ANS -- Canada Flips the Script, Hits Trump Where It Hurts the Most

This is about Canada's new Prime Minister outsmarting Trump.  

--Kim

Cindi Schaab ·edoSrosnpt03cgh28l6g202g1m1m1u30h31a63mm0ml3t0ag05i28au3363a ·

Tom Speck

tdnsoeSrop91P emf9 379mm04li5ce:tiMlht3ufl2D420gma a0erbc3c4  ·

Canada Flips the Script, Hits Trump Where It Hurts the Most

The Art of the Self-Own

Samuel Wynn Warde

Dec 28, 2025

Donald Trump has always operated with the sophisticated geopolitical strategy of a mob boss collecting protection money. He assumes that leverage is a one-way street where the loud dictate terms and the quiet submit.

This worldview crashed into a wall of reality in 2025 when Canada, America's polite northern neighbor, finally decided to stop apologizing and start fighting back.

Trump assumed that Canada had no choice but to fold. He believed that trade dependence was a leash he could yank whenever he wanted a concession.

He was wrong. And in the process of being wrong, he didn't just lose a trade skirmish. Trump suffered a humiliation that strikes at the only thing he truly cares about: his ego. The "dealmaker" got outplayed by a technocrat.

The "strongman" got muscled by the nice guy. Canada didn't just survive Trump's pressure campaign; they exposed him as a strategic amateur.

The "Final Demand" Disaster: How Trump Broke His Own Base

To understand how badly Trump miscalculated, you have to understand the ultimatum he issued. His team arrogantly termed it the "final demand." It wasn't a negotiation; it was attempted extortion.

Trump demanded that Canada restrict its exports of critical materials - things like aluminum, steel, and rare minerals - to other nations unless American companies were given preferential access at below-market prices.

Essentially, Trump wanted Canada to subsidize American industry by selling its own resources at a loss.

He expected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to bow down and kiss the ring. Instead, Carney looked the bully in the eye and delivered a masterclass in bureaucratic warfare.

Here is the part Trump didn't understand: The American economy runs on a "Just-in-Time" manufacturing model.

Factories in Ohio and Michigan don't keep weeks of inventory in warehouses anymore; they rely on parts crossing the border exactly when they are needed.

This system requires speed, trust, and massive voluntary coordination between customs officials on both sides to keep goods flowing without paperwork delays.

When Canada rejected the "final demand," they didn't need to declare a trade war. They simply stopped doing the extra work.

They withdrew from the voluntary coordination protocols. They decided to "work to rule," applying every single bureaucratic check and regulation to the letter.

The result was immediate chaos for the very "America First" industries Trump claimed to save. Automotive plants in the Midwest found their supply lines severed by red tape. Construction projects stalled as Canadian lumber sat in inspection queues.

Trump tried to hold a gun to Canada's head, only to realize too late that his neighbor controlled the ammunition. It turns out that when you declare war on your logistics partner, you stop getting your deliveries.

The $250 Billion Pivot: Europe Moves In

While Trump was busy firing off all-caps rants on Truth Social about Canadian "betrayal," Ottawa was quietly executing a strategic pivot that fundamentally rewires Western security.

The American media was too distracted by the circus to notice, but Canada recently signed a deal that effectively divorces its defense industry from American volatility.

Canada became the first and only non-European nation to join the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) framework.

For those who don't speak bureaucrat, let me translate: SAFE is a massive, binding defense financing mechanism worth €150 billion (roughly $177 billion). It was created at the end of May by the European Union to rebuild its military capacity independent of the United States.

By joining this club, Canada has integrated its defense industrial base directly into European supply chains for the next 30 to 45 years. This is a geopolitical "poison pill."

By embedding itself into the military supply lines of France, Germany, and Poland, Canada made it impossible for Trump to attack its industries without declaring economic war on the entire European Union.

Canada negotiated exemptions allowing its firms to contribute up to 80% of the value for specific high-tech systems. They didn't just find a new partner; they moved in with them, changed the locks, and left Trump shouting on the front lawn.

Clown Car Diplomacy in the Arctic

Nothing exposes the incompetence of Trump's approach quite like the battle for the Arctic. Trump looks at Greenland and sees a real estate deal; he famously wanted to buy it like it was a distressed hotel asset.

To facilitate this delusion, he appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry - a partisan hack with zero Arctic expertise - as a "special envoy." It was clown car diplomacy at its finest.

Canada took a different approach. They treated Greenlanders like human beings instead of property.

While Trump's cronies were reportedly running clumsy influence operations trying to compile lists of friendly locals (creepy, much?), Canada was busy doing the boring, adult work of governance.

They offered logistical support, lower shipping costs, and respectful partnership.

The contrast was humiliating. When Canada announced it was opening a new consulate in Nuuk, Greenlandic MP Pelle Broberg responded with a single word that should haunt every MAGA strategist: "Finally."

That is the sound of an ally realizing the adults have entered the room. Canada stole the diplomatic initiative without raising its voice, proving that "boring power" beats loud ignorance every day of the week.

The Find Out Phase

Mark Carney, the technocrat who replaced Justin Trudeau, understands something Trump never will: leverage isn't just about size; it's about stability.

Trump thrives on chaos, but supply chains, defense contracts, and economies run on predictability. By offering stability to Europe and Greenland, and by imposing the cost of chaos on American industry, Canada has flipped the script.

