 ($69) a month to the bills of each American affected. “It needs to end. Until these tariffs are off the table, until the threat of tariffs is gone for good, Ontario will not relent,”  Ford said. ...

Ford’s Progressive Conservative government just won reelection by standing up for Canada against Trump. ...

Andrew Sullivan: The point is the abuse, whether it's Canada's Trudeau, Mexico's Sheinbaum, Germany's Scholz, Ukraine's Zelensky, or the S&P 500

 

Trump doesn't really believe in the tariffs, that they'll do anything one way or another. They are simply the readiest instruments which demonstrate his power, and the daily reminder to all and sundry that he is the king, Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria reincarnate.

 

Trump says he’s not even looking at stock market, tariffs will make U.S. ‘very strong’ 

Trump ‘an agent of chaos and confusion,’ economists say — but a U.S. recession isn’t in the cards yet

So long, Trump bump: Tech stocks wipe out last of post-election gains 

 

Trump rejects pleas from business for more clarity on tariffs: ‘They always say that’ 

 

... Bartiromo interjected: “That’s not clarity.” ...

 

The Bully In His Pulpit

 

... Canada and Mexico are best understood as the baby in the playpen [whom Trump pelted with stones when he was five or six]. Trump himself re-negotiated a trade agreement with both in his first term. Have they violated that deal? No. Have they refused to cooperate on fentanyl and illegal migrants? No. Has Mexico reduced the pressure on the Southern border to almost nothing. Dramatically. Is there anything they can or could do to please Trump? No. The point is the abuse. And like all abusers, Trump constantly shifts what he is demanding, gaslights, threatens, charms, attacks … so that you begin to realize there is nothing you can do except wait for his mood to change. Welcome to monarchy. ...

Canada beat America 3-2 in 4 Nations Hockey Face-Off final, Gulf of America renamed

 Connor McDavid scores in OT to give Canada 3-2 win over United States in 4 Nations Face-Off final

 

Just a reminder that theatre is exactly what this is, starring Mexico, Canada, and Donald Trump

 Sound familiar?

More tariff theatre: Trump announces 25% tariffs on Canada on Saturday, reverses himself before dinner on Monday lol

 

Trump pauses tariffs on Canada imports for 30 days after doing the same for Mexico

... Trudeau said Canada had made new commitments “to appoint a Fentanyl Czar.” 😉😉

“Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl,” the prime minister wrote. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.” ...

In 2024, more than 21,100 pounds of fentanyl was seized by U.S. authorities on the border with Mexico, compared to only about 43 pounds seized at the Canadian border. ...