Trump wanted to make Canada the 51st state. Instead, he forced it to become a European power and united the Canadian people against him in a way no domestic politician ever could.

Trump f*cked around, and now, spectacularly, he is finding out.

Lisa Baker

ANS -- When dissent becomes "disloyalty".

This is about political thinking.  About why the Trumpies have turned on Mitt Romney.

--Kim

Nenette JessupDemocrats, Republicans and Independents for Democracy

Nenette Jessup ·Sonodrestptg4fmf08h0iugg2gtg834l9mlg26h22flguah38a4lg1cau373 ·

When dissent becomes "disloyalty".

Genny Harrison 

Sonodrestptg4fmf08h0iug82gtg834l9mlg26h21flguah38a4lg1cau373 ·

I was watching Heather Cox Richardson the other night when she mentioned, almost in passing, one of the stranger accusations to come out of Mitt Romney

years. After Mitt Romney voted to convict Donald Trump on one count during the first impeachment, Trump promptly claimed that Romney was secretly working for the Democrats. Not merely wrong. Not misguided. But an infiltrator. A plant.

Richardson paused, as historians often do, and noted how strange this was. Romney had been the Republican nominee for president in 2012. Less than a decade earlier, he had carried the party's banner nationwide. The idea that he was somehow a long embedded Democratic sleeper agent was, in her word, bonkers.

She was right. But the real story is not that the theory is ridiculous. It is why it felt plausible to so many people.

The Romney-as-plant theory is not an accident or a fringe misunderstanding. It is a feature of how Trumpism redefined political loyalty and, by extension, political reality. It reveals less about Romney than it does about the psychological architecture of the MAGA movement.

Before Trump, American political parties were messy coalitions. They fought internally. They tolerated dissent. You could be a Republican who disagreed with other Republicans on tone, tactics, or even major policy questions without being declared an existential threat. Politics was adversarial, but it was still recognizably pluralistic.

Trump broke that model.

From the beginning, Trump framed politics not as competition between ideas, but as a struggle between friends and enemies. Loyalty was personal, not institutional. Agreement was not sufficient. You had to signal alignment in affect, language, and posture. Once that framework took hold, disagreement stopped being a normal democratic function and became evidence of betrayal.

Romney was uniquely vulnerable to this reframing because he embodied the old Republican elite Trumpism defined itself against. He was wealthy, technocratic, globally oriented, and publicly concerned with norms and character. In the pre Trump GOP, those traits were assets. In the MAGA imagination, they became markers of corruption.

When Romney criticized Trump's behavior, he was not heard as a conservative with a different theory of leadership. He was heard as an imposter revealing himself.

This is where conspiracy thinking enters.

Conspiracy theories thrive in moments of identity rupture. They provide clean explanations for messy change. Instead of acknowledging that a movement has evolved in ways that exclude former allies, conspiracy thinking externalizes the loss. Romney did not leave the movement. He was never really part of it. The movement did not fracture. It was infiltrated.

This logic performs an important emotional service. It preserves the moral purity of the in group. If Romney is a plant, then MAGA did not fail to persuade him. He was always aligned with the enemy. There is no need to ask why certain Republican leaders found Trump unacceptable. There is no need to interrogate whether institutional loyalty or constitutional norms matter. The problem is not internal disagreement. It is contamination.

The theory also depends on a misunderstanding of how power works.

Infiltration implies coordination, secrecy, and reward. But Romney's opposition to Trump was public, consistent, and costly. It alienated him from the party base. It diminished his influence. It ultimately helped push him toward retirement. There was no payoff. No hidden advancement. No Democratic embrace waiting in the wings. What there was, instead, was a political system that increasingly punishes dissent.

That punishment is the point.

Trumpism does not merely demand loyalty. It retroactively rewrites identity. Once someone breaks with the leader, their entire past must be reinterpreted. Romney did not become disloyal in 2019. He must have always been disloyal. The same logic has been applied to career civil servants, judges, prosecutors, and even Republican appointees who carried out their duties in ways that conflicted with Trump's personal interests. When institutions resist, they are not functioning. They are conspiring.

Richardson, as a historian, recognizes this pattern because it is not new. Authoritarian movements often collapse the distinction between opposition and treason. Once that collapse occurs, facts lose their stabilizing power. Romney's documented Republican career does not disprove the conspiracy. It becomes part of it. A deeper cover. A longer con.

This is why the theory cannot be argued away with evidence. Evidence is not what sustains it. What sustains it is a worldview in which loyalty is the highest virtue and disagreement is moral failure.

The irony is that Romney's actual behavior is remarkably old fashioned. He acted as though senators are accountable to the Constitution rather than to a single leader. He treated impeachment as a legal and moral process rather than a team sport. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, none of this requires a secret Democratic handler. It requires only a belief system that predates Trump.

That belief system is now treated as foreign.

Watching Richardson lay this out, what struck me most was how quickly the extraordinary has become normalized. A former Republican presidential nominee is accused of being a Democratic plant, and the accusation circulates not as satire but as plausible explanation. That should not be dismissed as internet noise. It is diagnostic.

The Romney conspiracy tells us that Trumpism is not merely a set of policy preferences. It is an identity structure that cannot tolerate internal dissent without recasting it as existential threat. It is a politics that replaces persuasion with purification and disagreement with expulsion.

Romney was never an infiltrator. He was a stress test.

And the fact that so many people needed him to be unreal tells us far more about the movement that rejected him than it ever could about the man himself.

#new #friends #i